Hi everyone, some days ago my old pc abandoned me, so in the next weeks I’m going to buy a new one to continue my sculpting journey in blender. I saw some laptops that seem good for my budget (1.2/1.4k). The specs are 3060/4060 and 16gb of ram. Do you think that this will be enough to do some great sculpting stuff? I’m not going to do some crazy rendering works, I’m just interested in sculpting, texturing and rigging. I need a laptop because I will move a lot, so I can’t use a “standard” pc.
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For sculpting you need memory and a processor with a lot of cores.
Because with sculpting a lot of calculations (floating point…) has to be done.
If you render a lot (animations), then a good GPU becomes important.
But I think this hardware choice is more for PRO’s.
So pick something in the middle. Reasonable CPU and GPU.
But I would double the memory (remember, blender has an undo feature and all those changes on the model are kept in memory.
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Thank you for the answer. If I don’t find a pc with 32gb of ram that I can afford, do you think that using a multi-res modifier could help me handling the work any better? I saw some laptops with 32gb, but in my country they cost like 1.7/1.8k, so they are a lot more expensive
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I understand!
Memory is expensive.
My laptop is 11 years young …
Have a lot of problems using Geo-nodes, Sculpting, large material node setups.
But still having a lot of fun and learning things about Blender.
And yes, sometimes I reach the limits. But you can deal with those if know Blender a lit. It is still part of a learning process.
And yes , multi res can help but it needs also keep in memory which verts belong to which level … and also how much detail you want to put into your model. With a tool like subsurface painter you can mimic a lot of mesh details.
So there a enough tricks using blender to get a good result on a “simple” machine.
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I really appreciate your support, I think I will buy a 16gb one, and I will try to do my best to have fun with the tools I can use 
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I’ve just checked, was curious, on my laptop Dell Precision M6700, I have 16GB ram.
Running Ubuntu and obscure NVideo GPU card
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Perfect, I think that I will take a closer look at the best laptop for my budget. One last question, if I reduce the number of undoes, can I increase the performance since there will be less memory occupied by those?
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Yes, and the operating system (Windows, Apple, Ubuntu), will also do another trick.
When machine memory becomes low (many application, or heavy Blender usage), then the OS will swap memory to your disk drive. But this takes time and will be much faster if you have a SolidState Disk (SSD) instead of a HardDisk Drive.
But memory swapping takes more time and will slowdown your machine and running processes. It is the last resort of heavy applications on your machine. After that your machine will be unresponsive (hard reset needed). Or Blender crashes and you lose your unsaved work.
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All right, I’ll keep in mind your words, thank you very much
32GB memory is recommended now.
Here is the Blender requirements specs page to use as a guide.
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How many polygons do you think I will be able to handle with 16gb in sculpting? Because I’m not going to use my laptop to create crazy scenes or complex simulations, I’m only interested in learning sculpting and texturing, so as long as I can handle a good amount of polygons without being unable to continue, I will be fine
Hard to impossible to tell, I can not recall a time when I had a pc with less Ram than that. That is what my last one had and I think I had that about ten years possibly. It struggled with 6million verts probably.
You should be ok for small to average sized projects. Generally save before trying another level of remeshing detail or multi resolution.
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I currently use a Surface Book 2 with an i7, 16GB and a 1060GTX 6GB and it got me through all the sculpting courses here.
The two things I’d look at, as mentioned above, are memory, a great screen that covers the sRBG space at least 100%, and a fast SSD. Any current CPU and GPU will do. Go for min. 8GB VRAM. Ran into issues with cycles and 6GB VRAM.
There are a few tricks to increase performance, e.g., increase the number of faces before you add the multi res multiplier.
Not sure which country you are in, we got an Acer gaming laptop (16", 4060, 16GB, 1TB drive, i7 13th gen) at BestBuy for $1.1k the other week. The list price is $1.6k. And Lenovo has great discounts too right now. Just make sure the color space the screen covers doesn’t suck.
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I’m writing from Italy, due to taxes I think that the pricing will be a little bit higher, but I will go with something like what you have just mentioned. I’ll be able to buy something like that with my budget and I can get trough all the courses I’ve already bought here
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