Using Indigo on a laptop

[noelyone]

Hi Guys,

Hopefully some of you can give me your insight. I have been using indigo on my home PC for two years and am now looking into buying a laptop so I can use indigo on the move - for example if I go on holiday or head over to another part of the country for a few weeks at a time.

My PC spec is:
12gb
i7
3.07GHz
64 bit operating system

My PC allows me to render in high resolution in 8 minutes for external scenes and that is the timeframe I am looking to achieve with a laptop. The laptop I am eyeing up is a Toshiba Qosmio and has the following spec:

Intel® Core™ i7-3630QM processor (2.4 GHz (3.4 GHz with TurboBoost),
Memory: 16 GB
Hard drive: 1 TB with 128 GB SSD
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 670

OR I am looking at the Apple macbook pro which has the following spec:

Processor Quad-core Intel Core i7 2.6GHz (turbo boost upto 3.6GHz) Processor
Memory: 16 GB
Graphics:Intel HD Graphics 4000

My main question is; has anyone had experience using indigo on a laptop? My concern is the over heating of the laptop and how that affects its overall rendering proficiency? Will this be a problem? And will I be able to produce renders in 8 minutes like I do with the PC?

Many thanks and hopefully I can get some feedback here.

Noel

[Bosseye]

Thats a very similar (but better) spec to my laptop, mine is:

Intel® Core™ i7-3630QM processor (2.4 GHz)
Memory: 8 GB
Hard drive: 750Gb
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660m

Its not too bad for Indigo rendering, I don't tend to output higher than the screen resolution and for external scenes with 1 or 2 light sources its an hour or so to maybe 1000 SPP with GPU switched on. With more complex scenes its overnight minimum though, often 48-72 hours to get smooth.

[noelyone]

Thanks Bosseye, appreciate your feedback. 48-72 hours is a hell of alot! Even with the most complex scenes I've worked on takes a maximum of one hour. All externals take 8 minutes max it's just some of the interiors with 6ish light layers can take an hour to render properly. But thanks for establishing that a laptop can handle the heat!
Cheers!

[Bosseye]

It will handle it fine, better than mine I'm sure. And to be honest, aside from simple external scenes which are generally smooth in 30 mins/1 hour, all my Indigo scenes take hours to render smooth, so chances are its my model/Indigo set up not being as efficient as it perhaps could be.

Even on my work PC which is £2,500 worth of Xeon W3530 with 28Gb Ram and 2GB Quadro 4000 DDR5 all my more complex scenes take overnight minimum to be acceptably smooth for the client.

[noelyone]

Interesting it takes so long with such a powerful machine. I use sketchup and the sketchup model files themselves are normally around 50mb in size. Scenes are normally lit with a hdri. Once the render time hits 8 minutes the image is smooth. Leaving it for 16 minutes won't improve the image quality. Super sampling 3, and export the renders at around 3800x2100 which leaves the final jpeg image around 5mb. You may be exporting your renders in a higher resolution than me perhaps hence the longer render times....