I’ve an old Dell Precision 4500, i7 @ 2Ghz with an nVidia Quadro 1800M. I got it cheap off eBay and upgraded it. RAM went from 4Gb to 8Gb, replaced the 320Gb HD with a 960Gb SSD and added a 1Tb HD in the place of the DVD drive. I use it for 95% of home use now.
Oh, and I added USB 3.0 to one of the PCI slots.
The eSata port has come in extremely handy on many occasions too. I don’t know what it would be like having to swap drives in the laptop all the time whilst I was upgrading other laptops.
Simply put, it is fast…
Tonight I tested myself against the clock with creating a demonstration video in Blender. In the background my laptop was moving a load of files from the SSD to the 1Tb HD. I wanted to get everything done within an hour. No programming tonight.
First 5 minutes was thinking of an idea, then it took about 10 minutes to collect artwork together and create the project folder with the assets.
The demonstration, with a video texture, lighting and shadow, was all done within an hour. I was happy tonight.
The test of my laptop didn’t end there.
I decided to create a new project with another demonstration idea, while Blender was rendering the project as a video file. *big grin* nothing slowed down even though the CPU was being obliterated.
Yup, I like this laptop.
Running Linux and Windows 10, but all my work gets done in Linux.