Nvidia brings desktop GPUs to laptops
Joe Cotter
Posts: 3,259
Nvidia brings desktop GPUs to laptops.
This isn't an M series, or "for notebooks," it's the GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080 inside laptops.
"They're nearly identical to their desktop counterparts, with only a slightly slower base clock speed on the GTX 1060 when it's inside a notebook" says Aevermann.
At the top of the line, the GTX 1080 will run 2,560 CUDA cores at 1733Mhz, with 8GB of GDDR5X memory. The GTX 1070 (designed to replace the 980M) will run 2,048 CUDA cores at 1645Mhz with 8GB of GDDR5 memory, and the GTX 1060 (designed to replace the 970M) will run 1,280 CUDA cores at 1670Mhz with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.
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Comments
...still would stick to a desktop as most notebooks do not offer the ability to install third party cooling options or much room for expandability besides memory and drive capacity (and you really have to watch the power consumption more closely as you just can't slap in a beefier PSU to compensate).
Cost is another factor as you pay more for portability. I imagine these will be in the 2,000$ - 3,000$ range. with a maximum of 32 GB DDR4 dual channel memory.
yeah...this is probably good for gamers who want to game on a laptop, but for rendering? i can see heat generation and lack of air flow being a problem.
My thoughts exactly. I have a Corsair 450D case with two inlet and two outlet fans. It keeps my i7 and 970 cool in all but the hotest day. The Pascal gpus run cooler than the Maxwell cpus but I wouldn't have thought they were that much cooler.
Cheers,
Alex.
Nice to see, but you pay a premium for Laptops, and such extended use can shorten the life too. But for those with the cash, or space issues, or who travel, then it's a nice extra option.
This reminds me of the small Cube computers. I wonder if this tech is comming to them as well. They are expandle and have excellent cooling.
My main motivation for considering a powerful laptop is that my desktop is an iMac, and I am not likely to migrate. However, Apple's support for Nvidia has pretty much disappeared, so I am thinking of getting a second machine just for rendering. A laptop would be something I can put away between uses, doesn't need a monitor, etc. Not an easy call, though, and I will probably keep waffling over this for several months more.
Heat really isn't a huge issue with properly designed laptops, but most of the laptops you see in the stores aren't designed to really do much more than browse the internet, watch movies, and run office applications. Many of the gaming laptops that are designed for serious gamers that push their systems hard work very well for 3D rendering. I've done most of my rendering on a gaming laptop (all of the images in my gallery were done on a laptop), and temps are quite good, but they can gat a bit loud when running the fans at full speed. My current laptop has a GTX 970 (1280 cuda cores, 6Gb, running at 924 MHz), and when rendering with Octane the fans seldom run above an idle with the GPU temp about 56 degrees. Rendering with Iray makes the fans a bit louder because it uses one full CPU core while rendering, which generates more heat so the fans need to work harder to keep things cool.
With the lower power requirements for the 10xx series, which also means less generated heat, it's not surprising to see that they will be integrated into Laptops, especially when you consider that you could get laptops with dual GTX 980m GPU's.
I don't remember what type it was, but I remember a review for a laptop that let you swap the cd drive for a pop-out cooling device. Looked pretty useful for what we do.
Asus already has laptops that ship 64GB DDR4 RAM for the G800VI-XB78K and the G752VS-XB78K systems with Pascal GPU's.
Or did you mean the GPU would max out a 32GB DDR4, because the Pascal GPU architecture would use DDR5, not DDR4.
You could get one of those little dorm room fridges or if one wishes to be fancy, a small wine fridge, and set that in your lap and place the laptop inside... You'd have to cut holes in the door for your hands and probably your eyes too, but that's the cooling problem solved right there.
At 3K, one might not have enough cash left over, so until they can afford a small fridge, one could dig around inside of the medical waste dumpsters outside of most hospitals... You would most likely find a couple of used styrofoam coolers of appropriate size and loads of those disposable cool-paks... You might have to rinse off some stray flesh and body parts here and there, but that's a cheap solution... Very portable too.
You can also stock yoo-hoos in there. I always wanted to wear a fridge with a supply of yoo-hoo and tell people just open my chest and grab yourself a yoo-hoo!
If you you want a portable GPU rendering monster with 5,120 cuda cores, and have $4,200 to spend, you can get a dual GTX 1080 (8Gb) laptop with Win10 and 64Gb of RAM (http://www.pro-star.com/index.php?r=product/configure&model=P873DM3-S). For about $2,100 you can get a laptop with a GTX 1070 (8Gb) with win10 and 64GB of RAM (http://www.pro-star.com/index.php?r=product/configure&model=P673RS-GS).
Not as cost effective as a desktop, but it's pretty hard to travel, do presentations, and sit in your recliner and watch TV with a desktop.
...I have an old Antec P-183 that has six fans (intake ones with filter screens) including a large one on the left side panel right by the GPU. Monster of a case that is nicely compartmentalised, though unfortunately no longer made. Just about everything I see today now has that ridiculous window in the left side
...but for the price of one of those high end gamer notebooks with proper cooling, I can build a pretty decent and more powerful workstation.
