Best Budget Laptop For Graphic Design 2021

Graphic design becomes a painful task if one doesn't have the right device. With proper configuration, the device will be laggy, the applications will take a huge time to load, and it might even get stuck while booting up. Anyone can prevent that problem easily if they know how to buy the best laptop for graphic design.

In today's article, we'll be discussing the best laptops for graphic design. Our objective is to educate the readers on how to pick the best laptop for graphic design and not get scammed in any way.

To find the right printers, we've dedicated over 30 hours to research and writing. Most of this time went on finding the proper selection criteria. We took time to figure out what are the things that would make or break a deal. After that, we graded each of our recommended products with a score of 1-10 on each criterion.

We provided our printer recommendations based on various use cases. Users can relate themselves to these use cases to find the printers that work out best for them.

Enjoy!

How To Choose the Best Laptop For Graphic Design

Since graphic design is quite intensive in a lot of aspects including both CPU and GPU, we tried to include all the relevant points that would affect graphic designing in some capacity.

CPU

The CPU is also referred to as the central processing unit. A CPU is a bunch of circuitry performing various commands made by the user. Core count and clock speed are the two most important things in a CPU that affect one's overall experience.

Today we'll be discussing both core count and clock speed in depth. We'll be defining these criteria and we'll also let you know how to measure them.

Cores

Cores can also be called the heart of a processor. All commands are executed by these cores. Each core performs a separate task. It's impeccable to have multiple cores for better output

Ideally, you'd want quad cores. With quad cores being available, your laptop will be able to perform multiple tasks at once. Since graphic design is both CPU and a GPU-consuming task, having a minimum of quad-cores will ease up the pressure on your CPU.

In today's article, we'll take a look at processors that have core counts between dual cores and up to octa cores.

Clock Speed

Clock Speed is the number of cycles a processor can fully complete in under a minute. For example, if a processor has a 3GHz clock speed, that means that the processor performs 3 billion cycles every minute.

Ideally, you'd want as much clock speed as possible. That's because the faster the clock speed is, the faster your graphic designing would be. But you'd want a minimum of 2GHz clock speed to do graphic designing. Our recommendation would be to go over 2GHz clock speed as much as possible.

In today's article, we'll be presenting you with processors that have clock speeds ranging from as low as 4.1GHz.and as high as 4.5GHz

RAM

Random Access Memory or popularly known as RAM is one of the most crucial parts of a graphic designer's setup. It's a temporary data storage that serves data instantly once requested. Due to the data transfer rate being dependent on RAM, it's important to get as much RAM as possible.

RAM is measured using GigaByte(GB). Based on all the research and feedback, we can safely say that a minimum of 8GB RAM is required to do graphic design. But you can always get more ram than 8GB as more is always better.

In today's article, the number of RAM will range from 4GB up to 16GB.

GPU

GPU is short for Graphics Processing Unit. It's one of the most critical aspects in terms of graphic design. GPU is a collection of chips that produce visuals on the screen.

The full form of the GPU is Graphics Processing Unit. It's a collective set of chipsets that produce graphics on the screen. A potent graphics card is massively important to run Photoshop as the user will need to edit different pictures from time to time.

To know if your laptop has the ideal GPU for graphic editing, check the model first. If it's a newer model then you'll be good to go. The GPU also needs to have a minimum of 4GB VRAM to be a perfect fit for video editing.

In today's article, we'll be having a look at a bunch of different GPUs. These GPUs have Vrams ranging from 4GB up to 8GB.

Storage

Storage is another important selection criterion in terms of graphic designing. Storage is the technology that tracks and keeps the data safe after it has finished being written on the storage module. Storage can be categorized into two main types, HDDs and SSDs. Among them, an SSD is the one that your laptops should have.

SSDs provide the much-needed speed boost during graphic editing as they have fast data transfer speeds. With the availability of an SSD, programs will load faster, load times will reduce and applications will function smoothly.

In today's article, we'll be discussing laptops that have SSD storage options between 128 GB up to 1 TB.

Display resolution

Display resolution are the number of pixels that can be displayed both horizontally and vertically. A laptop needs to have a proper resolution to do graphic design because without the proper resolution, the colors and details won't appear properly and thus the task will be completed unevenly.

Ideally, you'd want your laptop display to have a minimum of FHD resolution (1920 X 1080P). Up until FHD resolution, most outlines and colors are properly visible and thus it's the minimum resolution a laptop display should maintain.

In today's article, we'll be discussing laptops that have resolutions ranging from FHD to WQXGA.

Price

Perhaps the most important selection criteria among them all are the price. In today's article, we'll be mentioning the price range of each of the products that we'll be discussing as it's very hard to give an exact price as these shift and fluctuate daily.

