Best Laptop For Animation Students And Graphic Designers (2022)

In order to be considered the best laptops for animation and graphic designers and Designing, the laptop must have sufficient specifications to handle applications with high memory and power consumption. When it comes to this scenario, a strong CPU, a huge quantity of RAM, a competent graphics card, and a significant number of storage space are required.

When selecting a laptop for graphic design, it is critical to strike a balance between performance, design, mobility, a big screen, weight, and affordability. A graphic designer need a laptop that is capable of running all design tools without experiencing latency or performance problems. If you are a graphical designer seeking for the finest laptop, this list will assist you in making your selection of the best laptop for graphic design.

So that you can make an informed decision, we’re going to go through some of the finest laptops for animation and graphic design right now. These laptops are capable of generating flawless animations in a variety of demanding applications when utilised in conjunction with them. Since graphic design requires the use of high-end gear and software, it is a challenging endeavour for anybody to undertake.

The visual representation of ideas and messages is achieved via the creation and use of symbols, pictures, and text by graphic designers. Such designing efforts need the use of the finest laptop with the greatest hardware specifications available. Professionals, particularly those working in the design profession, need laptops that are tailored to their specific requirements.

In your search for the finest laptop for graphic design work, there are various considerations that you should take into consideration. As a starting point, you should make certain that your laptop has the processing power to execute visually intense apps.

Factors That Define The Best Laptop For Graphic Designers:

Performance:

Since graphic designers run advanced software such as Flash Anim8or, Adobe Illustrator, Coral Draw, and VFX, performance will be the most important factor in choosing the best laptop for graphic design and animation. We recommend an Intel i5 processor or above with at least 8 GB of RAM or above, at least 2 GB of dedicated GPU (preferably a discrete graphics card from Nvidia or AMD), and Windows 10 OS or Mac X OS (for Apple laptop) is very essential.

Other essential features to look at include a larger screen size and longer battery life. These are important points before searching the list below to select the best laptop for graphic design. By the way, if you love to play games in your spare time, then you can use these laptops for graphic design as well as gaming.

Graphics:

Many of us believe that graphics cards are just for gaming, but graphics cards are essential for any laptop that is intended to be used by a designer. If you are into 2D designing and painting, the software will run smoothly and is capable of handling complex projects with the help of graphics cards. It is advisable to have a mid-end graphics card.

There is something worthwhile along the lines of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX1050 or AMD’s Radeon R7. It also helps in providing you with the best performance in the future, so you don’t have to keep upgrading it every year or two. However, 3D modeling software absolutely needs a graphics card. Projects typically have elaborate wire-mesh and large-scale textures that’s why integrated graphics solutions struggle to handle these projects. All of this rendered well on dedicated graphics cards and this requires more powerful hardware.

Storage Capacity:

Laptops typically come with two types of storage – hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Hard drives are more inexpensive, but slower than solid-state drives. SSDs are more expensive and come in limited sizes.

If you are working on large-scale 3D and video editing projects, check out the storage capacity first. Most laptops come with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. Choosing a laptop with a 1TB HDD should suffice for installing all designing software and storing projects, but we recommend SSD, the advantage of using SSD is its speed which means rendering and loading of projects will happen in seconds.

Screen:

The best laptops for graphic design will also have impressive screens, which not only show your work in the best possible light but accurately reproduce the colors, as well as ensure that after working on them for long periods of time you don’t get eye strain. The best laptops for graphic design should also be thin and lightweight so that you can carry them with you while traveling.

Battery Life:

Graphic applications can be processor-intensive and use a lot of battery power. Of course, it is best to have a laptop with a long-lasting battery. You may work outside of home or office and may not be close to the power port so getting a laptop that can stay charged for at least 8 to 10 hours is ideal for a graphic designer. Note that the 4K resolution screen will use more power.

In fact, the demand for graphic design has been increasing rapidly for the past decade. And to do this graphic designing job, a professional laptop with some essential features and specs is required. Whether you are a beginner or a high-end professional graphic designer, we can guarantee that you will get an inexpensive and budget-friendly laptop that will meet all your animation and graphics needs on this list.

In this guide of top laptops for graphic designers, we also included the Best 2 in 1 and Best Affordable Laptops. Many graphics designers prefer them for this work. So, if you want a macOS device or a Windows machine, read our guide to the best laptops for graphic design.

