Best Laptops for Graphic Design

Time is money and the importance of good equipment that doesn’t hinder your efficiency is undisputed. This is as true for graphic design as it is for anything else.

Finding the best graphic design Laptop can be a challenge because you need a powerful machine that can perform a variety of complex tasks while still being mobile. The demands are similar to what you’ll need for photo editing or video editing.

You need the ability to manipulate high-resolution images efficiently, and older Laptops just aren’t up to the task.

Today, I’m going to walk you through how to find the best Laptop for your Graphic Design needs.

We’ll take a look at the CPU, RAM, and GPU requirements, as well as laptop-specific considerations like size, weight, and mobility.

Image-Credit: MSI

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to choose the best laptop for working with the Adobe Creative Cloud and other graphic design software.

I’ll be talking about laptops, not desktop PCs. If you’d rather chose a stationary desktop PC / Workstation for your Graphic Design needs, check out our guide on choosing the Best Computer for Graphic Design.

You won’t get the same portability, but you’ll get more bang for your buck and generally higher performance.

If you don’t want to read through the nitty-gritty and just want our Graphic Design Laptop recommendations, go ahead and skip to the end.

For everyone else, let’s get started!

Best Laptop Components for Graphic Design

CPU Requirements

The CPU, or “Processor”, is the brain of your computer. It handles pretty much every task performed by your PC.

Typing an email? Your CPU processes every keystroke and puts the correct letter onto your document.

Drawing a line? Your CPU is taking your inputs and turning them into a line on the screen.

Opening a menu? Your CPU is processing all your instructions.

You get the gist.

There are two main ways of measuring CPU speed. The first is to measure the clock speed, which is measured in Gigahertz (GHz), or billions of cycles per second. So a CPU clocking at 1GHz makes 1,000,000,000 calculations per second.

The other way is to count the number of cores. A core is basically its own mini-CPU. In essence, a quad-core CPU works like 4 CPUs glued together.

The reason this is important is that a CPU core can only work on a single task at a time. If your computer were running multiple tasks on a CPU with just one Core, it would have to constantly switch back and forth between the tasks, which slows it down.

So, the more cores, the more speed you get for multiple tasks or tasks that can easily be parallelized.

Image-Source: Microsoft Windows

For graphic design purposes, you’re typically running a single program. And, while a single program can use multiple cores, graphic design program tasks are hierarchical.

For example, your software might need to execute Task A, Task B, and Task C.

But Task C cannot be executed until Task B is executed, which cannot be executed until Task A is executed. Faster core speeds allow Task A to get executed faster, which moves the process along quicker.

As a result, it’s important to look for a processor with high clock speeds, and 4 cores are just fine.

If you also want to perform rendering or video editing tasks, you might want 8 or more cores. But that’s not necessary for graphic design.

Here are some CPU benchmarks from PassMark Software. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it does illustrate how much performance can vary from one CPU to another.

RAM Requirements

Your computer has 2 different types of storage: volatile memory generally referred to as “random access memory”, or RAM, and non-volatile memory, or storage.

RAM is perhaps the most important component for your graphic design performance.

The reason for this is that RAM can be read from and written to very quickly. Storage, such as a hard drive, takes a lot longer to read from and write to.

Image-Source: G.Skill

So, how much RAM is needed?

Let’s assume you’re running Windows 10. By the time your computer boots up, you’re already using 4GB of RAM. Once you load Adobe Creative Cloud, you’re already using 8GB of RAM.

What does this mean?

It means that if your computer only has 8GB of RAM, you’d better not be running anything in the background. Want to fire up iTunes or Chrome? You’re going to need more RAM.

When your RAM is used up, your computer will need to use slower storage space to function as extra RAM. Since storage takes longer to read from and write to, this significantly slows your overall graphic design performance.

As a result, 8GB of RAM is the bare minimum for graphic design. Even then, you’ll probably get frustrated from time to time. In reality, 16GB is a much better number for graphic design.

Unlike progressively increasing performance with better CPUs or GPUs, having absurd amounts of RAM doesn’t improve your performance above a certain threshold.

As long as you have enough for your tasks, you’ll be fine. But it’s still better to have more than you need than not enough.

GPU Requirements

The GPU is a dedicated processor, similar to the CPU. However, the GPU is a processing unit that specializes in tasks related to graphical computations and visual output.

Using a strong GPU can free up a lot of resources from the CPU.

The good news about choosing a graphic design laptop is that the GPU demands will be relatively minimal. You’re typically working with a single image, even if there are several layers to deal with.

As a result, you might notice that our top Laptop recommendations in this article all have mid-tier GPUs.

If you’re building your own desktop PC, it doesn’t hurt to buy a more powerful GPU. But in practice, ultra-powerful GPUs are only necessary for gaming, where the GPU needs to handle a multitude of textures and render them in real-time, often at high framerates, or other graphically demanding tasks such as 3D modeling.

