What Laptop Should I buy?

[Benson Gravois]

I am looking around at laptops, does anyone know what I should look for as far as hardware? There are a lot of Facebook market place deals but I don’t want something that won’t run Second Life. Would I have to buy a gaming laptop specifically or would any laptop work?

[Coffee Pancake]

You need an actual GPU - so yes, gaming. 

Also 16GB Ram (this alone will weed out 90% of the junk)

 

[JeromFranzic]

Get a laptop with at least a Nvidia GTX 2070 GPU in it. If it has Windows 11 preloaded, that's OK.

ETA: if you prefer AMD that's cool too... that's where I want to be next time I upgrade. All out AMD, especially as their GPUs have better open source support in Linux.

Edited October 23, 2022 by JeromFranzic

[Charalyne Blackwood]

https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

 

Any machine that meets these sysreqs will work, but beware the 12 year old list of video cards

[Lyssa Greymoon]

17 minutes ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

https://secondlife.com/system-requirements

 

Any machine that meets these sysreqs will work, but beware the 12 year old list of video cards

No, the minimum requirements either won’t run SL or won’t run it right. I don’t know why no one at Linden Lab will update that ridiculous nonsense, but it’s been out of date for years and is just wrong. The Mac minimum requirements are just a fever dream of impossible hardware combinations. 

[Charalyne Blackwood]

3 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

No, the minimum requirements either won’t run SL or won’t run it right. I don’t know why no one at Linden Lab will update that ridiculous nonsense, but it’s been out of date for years and is just wrong. The Mac minimum requirements are just a fever dream of impossible hardware combinations. 

Are they trying to slow the number of new accounts by showing bogus sysreqs?

[Rowan Amore]

The desktop kind.

[diamond Marchant]

3 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

Get a laptop with at least a Nvidia GTX 2070 GPU in it.

If you just want to run Second Life, a mid range Nvidia will be fine. My laptop is

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz (2592 MHz)
Memory: 32676 MB
Concurrency: 12
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19044.2130)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Card Memory: 4096 MB

I would go for more RAM and less GPU. On a laptop, I prefer cool and quiet. With a higher-end GPU, this is difficult.

[Sissi Slacker]

10 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

Memory: 32676 MB

That's already more than enough RAM for anything. 16 GB is fine for SL, and it's the easiest thing to upgrade in a laptop. 

 

If you are sure you don't want a pc then getting a laptop with the best GPU you can afford would be ideal because your graphics card will be a bottleneck at some point. 

Edit: I still stand by my words - I have an older gaming laptop (Lenovo Legion) which I've upgraded from 8GB to 32GB RAM, but I can't change its GTX 1050 with 3GB memory. It still runs SL fairly ok (but not on busy sims), and there is nothing that could be done about it. If I had a 1060/1080 version it would hold up a bit better.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Sissi Slacker

[diamond Marchant]

I prefer lots of RAM for reasons other than SL, just saying that paying for a 2070 is overkill for SL as raytracing is not used. But if you need a heater for the winter, go for it.

Edited October 24, 2022 by diamond Marchant

[Istelathis]

One thing to consider is to have enough ram to create a ramdisk for your cache, doing so for me really made a significant difference in the performance of my viewer.  For my setup, I keep 2gb stored away at all times, I did so because

1) I have 20gb of ram in this laptop

2) My SSD is less than 150gb and I was worried about the degradation of having multiple writes on it for cache.

3) My HDD was slow as molasses, it would cause the entire viewer to hang and be unresponsive when my cache was stored there.

 

[Charalyne Blackwood]

3 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti/PCIe/SSE2

You only have 128 bit memory bandwidth and that's a major factor. High memory bandwidth does tons more than a faster GPU. It falls down to processes per second, but the memory bandwidth is how much memory per cycle can be utilized. A video card with 128 bit memory bandwidth will perform considerably slower than the exact same card with 256 bit. 512 bit screams, but is expensive.