List of Best Laptops For Graphic Designing, Animations, Graphic Designers, and Animation Students:

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch

(Best Laptop for graphic designing and designers)

The best option, and possibly the most viable option for you, is going to be the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Apple hardware is still known to many pro and hobbyist graphic designers and, with its balance of specs and portability, the MacBook Pro still remains the best smart laptop for graphic designers.

The good part is that the MacBook Pro 16 is a great choice for graphic designers, as not only does the MacBook Pro come with powerful hardware that can handle difficult tasks, such as animations and 4K video encoding in a jiffy, but it also has many improvements. In fact, for laptops with 16-inch screens, the new MacBook Pro is remarkably compact, and it will fit in most laptop backpacks that can accommodate 14-inch laptops.

Performance:

The MacBook Pro has always been the most powerful portable laptop, which is one of the best laptops for animation students too, with the highest speed. This new model maintains the tradition of the strongest performance. The Apple MacBook Pro comes with an Intel Core i9-9880H processor and an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU, with 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM.

The machine also has 16 GB dual-channel DDR4-2666 RAM (up to 64 GB supported) and a 1 TB SSD. Software that takes better advantage of GPU will get a lot of performance gains. The MacBook Pro 16 inch isn’t just the most powerful MacBook Apple – it’s also the best. Apple has created a MacBook Pro that improves on almost every aspect of the iconic workstation. If you have the budget for this, then Macbook Pro is one of the best laptops that you can buy for graphic design.

Graphic Performance:

The performance of the GPU is one of the biggest advantages of the MacBook Pro 16 over other best laptops for graphic design. The machine comes with either a Radeon Pro 5500M or a Radeon Pro 5300M, although Apple offers these GPUs in 8GB and 4GB variants.

The AMD Radeon Pro 5500M and Radeon Pro 5300M are still incredibly powerful GPUs and many people will go for it if they need a great laptop for graphic designing, video editing, animation, etc. The Radeon Pro 5500M is a powerful GPU for any graphic designing software and also has the edge over the Radeon Pro Vega 20 and Radeon Pro 560X found in its 15-inch predecessors. It generally does well in running graphic designing applications and outperforms the GeForce GTX 1650.

Design and Display:

There are some surprises when you look at this MacBook, the best laptop for graphic designers. It follows the same elegant space gray aluminum casing with delicate speakers on each side of the keyboard and below are downward-facing speakers. Build quality is flawless: strong, detailed with every element integrated splendidly from those side speakers to the solid, adaptable hinge. As is common on Apple laptops, it is impeccably weighted, so you can open it one-handed, unlike many rival Laptops.

Screen:

This is truly a beauty. It is the largest display on the MacBook. The largest-ever Retina display looks great on a Mac laptop. Apple screen features like True Tone are here, so that the colors on the screen look particularly natural, with ambient color temperatures compatible for extra fidelity. Even with a larger display, Apple has ensured that the image quality remains high, as it has also surpassed the resolution of 3,072 x 1,920. The result is a beautifully crisp display that looks sharp and vibrant.

Battery Performance:

The performance is also enhanced by an increase in battery life. MacBooks always have an impressive battery life, especially compared to Windows laptops. Apple has made a remarkable achievement in making battery life last longer. By its estimate, it gives about an hour more battery life than the 15-inch model. It is now a 100-Wh battery, the largest battery on a Mac laptop, and can last up to 11 hours. The charging block has also been upgraded, so recharging the MacBook Pro is also faster than any other laptop.

Microsoft Surface Book 2

(Best 2 in 1 Laptop for Graphic Designers and Graphic Designing)

Microsoft Surface Book 2 is a sturdy device and the best 2 in 1 laptop for graphic designing and video editing. This is a powerful laptop that can do a lot of tasks smoothly for graphic designers. Most of the time you will be using it as a regular laptop, but you can also separate the screen and use it as a large tablet for graphic designing and animation. It is compatible with surface pens so that you can write important notes and sketch ideas as well.

Performance:

The Surface Book 2 comes with an 8th Generation Core i7-8650U processor (1.9GHz) and 16GB of RAM. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 GPU provides enough power, and the 512 GB SSD also provides plenty of storage space.

The Surface Book 2 NVIDIA GTX 1050 GPU allows you to run the most demanding software of graphic designing, without greatly reducing resolution or quality. Unlike most thin and light systems, the Microsoft Surface Book 2 can handle graphics-intensive tasks and video editing. Its GTX 1050, a card commonly found in modern mid-range gaming laptops, is perfectly suited for running graphics-intensive software.