Any GPU with at least 2GB of VRAM is just fine for running Adobe Creative Cloud.

Before we continue, here’s a list of GPU benchmarks I put together, as provided by PassMark Software.

HDD vs. SSD vs. NVMe Drives

There are three basic types of storage devices: Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), Solid-State Drives (SSDs), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe).

An HDD is the standard, old-fashioned type of hard drive that still exists in most PCs.

It consists of a small metal case, with a hard disk inside. The disk spins around like a vinyl record, while a magnetized needle reads and writes your data.

HDDs are inexpensive but slow. This is because the disk has to physically spin in order to read or write. This rotation speed, or RPM, limits your disk’s speed.

Most modern desktop drives operate at 7,200 RPM, while laptop drives are typically limited to 5,400 RPM.

Seagate Barracuda Hard-Drives

The faster option is to use an SSD or an NVMe drive.

These two technologies have no moving parts, so they can operate much quicker—NVMe drives even more so. Instead, they rely on a process called quantum tunneling to read and write your data. I’m not going to get into quantum tunneling, because it’s absurdly complicated.

Suffice it to say that SSDs and NVMe drives are a lot faster.

So, why is this important?

These drives, as fast as they are, are significantly more costly on a price-per-gigabyte basis than HDDs. As with many things in life, you’re going to need to strike a balance between cost and performance.

For data-heavy applications like video editing, an SSD—or preferably an NVMe drive—is all but mandatory.

However, for graphic design, this is less important. There just isn’t that much data in even a complex Photoshop image. It’s like buying a race car to go to your next-door neighbor’s house—not a great financial decision unless you just wanted to show off.

That said, there are good reasons to choose a fast drive. The reason is that your operating system, as well as your graphic design apps, need to load. And both of those applications are very heavy on storage.

Without a fast drive like an SSD or NVMe drive, it can take several minutes just to boot up your laptop and load your software. And if you’re shelling out over a grand for a laptop, that’s just unacceptable in this day and age.

Image Credit: Samsung

If you’re really short on cash, you might end up buying a laptop with a small SSD that’s barely large enough for your operating system and Adobe Creative Cloud.

In that case, there’s a good compromise solution: simply store your other data, such as your project files, on an external drive.

Alternatively, you could use cloud storage for your project files. Either way, use the faster drive for your operating system and apps, and you’ll get much better performance.

Screen Requirements

There are several things to take into consideration when evaluating a laptop screen for graphic design. The first, screen resolution, is easy to understand. The bigger the numbers, the sharper the images.

You’ll see more detail, so you’ll be able to do better work without zooming in and out constantly.

That said, there’s a limit to how much resolution will help you. On a smaller screen, you won’t notice the difference between 1080p and 4K resolution because your eye just can’t discern such tiny details anymore.

If you want 4K resolution while working with your laptop, we recommend using an external monitor with at least a 27″ screen size.

Screen size is another important consideration. The bigger the screen, the easier it will be on your eyes. On the other hand, a large screen means a bigger laptop, which means more weight while you’re traveling and more strain on your battery.

Perhaps the most important consideration is color accuracy. This simply means the number of colors the screen can display.

As a side note, this is another reason to steer clear of gaming laptops for graphic design. Gaming GPUs and monitors are designed for fast refresh times and highly saturated colors.

These are great for video games, but they’re not beneficial for graphic design.

For graphic design, you need color accuracy for your visually demanding projects. You want to know exactly what the end product is going to look like, no matter if you are going to print your designs or display them on the TV, Monitors, or Smartphone screens.

In addition, the type of panel will affect your viewing angle, and your ability to see accurate colors from an angle. Since you, colleagues, or a client might be looking at your screen at suboptimal angles, this is crucial.

First, let’s look at different color accuracy standards:

• sRGB is the default RGB color standard and the most commonly-listed metric.
• Adobe RGB is a wider color standard that’s used for applications that will output their results in CMYK. It’s the most important metric for graphic designers.
• DCI-P3 is a more advanced color standard that’s not listed on most devices. In the future, this metric will become more important.

For laptops, it can often be difficult to find this information. You’ll need to read the product data-sheet to find out, and many times, it isn’t even listed there. If it’s not listed, that is usually a bad sign.

Choose a Laptop that clearly states how color-accurate the screen is.

