When it comes to choosing the best laptop for college students, it all depends on what you’re studying. For instance, if your major is English literature or history, you don’t need a beefy laptop. You need one that will do a good job on the internet, so buying a Chromebook would be a good choice.
However, if you’re going to do a lot of animation work in college, you will need a more powerful laptop for school. Whether its 2D or 3D animation, you will surely need a device that packs a powerful video card, as well as a pacey CPU and a lot of working memory.
And considering that you’ll be doing graphic design work, your laptop will need to have a good display. By ‘good’ we mean a full HD display that’s at least 15 inches in diagonal. Actually, when the size of a display is concerned, the rule is: the bigger, the better.
Your ideal laptop also needs to have a good battery, which will provide enough energy to keep it going for hours. After all, you’re gonna be spending a lot of time at college and you surely don’t want your laptop battery to drain out too soon.
4 Best Laptops for Students Taking Animation Course At College
In the first part of this article, you’ve learned about all the things a good laptop should have, especially if it’s going to be used for animation work. The problem is that because these devices cost a lot, you need to be extremely careful not to pick a wrong one. You need a laptop that’s going to serve you well for years, keeping a high level of performances all the time. But, if you fail to pick such a laptop, you’ll just give away your money for a device you won’t have any use for.
In order to find the very best laptop for animation work, you have two options before you. The first one is to sit down in front of your old computer and browse the internet hoping to find a suitable device. Unfortunately, you may not be able to do so unless you have extensive knowledge of laptop hardware. And even if you’re very knowledgeable on this subject, you still need to be ready to spend a lot of time on your research.
The alternative is much more convenient. Instead of doing research on your own, let the pros take care of it. Actually, we’ve already researched the offer of laptops on Amazon and were able to select four products that stand out. So, here they are!
LG Gram Laptop (17″ Display, Intel Core i7, SSD drive and 16GB RAM)
With a 17-inch display, this laptop is very convenient to use, even if you need to do some kind of an animation project. The laptop also comes with an impressive processor. The CPU in question is an 8th-generation i7 Intel processor with a processing speed of 1.8GHz.
To help out the processor, this laptop uses SSD, which takes its performances to a whole new level. The Solid-State Drive has a capacity of 512GB, which makes this laptop both fast and reliable. And of course, with 512GB of storage space, you will be able to save all of your big animation projects.
Another great thing about this laptop is that it’s very lightweight (about three pounds), despite being 17 inches in diagonal. It also comes with an impressive battery that can supply enough energy to keep the laptop going for nearly a whole day.
Pros
- Impressive CPU
- 512GB SSD
- 19.5-hour battery
- 17-inch display
- Lightweight
Cons
- Could’ve been a bit cheaper
ASUS – TUF FX705GM (17.3″ Screen, Intel Core i7, SSD drive, RAM 16GB & powerful Nvidia card)
Although it’s almost a grand more expensive than the first laptop we reviewed, this one is definitely worth buying.
It comes with truly sensational performances, making it not only suitable for college students but professional animation engineers as well.
So, what are the things we’re talking about? First of all, there’s an Intel i7 CPU inside, as well as a 256GB SSD drive and 16GB RAM.
But, the most impressive specification of this laptop is its graphics card. It comes with NVIDIA GeForce GTX, which is a high-performance video card that makes this laptop capable of running some really demanding programs.
Pros
- Fantastic specs
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX video card
- Impressive display
- Impressive battery
Cons
- Not so impressive price
Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series (17.3 FullHD Display, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, SSD 1TB, Radeon 530 card)
Although we can’t say this is a budget laptop, the fact is that it’s much cheaper than the two previously-reviewed devices.
But, being cheaper than those laptops doesn’t make it worse than them in terms of performances.
On the contrary, this laptop has a pretty awesome CPU and a pretty awesome GPU.
The processor in question is an Intel Core i7, while its video card is AMD Radeon 530 with 4GB memory. Then, there’s also RAM with 16GB and an SSD of 1TB storage capacity.
Pros
- Reasonable price
- Impressive specs
- Video card suitable for animation work
- Incredible 1TB SSD
Cons
- None – everything about this laptop seems amazing!
Acer Predator 17 GX-792-7448 (good for animation & gaming, Intel Core i7, RAM 16GB, Nvidia GeForce card)
The last laptop we’re going to review is one from the Acer Predator series, which comes with an i7 processor, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX1080 video card.
All of these specs make this laptop a perfect choice for those who have to do many animation projects. It has a pacey processor and, even more importantly, comes with a pretty beefy graphics card.
The laptop also comes with an impressive battery, which can keep it working almost one entire day. On top of everything, the laptop is very lightweight, which is kind of surprising considering that it has a display with a diagonal of 17.3 inches.
Pros
- Beefy hardware
- Impressive graphics
- Good battery
Cons
- Expensive
Final Word
Now that you’ve read out four reviews, you should be able to decide which one is the best option for you. Each of these devices would serve you very well in your animation studies, but you can’t just pick one on random. Instead, you need to take many different factors into consideration before making your choice. Think about things like its performances, the battery life, and, of course, the price of the laptop.
If you’re not afraid of spending a bit more for a really astonishing laptop, our device is to go with Acer Predator 17. This is one of the most powerful laptops you can find on Amazon! But, if you’re not feeling like spending too much cash, a Dell Inspiron 17 5000 Series for yourself would be more than a suitable choice. And, of course, you won’t make a bad decision if you buy one of the remaining two laptops, that is, ASUS – TUF FX705GM or LG Gram.