Battery:

With the integrated graphics chip-enabled and the Surface Book 2 is the best laptop which gives you more than 8 hours of battery life if you set the battery set to the recommended level which is more than enough for graphic designers and graphic designing.

Design:

In terms of design, the Surface Book 2 feels comfortable, its brushed aluminum glory, it makes sense to say that Microsoft took the Surface Book and blew it all the way to make the Surface Book 2 an astonishing 15-inch device.

While Microsoft clearly made a lot of efforts to significantly improve the Surface Book 2 power profile and screen technology in many ways. The Fulcrum hinge is undoubtedly well-engineered and does exactly what it is designed for. Attaching and detaching the Surface Book 2 screen is straightforward.

A separate button is located in the top-right corner of the keyboard to the left of the delete button. Press it for a second and the screen is released from the fulcrum hinge, in which an audible de-click is heard and a notification on the display says that it is “ready to detach”.

Display:

Microsoft Surface Book 2 has a 15-inch PixelSense display. The picture quality is very sharp, and the screen becomes brighter at maximum settings. The resolution of the display is impressive but not as much as the Apple MacBook Pro display resolution.

The Microsoft Surface Book 2 is a laptop for animation students with a unique set of capabilities. It is fast and powerful enough for professionals, you can comfortably run any application that you think is graphics-intensive and the display is good enough for professional-level photo editing, illustration, and video editing. You can also sketch and take notes on the screen if you really want to.

MSI P65

(Best Powerful and Lightweight Laptop For Graphic Designing and Designers)

This versatile workstation is thin, lightweight, and very powerful. MSI P65 is a type of creative workstation for intensive photo and video editing. It is undoubtedly capable of running Photoshop and Premier – but it is better suited for such tasks than a regular laptop with its powerful specs.

Performance:

The MSI P65 Creator is another best laptop for graphic designing and graphic designers that comes with some great hardware. The MSI P65 is on our list of best laptops for graphic designers and animation students because it has an Intel Core i7-8750H processor. This is a hexacore processor that comes with a clocking frequency of 2.2GHz and can clock up to a maximum of 4.1GHz. With 6 cores, this processor is more powerful than your regular quad-core processor.

Ram and Hdd:

The MSI P65 Creator has 32 GB of RAM which is great for multitasking. One of the major contributors to the performance of this laptop is its storage. The MSI P65 Creator 8RF-450US laptop comes equipped with 512GB NVMe solid-state storage. This SSD storage is super quick and takes laptop performance to the next level.

Graphic Card:

Although the MSI P65 Creator laptop is known as a manufacturer-oriented laptop, this is the best graphic designing laptop in its own right. The graphics card here is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card. This GPU comes with a dedicated 8GB of memory in MSI P65, making it one of the best graphics cards available on this type of laptop. Cooler Boost Trinity technology keeps the laptop cool even during intense graphic designing sessions. If you are a professional graphic designer, then this MSI P65 is the best laptop and perfect choice for you.

Design:

MSI P65 Creator is made of aluminum, the laptop’s build quality is solid. MSI’s metal chassis assures the strongness of a laptop. If handled with care, the laptop should age well. While the P65 Creator is not as sleek or elegant as the Microsoft Surface Pro 2. It is quite slim and light, given the well-built components packed inside. The laptop is one of the thinnest laptops you can see. This Laptop can slide into any of your backpacks because its thickness is just 0.69 inches. The laptop also weighs only around 4.2 pounds which is not heavy considering what is inside the hood.

Display:

The display is another obviously important feature for any creative laptop. A better display is an important component of any laptop. The MSI P65 Creator comes with a 15.6-inch LED-backlit full HD screen that has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The MSI P65 Creator has very thin bezels that are 4.8 mm in size.

If you are a professional graphic designer then you will be quite happy with color accuracy for video and photo editing. The display panel is an IPS-level panel and has excellent viewing angles. There is almost no color loss when you are viewing the screen from a different perspective. The display also has almost 100% sRGB color gamut which is perfect for graphic designing, animations, video editing, etc.

ASUS ROG Strix GL702VS

(Best big-screen laptop for graphic designing)

Performance:

The ASUS ROG Strix, the Best big-screen laptop for graphic designing and designers, has an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, 16 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB) graphics card and a hybrid storage option (128GB SSD + 1TB 7200RP3D). Having SSDs on this laptop allows for faster booting and increased transfer speeds in addition to CPU and GPU, which promises better performance.