..the "affordable" ones I've seen seem to top out at 32 GB physical memory.. I have seen a couple pro engineering notebooks with 64 GB (that also include mobile Quadro GPUs) but then you are looking at prices in excess of 5,000$.
...for portfolio presentations, I'd just dump everything to an inexpensive tablet.
The one downside of those two systems is the OS bundled with them.
An inexpensive tablet works great if you have a simple canned presentation. Unfortunately what I do for presentations (not the same stuff I do with DAZ content) requires something a lot more robust, especially when it needs to include a live demo. Also, I'm usually finishing everything up the night before in the hotel room
, so I need something that can travel. Desktops, even with light flats screens, simply don't travel well. The plus with many of these new laptops, is that performance wise, they really are good desktop replacements. I work with Agisoft Photoscanner quite a bit and teach it at the local community college, and my laptop is much faster than the Intel 4790K based desktops in the lab (faster processors than my laptop). I often use my laptop for class demo's because it is much faster.
True, you can get more for your investment with a desktop, but there are situations where a desktop simply isn't practical, or where having both a high end desktop and a reasonably affordable and functional (high end but not ultra high end) laptop doesn't make practical or financial sense.
Unfortunately, I think it will become increasingly difficult to get a system with Win7. If you must still run Win7, you might seriously think about either getting a new system soon, or purchasing an OEM Win7 license soon to use later (though then you might have some driver issues).
I've got a gigabyte laptop with a 980m -- it works well for iray. Not as well as my 980ti, but hey, I can sit on my couch with it. Also, it blazes on After Effects. Highly recommended.
Portability has become much more of an issue for me.
I have to do some test renders on online render farms to see how cost effective they are or are not. Optimally I would like to use a notebook for the grunt work and an online render farm for final images/animations. As to cost, notebooks continue to come down.
My current notebook has 32gb ddr4 memory, 1.5tb ssd, an i7 6700hq at 2.6ghz, the latest JBL sound system (best I've seen for notebooks) and the weak spot, a 960m 4gb Nvidia gpu for rendering (integrated intel runs both notebook and 4k monitor just fine.) Currently, the video card is what drives costs through the roof. My system was around 1.4k U.S. after add ons.
...the one rub is having to perform test renders to check lighting, shadows, materials, & such. If you don't want these to take hours, you still need a fairly decent amount of GPU memory. Online render farm services are not cheap and using them for test renders could very well cost more in the long run than purchasing a better GPU.
That's a nifty idea.
I'll add my voice to Dustrider to say that I've rendered on laptops for years with no problems at all (I do usually also have a laptop fan that the chassis can sit on either on my desk or on my lap, so there's a small caveat there). My most recent laptop I used for 8 core CPU rendering in Carrara and GPU rendering in Octane with no heat issues at all, even on animations that took quite some time to render out and I actually still use it as a render node. For the first time in my life, I've now purchased a desktop with a 1070 (I wanted to play with the Oculus, even though I'm not a gamer, so used the excuse that I also wanted to render faster and larger scenes in Octanes so I could justify spending the money) and I will admit it blazes in render speeds, but there really isn't any reason to think that today's laptops (and for the last 5 years or longer) can't be perfectly viable for rendering.
That seems like a terrifically practical approach, purchase a laptop with enough specs to run the software to arrange and save the scene file, then send the file to the cloud to be rendered by a render farm in a jiffy (if I'm understanding the workflow). One question I've always wondered about though, how expensive is it to use an online renderfarm? If it's too pricey it would just chase me back into my 'mini farm' network of 2 laptops and 1 desktop (20 cores total), but if it's affordable that seems like a great solution.
Heheh, saw a youtube vid (Linus Tech Tips I think?) where they tried this idea out, sadly didn't work as the mini freezer couldn't dissipate/radiate heat quickly enough.
wait, I found it with a quick search:
My brother in law is hvac and works on air conditioning all the time, mentioned the idea to him but he wasn't surprised it wouldn't work with a mini fridge, said it might be possible with a larger unit that could radiate more heat more effectively. But at a certain point if you're purchasing an industrial walk-in freezer to enclose your computer, you probably aren't looking at much of a cost savings compared to more conventional pc cooling methods :)
Found it. The Acer Predator 17.
I'm too used to two large monitors on a desk top, a laptop might be good for travelling, but no way I'd want to rely on one as my main work environment, or renderer.
I have a 39" 4k display hooked up to my integrated video card as well as the notebook monitor. The only thing I use the discreet video card is for rendering. Any decent notebook comes with two slots for storage (m.2 and standard ssd) and 2 video cards.
That brings up another point though. The 4K Seiki tv is around $230 U.S. and works pretty well for me for my main monitor. I've been using it for a few months now. The only thing is, I have to double check things on my notebook monitor at times since it's colorspace is richer then the notebooks and therefore I suspect many standard monitors. Also, the refresh is low so it's not anything a hardcore gamer would want.