Based on the current market, we can place the price into three sections, they are

Cheap – $500<
Medium – $500 – $1000
Expensive- $1000+

Considering all of the selection criteria points, we think that the Lenovo Legion 5 is the best laptop for graphic design. This laptop matches all of our selection criteria recommended scores and the CPU and GPU, in particular, is phenomenal for graphic design.

Our Product Recommedations

Best Laptop Overall – Lenovo Legion 5
Best Laptop For Apple Users – MacBook Pro (2020)
Best Mid-range laptop for Graphic Design – Acer Swift 3
Best Budget Laptop – ASUS VivoBook Flip 14
Best Laptop For Professional Designers – ROG Zephyrus

1. Best Laptop Overall – Lenovo Legion 5

Lenovo Legion 515

CPU – AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8 cores and up to 4.4GHz) – Our Score – 9.5/10
GPU- RTX 3050 Ti (4GB VRAM) – Our Score – 9/10
RAM- 16GB DDR4 – Our Score – 9.5/10
Storage- 512GB NVMe SSD- Our Score – 9.5/10
Display Resolution – FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) – Our Score – 9/10
Price- $1,020 – Our Score – 8.5/10

The best laptop for graphic design at this moment is the Lenovo Legion 5. This laptop has some of the best configurations that I've ever seen for around $1000. The price of the laptop is justified because of its configuration. It also has some of the best selection criteria scores.

The Lenovo Legion 5 is one of the initial laptops to feature the latest Ryzen 7 5800 Processor. This processor is one of the good ones and it has some of the best processing power at the moment. The GPU portion is pretty generous too because, despite the current GPU crisis, they provide a laptop with the latest Nvidia RTX3050TI.

The RAM and the massive SSD are what keep this laptop up and running. With a generous amount of RAM and SSD storage, your laptop won't face any lag issues while rendering or using a couple of different design applications.

Legion 5 has another quirky mechanism in the name of Legion Coldfront 3.0. This technology allows the laptop to not heat up despite running more than a couple of applications at 100% capacity.

Pros

The excellent cooling mechanism doesn't let the laptop heat up even at 100% disk usage.
It has the most powerful Ryzen processor to date.
Comes with one of the best mid-range GPUs on the market.
Blazing fast RAM and SSD storage.

Cons

Battery life isn't that great.

2. Best Laptop For Apple Users – MacBook Pro (2020)

2020 Apple Macbook Pro

CPU – Apple M1 Chip + Intel Processor (8 cores and up to 4.5GHz) – Our Score – 9.5/10
GPU- Apple 8-core GPU (8GB VRAM) – Our Score – 9/10
RAM- 8GB DDR4 – Our Score – 9/10
Storage- Up to 512GB NVMe SSD- Our Score – 9.5/10
Display Resolution – WQXGA(2560 x 1600) – Our Score – 9/10
Price- $1,344 – Our Score – 8/10

If you're an Apple user you know how hard it is to break out of the Apple ecosystem. If a resident of the Apple ecosystem needs a laptop for graphic design purposes, they need to go for the MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Pro is the ideal Mac laptop you can get at the moment. It has great selection criteria scores and a lot of ideal components that are crucial for graphic design – especially the processor with M1 chipset,

Apart from the processor, other aspects of this laptop are great too. Users will find options regarding how much storage they want. However, the price depends on the amount of storage. The retina display of the Mac is also great for graphic design as it displays colors and details much more accurately than most display panels.

Pros

The M1 chipset has one of the most powerful architectures and provides massive processing capabilities.
It has the ideal resolution as well as a great display for graphic designing.
Provides options regarding storage and RAM as both can be upgraded.

Cons

Very expensive.

3. Best Mid-range laptop for Graphic Design – Acer Swift 3

Acer Swift 3

CPU – Ryzen 7 4700U (8 cores and up to 4.1GHz) – Our Score – 9/10
GPU- RX Vega 7 (System RAM) – Our Score – 8.5/10
RAM- 8GB DDR4 – Our Score – 9/10
Storage- 512GB NVMe SSD- Our Score – 9.5/10
Display Resolution – FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) – Our Score – 9/10
Price- $644 – Our Score – 9/10

If you're not keen to spend too much money and just want a laptop for moderate graphic design then you should opt for the Acer Swift 3. This is a light and slim-looking laptop with enough configuration to do graphic design properly. On top of this, the selection criteria scores are good too.

This laptop has one of the latest Ryzen APUs as both processor and GPU. Though the processor has enough cores and clock speed, the amount of thread available is a bit low and thus it loses a few points for that. The GPU is alright too, it uses half of the system RAM as its Vram.

