 You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Good morning all, after nearly 5 years of faultless performance my trusty Surface Book its beginning to show its age a little whilst using CAD files and processing videos. My first though was to go with the New Surface Book 13.5 as I really like what I have now but I think the graphics card maybe a bit lacklustre particularly as I'm about to purchase a drone to survey potential loft conversions and roof repairs. The logical option is to move up to the 15 inch Surface Book as that has better graphics card but is some serious money and loses portability somewhat. The Dell XPS seems to be the best reviewed competitor and is available for considerably less which would allow me to to purchase an external graphics card for use at home when i need to processing power and retain the portability of the smaller form laptop. Does any one have experience of external graphics card, is there a flaw in my logic anywhere or even is there a better plan C..........
Plan C - get a MacBook.
Getting a MacBook is plan Y at best.
There are quite a few alternatives to the Dell XPS:
https://www.windowscentral.com/best-alternatives-dell-xps-13
Something with a 4000 series AMD Ryzen processor and a discreet graphics card e.g. Geforce RTX 2060.
There is an updated version of the XPS 13 that came out about a week ago with the new 11th generation i7. That has a big improvement to the integrated graphics so worth looking at.
There isn't much in the way of reviews for that yet, but would expect some soon. Other build options may be made available after a short time.
Whilst the 11th gen integrated graphics are a massive step up for Intel chips they are still miles behind discreet card performance.
I've no experience with an external GPU but are you sure your processing is that GPU limited?
Depending on the software / activity, even for videos the activities will be CPU limited and you'd see significant benefit in going with a Ryzen 4000. It is quite software dependent though and iirc some CAD stuff is slightly better on latest Intel CPUs, whereas almost every other non-gaming benchmark is dominated by AMD.
XPS 15 with discrete graphics?
Good morning all, after nearly 5 years of faultless performance my trusty Surface Book its beginning to show its age a little whilst using CAD files and processing videos.
You mean it's slowed down, or your requirements have increased?
IT hardware does not get slower as it ages. The only things I know of that could cause a slowdown is too much of the wrong sort of software installed or your SSD is filling up.