An easier specification to find is the panel type. LCD panels are divided into 3 different types:

• TN panels are the most inexpensive type of panel. They’re ideal for gaming because they have the lowest latency and highest refresh rates. However, the color accuracy is the lowest of all panel types.
• IPS panels are the most expensive type of panel. However, they offer the highest color accuracy, as well as the widest viewing angle. The only serious downside is the so-called “backlight bleed”, which makes it hard to distinguish different shades of black. Nonetheless, this is the best panel type for graphic designers.
• VA panels fall somewhere in-between TN panels and IPS panels. They’re generally inferior to IPS panels for graphic designers. However, because they don’t suffer from backlight bleed, they can be a good choice if you work primarily in greyscale.

Size and Portability

As mentioned above, consider balancing size and mobility.

The bigger the screen, the easier it is to work with. In addition, a larger laptop generally has an easier-to-use keyboard with some even sporting a Numbers-Pad, which can be invaluable depending on your workflow and Software used.

However, a larger laptop is going to be heavier, meaning you might not want to carry it around too much. And on top of that, you’re going to need a larger workspace to accommodate the larger laptop.

On the go, in trains, on planes, a large laptop can be difficult to fit.

But there’s another balance to strike. You see, larger laptops also tend to perform better.

Why is this the case?

The issue here is cooling. As anyone who’s ever been burned by a laptop knows, laptops get hot. And that heat needs to go somewhere. A larger laptop allows for faster heat dissipation since there’s more room for vents, radiator mass, and fans.

What does this have to do with performance?

The faster a processor or GPU is running, the more heat it’s going to produce. And more heat doesn’t just run the risk of burning your thighs; it also means that your laptop can fail sooner.

To compensate for this failure risk, a laptop automatically throttles down its components’ performance when the particular component is starting to get too warm.

The result is that compact, high-performance laptops don’t always perform up to their theoretical and advertised potential. Sure, this micro laptop might have a Core i9 processor, but it’s not going to be running full-speed all the time because it gets too hot too quickly.

As a result, you’re juggling quality and performance against weight, low noise, and portability.

To maximize your performance, look for a 17-inch laptop that’s nice and thick.

For more portability, a 14-15-inch laptop will still get the job done, and be lightweight at that.

Thankfully, graphic design doesn’t generally put a lot of strain on your CPU. The main difference in performance will generally come down to loading times. That said, a hotter laptop will end up throttling sooner.

Also, don’t forget to look at – and optimally, test – the keyboard. If you’re fond of shortcuts, a small laptop with no function keys or Numbers-Pad can hinder your productivity.

This is another good reason to consider at least a mid-sized laptop.

Our Picks: Best Laptops for Graphic Design

Now that we’ve looked at all the necessary components, it’s time to get to the recommendations. Here are my top three choices for the best graphic-design laptop.

Best Budget Option: Acer Spin 3

Image-Credit: Acer

Let’s address the elephant in the room; a budget computer is rarely ideal. When you go cheap, your laptop is going to be obsolete sooner than it would if you bought a more fully-featured system.

That said, sometimes cash is tight, and you need a computer that will work for you tomorrow.

If you need a graphic design laptop right this second, the Acer Spin 3 is a solid choice. It’s designed as a hybrid between a laptop and a tablet, with a reversible monitor that gives the system its name.

The 14-inch screen is a bit small, but it’s an IPS touch screen, complete with a stylus for sketching out a new design in a hurry. It has a 1080p resolution, which isn’t as impressive as 4K, but still good enough to get the job done.

The 8GBs of RAM isn’t great, but it can still run Adobe Creative Cloud efficiently—there are some 16GB models out there, so if you can snag one of them, I would definitely suggest you do so. It also comes with a 512GB SSD, which allows you to boot up quickly and quickly load your files.

Image-Credit: Acer

The 10th Generation Intel Core i5-1035G4 CPU offers burst speeds of 3.7GHz. However, the slim profile will prevent you from reaching those speeds on a regular basis.

Then again, the small size is part of the attraction. This laptop is only ¾ of an inch thick and weighs less than 4 pounds. If you spend a lot of time on the road, you’ll appreciate the light weight.

The downside? There’s no GPU. This means that the entire weight of image processing is going to fall on the CPU.

Is the Acer Spin 3 perfect?

No. But it’s the best in its price range.

Best Value Option: GIGABYTE AERO 15

Image-Credit: Gigabyte

The GIGABYTE AERO 15 is one hell of a laptop for one hell of a price. It’ll chew through anything from graphics design work (regardless of how complex it might be) to games to movies and anything else, this laptop will handle it all.

One of the most eye-catching parts of this laptop is its gorgeous display. Sporting an ultra-crispy 4K resolution with an OLED, IPS panel that’s 100% DCI-P3 certified, the screen on this laptop is a feast for the weary eyes.

And if we take look under the hood, this laptop rocks an 8 core i7-11800H with a boost clock of over 4.6GHz and an RTX 3060 that’s powerful enough to last you years and run pretty much anything you can throw at it.

