Hi! I’m about to buy a laptop at PcSpecialist with i7 12700H and 32 GB RAM DDR5 (4800 Mhz), and was wondering the eternal question:
is 3080 ti worth the 600€ more than 3070 ti ?
I mainly work with Touchdesigner, Premiere Pro and sometimes Cinema 4D.
Thanks!
Hello,
This is likely to be a controversial take, but assuming that your workflow is mostly targeted at building/development, I’d go for the lower powered card.
In my experience, the main things that I need a laptop for are for portability and longevity of battery.
The performances losses incurred from thermal throttling, combined with the energy losses of extra cooling measures mean that the diminishing returns for top-end GPUs in laptops aren’t really worth it. I’d prefer longer battery life, quieter operation and (if you’re lucky) a smaller PSU to lug around.
The lower spec card gives you access to all the technologies provided by the target gen of Nvidia cards (ie: cuda, optiX, rtx, etc.) so it won’t limit your development options.
When I put projects into production, they go on hardware targeted for performance use (that’s almost always a racked machine) which is built for actual performance (ie: properly cooled, powered, etc.).
If you’re interested in a small form factor system for live usage, I’d highly recommend a small form factor PC over a laptop.
Agree with @flowb here and also 600€ is pretty extreme. A lot YouTube reviews of laptops offering both 3070ti and 3080ti models are suggesting the 3070ti model. In most cases the mobile thermals just can’t take advantage of the 3080ti and let it perform like its desktop counterparts do, where there is a larger gap in performance between 3070 and 3080.