The display is perhaps the best thing about this laptop as it has barely visible bezels thanks to a staggering 82.3% screen body ratio. It has the ideal resolution and color accuracy for graphics design too.

Pros

The display is very beautiful with almost no bezel.
A decent amount of SSD storage is included despite being a medium-budget laptop.
It's ultra-thin and lightweight, making it easy to carry around.

Cons

Speakers are underwhelming.

4. Best Budget Laptop – ASUS VivoBook Flip 14

Asus Vivobook Flip14

CPU -Intel Core i3-1115G4 (2 cores and up to 4.1GHz) – Our Score – 8.5/10
GPU- Intel UHD (System RAM) – Our Score – 8.5/10
RAM- 4GB DDR4 – Our Score – 8/10
Storage- 128GB SSD- Our Score – 8.5/10
Display Resolution – FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) – Our Score – 9/10
Price- $449 – Our Score – 9/10

There aren't many laptops that are low priced but can perform great while graphic designing. That's why we were a bit surprised when we saw the Asus VivoBook Flip 14. It has a decent configuration for graphic designing and it also has good scores on our selection criteria.

To be honest, there aren't many things to discuss about this laptop. This has the basic capabilities of various graphic designing applications such as Photoshop or Gimp despite being slightly under the recommended levels.

The thing that's making this laptop worthy of graphic design is the availability of SSD and its beautiful display. The processor and GPU are alright but nothing special. However, for the price of just $449 we can't ask for more.

Pros

Very affordable price.
The SSD makes the laptop fast enough to run most graphic design applications.
A beautiful and color-accurate display.

Cons

Because of the low amount of RAM, it can lag out sometimes.

5. Best Laptop For Professional Designers – ROG Zephyrus

Rog zephyrus m

CPU -Intel Core i7-9750H (6 cores and up to 4.5GHz) – Our Score – 9/10
GPU- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q (8GB GDDR6 VRAM) – Our Score – 9.5/10
RAM- 16GB DDR4 – Our Score – 9.5/10
Storage- 1 TB PCIe SSD- Our Score – 9.5/10
Display Resolution – FHD (1920 x 1080 pixels) – Our Score – 9/10
Price- $2,300 – Our Score – 9/10

If you're a professional graphic designer and you have no budget issues, the best laptop you could get at the moment is the ROG Zephyrus. It has some of the highest selection criteria scores because of the high-quality components it has to offer.

It's quite astonishing to see that a laptop has nearly perfect scores on all of the components it has to offer. I'm quite intrigued by the GPU portion especially since it offers a limited edition 2070 Card. But don't put any slouches on the processor as this beast can clock its speed up to 4.5GHz.

This laptop is very fast, and most of that credit goes to the high amount of RAM and SSD storage. Its SSD storage has the most amount (1TB) among all of the laptops today. The least astonishing part about this laptop is its resolution, but even that matches our recommended range for resolution!

Pros

It comes with one of the best GPUs at the moment.
Very fast UI and reduced application loading time because of the RAM and SSD.
Surprisingly slim despite offering so much RAW power.

Cons

The cooling system of this laptop isn't that great.

Final Verdict

This wraps our guide to the best Laptops For Graphic Design. Not only have we discussed how you can identify a good laptop, but we've also left our recommendation covering various use cases.

We've talked about how you can choose the Best Laptop For Graphic Design. In that portion, we explained why CPU, RAM, GPU, and storage, all of which are the key deciding factors. We've discussed them thoroughly enough for you to understand them easily.

After that bit, we also gave out various recommendations based on user reviews and use cases. These recommendations will help out the reader while picking a laptop for graphic designers.

Thanks for reading, Hope our suggestion helps you fetch your desired product.

Sources:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/tech-tips-and-tricks/creators/best-pcs-for-graphic-design.html#:~:text=Four%2D%20or%20eight%2Dcore%20processors,clock%20speed%2C%20calculated%20in%20gigahertz.

https://arturth.com/best-processor-for-graphic-design/#:~:text=Generally%20speaking%2C%20for%20most%20Graphic,will%20give%20you%20better%20performance.

https://99designs.com/blog/tips/best-computer-graphic-design/

https://www.cgdirector.com/how-much-vram-do-you-need/

https://www.neweggbusiness.com/smartbuyer/systems/laptops-graphic-design-professionals/#:~:text=We%20highly%20recommend%20solid%20state,and%20better%20overall%20system%20responsiveness.&text=The%20HDD%20would%20store%20less,any%20archival%20materials%20or%20projects.

https://shopineer.com/blog/how-to-choose-a-monitor-for-graphic-design