I had the R9 390, which has 512 bit bandwidth. It went teats up and the manufacturer replaced it under warranty, but because they allegedly had non in stock, they sent me the RX 580, which is a faster card, although it has 128 bit bandwidth. Immediately I saw the reduction in performance in SL with all the same graphics settings. I sent a complaint to them stating that the one app I use the card for the most has reduced performance with the 580 and having it isn't what I paid the big bucks for in the first place. Their take is "So? It's faster"

Edited October 24, 2022 by Charalyne Blackwood

[Modulated]

8 hours ago, Charalyne Blackwood said:

You only have 128 bit memory bandwidth and that's a major factor. High memory bandwidth does tons more than a faster GPU. It falls down to processes per second, but the memory bandwidth is how much memory per cycle can be utilized. A video card with 128 bit memory bandwidth will perform considerably slower than the exact same card with 256 bit. 512 bit screams, but is expensive.

I had the R9 390, which has 512 bit bandwidth. It went teats up and the manufacturer replaced it under warranty, but because they allegedly had non in stock, they sent me the RX 580, which is a faster card, although it has 128 bit bandwidth. Immediately I saw the reduction in performance in SL with all the same graphics settings. I sent a complaint to them stating that the one app I use the card for the most has reduced performance with the 580 and having it isn't what I paid the big bucks for in the first place. Their take is "So? It's faster"

Yes and no. It really depends on the card and what generation it is.  Newer AMD cards, for example, have 128 bit bus, but they also take advantage of things like smart access memory and have a larger on gpu L2 cache, which makes them very fast even with the 128 bit bus.  Probably the same for new Nvidia cards too. There's different things at play now with gpus.

[JeromFranzic]

14 hours ago, Sissi Slacker said:

That's already more than enough RAM for anything. 16 GB is fine for SL, and it's the easiest thing to upgrade in a laptop. 

 

If you are sure you don't want a pc then getting a laptop with the best GPU you can afford would be ideal because your graphics card will be a bottleneck at some point. 

Edit: I still stand by my words - I have an older gaming laptop (Lenovo Legion) which I've upgraded from 8GB to 32GB RAM, but I can't change its GTX 1050 with 3GB memory. It still runs SL fairly ok (but not on busy sims), and there is nothing that could be done about it. If I had a 1060/1080 version it would hold up a bit better.

I have a similar laptop with 32gb, mine is an Acer Aspire 7 from 2018. Having the m.2 ssd helps. I need the 32 GB as I often run VMs for work on it, not for SL. My 1050 has 4 GB of VRAM. I run ok in most sims.

It does slow down in busy areas, but there's an easy fix for that: turning off shadows for a while regardless of the overall graphic settings.

I generally run in mid settings, high if it's not too busy and if it's a ghost town I can get away with Ultra settings at 256m and shadows turned on and average of 15-24 fps. I cap my texture memory at 2 GB, sometimes 3 if the area isn't too crowded.

And ya, the CPU helps here, mine has a 8th gen Intel i7 that clocks max at 4.1 GHz with 6 cores and 12 threads.

Edited October 24, 2022 by JeromFranzic
Corrected Ultra fps average in empty areas. Sometimes it's a good deal slower depending on Sim complexity.

[JeromFranzic]

Just went for a quick stare at several sites... Newegg, Micro Center and amazon (to name a few places). Looks like any laptop with a Intel CPU/Nvidia GPU combination will give you the best bang-for-buck ratio in the laptop department right now.

[Charalyne Blackwood]

8 hours ago, Modulated said:

Yes and no. It really depends on the card and what generation it is.  Newer AMD cards, for example, have 128 bit bus, but they also take advantage of things like smart access memory and have a larger on gpu L2 cache, which makes them very fast even with the 128 bit bus.  Probably the same for new Nvidia cards too. There's different things at play now with gpus.

The newer 580 tanks in SL compared to what the 390 did. But my post ended up kinda pointless cos we're talkin notebooks n not desktops. *walks off, sulking*

[Bree Giffen]

I would circle back to this thread from May where we discussed laptops.