Designers working in 2D should opt for a mid-range graphics card. There's a wide variety of models with different price points and capabilities. Look for models advertising Nvidia GeForce GTX or RTX GPUs. The type of graphics card (or GPU) you need will depend on the nature of the work you do but we'd recommend choosing a laptop with discrete graphics or in other words a dedicated graphics card rather than one with graphics built into the processor. 16Gb of RAM is recommended but also look at the laptop's upgrade capabilities so you can potentially add more RAM in the future. Higher end models support up to 8 cores for fast image rendering.Īs for the memory (or RAM) in the laptop, most models are now shipping with 8Gb of RAM installed as standard but the more RAM you can get, the better, especially if you typically run multiple apps or work with very big files. As a minimum, look for a model with the latest Core i5 or AMD A8 or A0 series processor but also look at the processor's core count as entry level models tend to have just 2 cores and ideally you want 4 or more for serious work.

Most video and graphics applications are designed to take advantage of the latest multi-core processor multithreading capabilities so it makes sense to dedicate a large part of your budget to a laptop with a powerful processor. Consider the video editing or graphics software you need to use most will run on both platforms but some won't (e.g. If you're brand agnostic however, Windows based laptops can run a wider set of applications and allow you to take advantage of multi-core Xeon CPUs for superior processing power. Do you go for a Macbook or a Windows based laptop? Many creative professionals have traditionally preferred Macs due to their perceived superior colour accuracy, build quality and OS reliability.

Best budget laptop for video editing