A new laptop for mainly 3d design work, but maybe gaming?

[Myatyy]

Hey guys,

New to the forums, and I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for by searching. I am fairly new to the PC world and have a few potentially simple questions. If I were to look at gaming laptops, would they normally be the best for design work? Mainly I am looking at an MSI Stealth Pro that has these specs:
Intel Core i7-4710HQ (2.5GHz, 6MB Cache)
12GB DDR3L 1600 MHz
1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive, 128GB mSATA Solid-State Drive
17.3-inch Full HD eDP Anti-glare Screen; NVIDIA Geforce GTX970M with 3GB GDDR5 VRAM
Windows 8.1

I have done a bit of research and found that this thing has poor battery life and gets pretty toasty; however I am prepared to deal with this as long as it keeps up. I need something I can lug back and forth to work and use at home for different hobbies. I am under the assumption that basically if it is good for gaming it will be decent for rendering 3d images in my design software, being mostly blender/photoshop/Autocad123. Is there any aspect of laptop hardware that I may be overlooking? Thanks a bunch for the help. Also, I understand that this may be a bit overboard judging by the price, but I would like to have the flexibility of getting into complex video editing and potentially a bit of gaming as well.


On a side note, I recently came upon an interesting concept. Is it at all reasonable to try and maintain an older laptop with decent hardware and use its basics on the go, and have an external video card of my choice and home and office with an added monitor? Or will I need more than just GPU power for my design work? Thanks

 

[Blackbadger]

The Laptop you describe will perform well for the use's you suggest.

I do work in a similar field.

Personally use a lower spec macbook pro with parallels installed, mainly due to it's fantastic high res screen, and robust build. There are good more powerfull pc alternatives available now (not a few years back) such as what you have suggested. For most design work, office use and hobby tasks it's a pleasure to use.

However in addition I do use remote access tools to a PC workstation to process the heavy calculations. - much of my work would render the laptop useless whilst rendering etc for hours/days/weeks on end, as the laptop hardware spec is not even close to good enough. You will need a good stable internet connection at both ends and the workflow of maintaining/transferring duplicate folders across systems is a added burden, however the end result is more productivity, as your development system is always free to work on.

Good CPU/GPU performance requires lots of power there is no getting away from that, whilst laptops can obtain a fair balance, there are often drawbacks with silly fan noise and thermal throttling if they are maxed out for periods of time, and can never match a desktop counterpart in top end performance.

My advice is actually spend a bit more time figuring out what you expect your system to be doing at certain times, and figure out if the restrictions are acceptable.