Image-Credit: Gigabyte

And for all your browser tab hoarding needs, it also comes with 16GBs of RAM and a reasonable 512GBs of NVMe storage for speedy reads and writes.

Coming in at about $1600, this laptop is a pretty great deal for what it offers and is very expandable if you ever wanted to get your hands dirty in the future.

Best Performance Option: ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo

Image-Credit: ASUS

The no-compromises laptop. If you have money burning a hole in your wallet, this is what you should get. This ZenBook has all the bells and whistles you could ask for and a price tag to match at $3000.

This top-of-the-line creator laptop comes equipped with a jaw-dropping 15.6 inches, OLED, UHD 4K screen with 100% DCI-P3 coverage. Colors will simply pop on this screen and any color accurate work would be a breeze.

Along with that heavenly screen comes an RTX 3070 GPU that’s more than ready to handle all those pixels and pretty much everything else you could possibly throw at it.

Coupled with the 8 core i9-10980HK that can boost to over 5.3GHz, this laptop is a veritable powerhouse that will chew through anything.

Image-Credit: ASUS

And that’s without even mentioning the more…special aspects of this laptop. You see, this laptop doesn’t just come with one screen, it comes with two!

A multi-monitor setup on the go. It’s definitely something that’s hard to let go of when you get used to it. You can put references, toolbars, music players, videos, and all sorts of things on the secondary screen and free up valuable space on the top screen.

Oh, did I mention that it’s also a touch screen? It comes with a stylus out of the box that allows you to draw, write, doodle, take down notes, or do whatever else you want to do.

Other than that, this laptop also features between 16 – 32GBs of RAM depending on what model you go with you and over 1TB of fast NVMe storage so that you don’t have to bother with external hard drives.

The ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is one of, if not the best possible laptop you could get for graphics design.

The Apple Alternative: Apple MacBook Pro M1

I’m well aware that many people prefer a Mac. In many ways, they’re easier to use than a PC. If you’re one of those people, I also got you covered with the new Apple MacBook Pro.

Image Credit: Apple

To begin with, it sports Apple’s own M1 chip with 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores. Apple has made major strides with its CPUs have created quite a monster with the M1 chip.

Because of this, even though the new Apple MacBook doesn’t have a discrete GPU like the other laptops on this list, it is still very speedy and well optimized for tasks to the point where you will barely miss a discrete GPU on more simple tasks like graphic design.

The downside is that with Apple’s new M1 chip comes a whole new architecture that developers have to adapt to. Which means that some apps still haven’t fully converted over, but that’s quickly changing, and some of the most used apps when it comes to graphics design have already been ported.

It also comes equipped with Apple’s 13-inch Retina display, which is a little small but uses Apple’s True Tone color technology, which is ideal for graphic design. It also provides great color balance for other tasks, like animation.

The 8GB of RAM that comes with the new MacBook is not ideal, but considering how optimized applications for MacBooks are, it shouldn’t be too bad.

The MacBook Pro M1 is a significant change from Apple’s last MacBook Pro. The upgraded CPU, GPU, and keyboard make this laptop a great value.

And speaking of the keyboard, the MacBook Pro 16 has an RGB slider at the top to perform color adjustments on the fly.

This laptop was purpose-built for creative professionals, and Apple has really outdone itself. As an added bonus, the speakers are loud and powerful.

FAQ

How much RAM do I need for graphic design?

A minimum of 8GBs, but preferably at least 16GBs. 8GB is about the absolute minimum you can get away with these days; you will run into major slowdowns and problems if you try to go with anything lower.

But even with 8GB, you can expect some slowdowns from time to time if you have a lot of applications running, so 16GB is quickly turning into the minimum these days.

What type of computers do graphic designers typically use?

Generally, most professional graphic designers use desktop computers for their work, but I’ve met people that just as easily work a little on their laptop and then switch to their computer and wise versa, or simply just continue working on their laptop.

I’ve met graphic designers that work entirely through an iPad even. They work in whatever way they’re comfortable and knowledgable with.

It’s one of the benefits of work like graphic design, you’re not super constricted to your hardware compared to say, 3D modeling or whatnot.

Do you need a graphics card for graphic design?

Yes, but you don’t necessarily need a discrete graphics card for graphics design.

Most graphics design work isn’t very computer-resource intensive, so you’re fine for the most part with a newer integrated GPU (iGPU) or even a somewhat older discrete graphics card unless you’re doing very heavy graphic design work.

Do graphic designers use PCs or Macs?

Why not both? They both have their uses, and graphic designers use both. It’s simply a matter of preference. Have a piece of software that’s available in a Mac but not on PC?

Use a Mac. Hate Macs with a passion? Use PC. It really doesn’t matter what you use. So use whichever one you feel the most comfortable with.

That’s about it from our side. What Laptop for Graphic Design are you thinking of buying?