The Intel Core i7-7700HQ is one of the fastest mobile processors currently available in the market. The quad-core Kaby Lake chip has hyperthreading and a 6MB L3 cache. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 is based on Nvidia’s new Pascal architecture that focuses on high performance and energy efficiency. The powerful combo of the i7-7700HQ and GTX 1070 is enough for professional graphic designers. Asus OG Strix is also on our list of best gaming laptops.

Design:

This laptop looks smaller than the 17-inch laptops present in the market, and you can easily confuse it for a 15-inch one, but it packs enough muscle for most graphics-intensive tasks. The keyboard deck is quite sturdy, with a Xotic PC skin on the lid that accentuates the entire aluminum lid. While the rest of the chassis is made of plastic, the faux-metal brushing gives it a good metallic look. Weighing just 6.4 pounds, the ASUS ROG Strix is slim and light enough for professionals and animation students.

Display:

The ASUS ROG Strix features a 17.3-inch IPS panel with full HD (1920 × 1080) resolution. With great color accuracy and wide viewing angles, the IPS panel from AU Optronics looks stunning, especially when compared to TN panels commonly seen on other laptops. The system comes with G-Sync technology from Nvidia that synchronizes the monitor’s refresh rate with the GPU. So, you get improved graphics performance with less screen tear.

Acer Predator Helios 300 

(Best laptop for graphic designers)

Performance:

The Acer Predator Helios 300, the Best laptop for graphic designers, comes with an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, 16 GB DDR4 RAM (supported up to 32GB), Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card, two 256GB M.2 PCIe SSDs and an additional HDD for mass storage. The Core i7-9750H processor has a 2.60 GHz base clock speed that it can achieve with all six cores. The Core i7-9750H is an excellent choice for high graphics laptops.

The essential Acer component is the GeForce RTX 2060, one of Nvidia’s newer and more affordable graphics chips. The graphics card is one of the most important components in the best graphic designing laptops, and the new Helios 300 does not disappoint. It has a Turing Architecture GPU with 6 GB of VRAM.

Design:

The Predator Helios 300 looks compact and stylish, with a body coated with dark, matte metal. Blue accents surround the touchpad, highlight essential buttons and lighten the lid. It is much more compact with thinner bezels around the screen. It is still a fairly heavy computer, however, it weighs 2.3 kg (5.3 lb).

Screen and Ports:

This predator is actually slightly smaller than its main competitors like the ASUS ROG Strix, the Apple MacBook Pro (16-inch). There is nothing to shout about the port selection. You get a single Type-C connection, three USB 3 ports, a single audio jack, an HDMI port, and mini-Display Port output. So if you are an animations student or a professional graphic designer the Acer Predator Helios is the best laptop for you.

Display:

For the screen, the Acer Predator features a 15.6-inch full HD IPS display with a 144Hz refresh rate. It is a very good panel for daily use, and is an exceptionally good choice for graphic designers, due to the low response time and high refresh rate. Acer also offers great quality. Its brightness of 380 nits is high and means that Helios can stay bright in artificial lights and outdoors.

Gigabyte AERO 15-X9-RT5W

(Best 4K display laptop for Graphic Designing)

Performance:

The Gigabyte AERO 15-X9 is the best laptop for graphic designing and is equipped with a Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB RAM (up to 32GB supported), Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics chip and 1TB NVMT SSD.

This processor is a Hexa-core processor from Intel’s Coffee Lake generation. The processor has a 2.20 GHz base clock speed that can use Intel Turbo Boost to achieve 3.90 GHz across six cores. The Aero runs quiet and only warm with daily use, and thanks to the Optimus technology it can also last longer on each charge. The Aero 15-X9 is not only an impressive graphic designing laptop but also powerful enough for advanced gaming.

Design:

The Gigabyte Aero 15 is a compact 15-inch laptop and has a strong build quality. The laptop is made entirely of black-painted aluminum and has a backlit gigabyte logo on the hood. It has a thickness of 0.74-inch (2cm) and weighs just 4.49-pounds (2.13kg), which means that you can easily carry this laptop from one place to another.

Display:

For a serious bump in resolution, you can get the Aero 15 with either a fast, 144 Hz full-HD IPS panel from LG or AUO 4K display at 60Hz. Both are very good panels for daily use and are quite good for graphic designing, due to the low response time and high refresh rate, even though GSync is not supported. If you’re looking for something that has outstanding performance in graphic designing, then Gigabyte Aero 15 is the best affordable laptop for you.

Lenovo ThinkPad P52s

(Best Ultrabook Laptop for graphic designing)

Performance:

Lenovo ThinkPad P52s is the best ultrabook laptop for graphic designing. The P52 is currently available in five different configurations, but there is one thing that all versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad P52 have in common: the dedicated Nvidia Quadro P500.

There are two processors available: the Intel Core i7-8550U and the fastest “Cabi Lake Refresh” processor, the Core i7-8650U. Talking about storage device, there is some other option in it. Fixed configurations are available with PCIeNVMe SSDs with 256 GB, 512 GB or 1 TB capacities. You can also have 2, 16, or 32 GB of DDR4-2400 RAM. A Quadro GPU is definitely what you are looking for in graphic designing workstations, as they are optimized for graphic-intensive tasks.

Design:

The ThinkPad lineup may seem a bit utilitarian compared to stylish laptops like the MacBook Pro or Microsoft Surface Pro 2. It has a solid aluminum body and a stylish hinge. The keyboard and display are the two biggest assets of this laptop.

Display:

Lenovo has made the ThinkPad P52 available with the exact same LCD options as its predecessor the ThinkPad P51s. A high-end option in the shape of an Ultra HD display (3840x2160p) and a full HD screen (1920x1080p) is a cheaper option. Both display options are good and both LCD options are based on IPS technology as well.

Lenovo Legion Y530

(Best affordable laptop for graphic designing)

Performance:

Lenovo Legion Y530 is the Best affordable laptop for graphic designing and designers which features an Intel Core i7-8750H processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU. It has 16 GB dual-channel RAM, 256 GB SSD, and a 2 TB HDD.

This configuration should be powerful enough to have a smooth frame rate at high detail in the majority of modern graphic designing software. The Intel Core i7-8750H is a Hexa-core processor, runs at a base frequency of 2.20 GHz, has a maximum turbo clock of up to 4.10 GHz and can execute up to 12 threads simultaneously.

Design:

At 14.4 x 10.2 x 0.95 inches and weighing just 4.87 pounds, the Lenovo Y530 seems relatively slim and stylish for graphic designing needs. Many of the laptop’s essential ports are rear-facing, including power input, HDMI, USB-C and Ethernet.

Display:

The Lenovo Legion Y530 features a 15.6-inch IPS display surrounded by thin bezels (approximately 8 mm) at the top and side. It looks as sharp and vivid as on other budget laptops for graphic designing. The viewing angles are solid and there are no inverted colors as you can see on a cheap display.

Lenovo Flex 5 15.6” 2-in-1 Touchscreen

(Best cheapest 2 in 1 laptop for graphic designing)

Performance:

Lenovo Flex is the Best cheapest 2 in 1 laptop for graphic designing and comes in many configurations so when it comes to performance and power, we suggest the 8th generation Intel i7, 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. Couple that with an Nvidia GeForce GT 940MX graphics card. When it comes time to do a lot of photos or video editing, the graphics card will work perfectly. It is clear that Lenovo has made this system an affordable laptop for graphic design.

Battery:

The next biggest factor after power and performance is battery life. According to Lenovo, the battery can last up to 8.5 hours but it has the ability to give you up to 10 hours of battery life if you are not doing graphic-intensive tasks.

Design:

The Lenovo Flex 5 has an onyx black body. Features an eye-catching design, it is simply a silver-black slab of plastic with a nondescript Lenovo logo on the outside. Simplicity at its best, Lenovo really proved that when it comes to design, they will never disappoint.

Display:

The large 15.6 screen comes with 1080p resolution with an IPS display, the bright 1080p IPS touchscreen is crisp, making it a great screen for all purposes, especially for graphic designing as it offers a wide viewing angle. Its display is capable of emitting 300 nits of brightness. The fact that it has a smaller bezel makes it better.

Conclusion:

When making an option to purchase a laptop, it is important to do comprehensive specs research based on what you want to perform with the machine. The best laptop for animation and graphics designing can be accessed through the above-mentioned features. However, in addition to these features, it is mandatory to consider the cost of the laptop. As a professional graphic designer or animator, we recommend that you do not negotiate the cost and quality of the laptop.

These are the best laptops for graphic designing in 2020 that you can buy in the digital market. We hope that the above collection of our best laptops will help you to identify a laptop suitable for graphic design and animation from basic to advanced work. The most important features that you should look for are speed, storage, and graphics because these specifications decide whether or not you can use advanced graphic design software.