Best Laptop for Graphic Design in 2023 – Review & Buying Guide

Graphic design has become an integrated part of many business processes, from marketing and sales to internal documentation and publishing. Desktops are still the tool of choice for professional graphic designers. In addition, although laptops have become the tool of choice for professionals who are on the move, it’s important to consider your needs and preferences. You should select a laptop that provides the comfort and functionality you require.

Top Best Laptop for Graphic Design in 2023

After thoroughly reviewing all available laptops, we present the best graphic design laptop for designers the Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Black Edition. This laptop is designed for the graphic design profession. It comes with powerful hardware, coupled with a brilliant display.

Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Black Edition

Best Overall

The Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Black Edition has been dubbed as the ‘beast’ by Acer for its powerful hardware. It has a 17.3-inch screen which makes it one of the largest in the business. The laptop has a 4th Generation Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor and is equipped with 4GB of RAM. This gives the laptop enough processing power to allow you to take advantage of its features and also allows for a great user experience.

If you are wondering: ‘Why is a laptop with a 4th generation processor listed as the best?’ The reason for this is the powerful performance it offers coupled with a gorgeous 2.3-inch Full-HD (1920×screen as well as the formidable NVIDIA GTX 960M GPU.

Add to this 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB storage space, and 256GB flash storage – you get a perfect ‘beast’ to meet your graphic designing needs. This card is more than capable of handling all advanced 3D designing tasks and the 16 GB of RAM ensures that you never run short of memory even if you are used to opening multiple programs and windows at the same time.

Apple MacBook Pro 15.4″

Runner Up

Apple’s iPhone is the flagship product for their mobile device business and is a popular choice among a wide variety of professions, including graphic designing. One of the major advantages of using a MacBook is the ability to use Mac OSX. It includes using Apple’s own designing tools, and it’s also home to some amazing apps that are exclusive to the Mac such as Sketch 3 and Affinity Designer.

The hardware it offers is more powerful than the Mac OS – a 2.5GHz Core i7 processor and an AMD R9M370X graphics chip run at its core.

16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of flash storage allow for quick and smooth operation. It comes with a gorgeous Retina (2880×1800. display and is perfect for graphic design. There are two reasons it ranks lower than the Acer V17 Nitro. First, the comparatively smaller screen, and second, the vastly different price difference.

The new Asus ZenBook Pro UX390UA is a gorgeous laptop that manages to deliver outstanding performance with the added benefit of a fantastic display. You can’t go wrong buying this laptop. With the sleek casing that houses a 6th Gen Core i7-6700HQ 2.6GHz processor and an NVIDIA GTX 960M GPU, this is a worthy contender for not only the best graphic design laptop but one of the most powerful and portable.

It’s enhanced by an amazing 4k 15.6-inch display that is capable of a whopping 3840×2160 resolution, which means you’ll be able to view any graphics and design work in incredible detail. There’s no letdown here: the 512 GB SSD is the fastest of any laptop we have reviewed, with fast read and write speeds, and is definitely worth the investment.

I was looking for a new laptop with lots of memory to avoid frequent shutdowns due to memory issues. This laptop provides 16 GB of RAM so I don’t have to worry about running out of memory and needing to close programs down.

ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW

Budget Pick

The new ASUS ZenBook is a high-end notebook that is both portable and designed well. It manages to provide portability without sacrificing performance. It’s even quite comparable to the MacBook in terms of design and appearance. It’s hard to beat the performance of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar. The slim, portable design and powerful processor make this the best of both worlds for anyone who needs a computer for work, school, or plays.

The new iMac comes with an amazing 4K display that is capable of 3840×2160 resolution, allowing you to work on graphic design at full-screen without any lag or jitter. This laptop has a good processor, so I don’t see why anyone would want to buy a MacBook Air. However, there are several good reasons why it is not suitable for school, business, and entertainment applications.

This laptop provides enough memory to run all of my programs, ensuring that I won’t have any problems with lag or slowdown.

Microsoft Surface Book

Best Display

Apple’s flagship offering is listed at the far end of this list mostly due to the price factor and the relatively small screen. The Surface Book can edge out a few laptop options and is nowhere near as powerful as an ASUS ZenBook or the MacBook Pro 15.

The laptop might not prove to be ideal for graphic designers. A 13.5-inch screen may prove to be too small for them to work comfortably. The image quality is excellent as the screen is a 4K display at 2000 x 1080p. It is also a very bright screen so this will be a great screen for movie watching.

It features a custom-built Intel processor and NVIDIA GeForce graphics, which give it strong performance for all graphic-designing programs. The new MacBook Pro is similar to Apple’s MacBook, but unlike its smaller sibling, it comes with a lot more power and functionality.

Lenovo Z70

Great Graphics

The Lenovo Z70 is Lenovo’s underperforming version of the Acer V17 Nitro. In terms of hardware, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a powerhouse. With its 15.6-inch HD display and powerful Intel Core i5 processor, it is capable of performing multiple tasks including graphic designing.

The Full HD screen gives you the ability to edit small details easily. It’s large enough to check out your editing progress with ease. 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive, even though a slow 5400rpm hard drive. These specifications make sure that you are covered when it comes to storage and memory.

It underperforms compared to every single laptop listed above. It’s significantly cheaper than any of the other laptops listed here too. Therefore, if you are looking for a computer for graphic design purposes and are on a budget, this is the computer you should be looking to purchase.

How we chose the best laptop for graphic design

We spent several hours of painstaking research that resulted in a list of features that we think are absolutely essential for a laptop to be considered the best for graphic designing tasks. When choosing the Acer Aspire V17 as the best laptop for graphic design, we focused on these features:

  • CPU
  • Display
  • RAM
  • GPU
  • Storage Space

There are various factors that will impact your portability, so it is not included in the rankings. We will go over the top 5 laptops available in the market that are the best performers when it comes to graphic designing.

The most important consideration when choosing the best laptop for graphic design

Even though all the features and hardware in a laptop are important, one of the features usually stands out when looking for a laptop to perform a specific task. Graphic designers agree that a powerful CPU is essential to laptops.

The most common graphic designing software is Illustrator and Corel Draw. They tend to be very memory intensive so they don’t work well on low-end devices like tablets. Since the speed of the graphic designing and production process is largely dependent on the performance of the computer’s CPU, a strong CPU is an absolute must-have.

Whether you have a 3D graphics program that requires lots of computing power, or you use your laptop for more mundane tasks, you’ll want to consider how much power each of your components takes up. In a laptop, you need to balance both the CPU and the GPU.

Other considerations when choosing the best laptop for graphic design

Display

You really can’t go wrong with a good screen. All the processing power in the world cannot provide great detail unless it has a great display that can be used to output your designs and graphics. There are different types of screens for different purposes – from 11-inches to 15-inches, and even larger. It’s important to choose the right screen for your work, but the sweet spot is the 15-inch segment of laptops. Large high-resolution displays help you to create detailed graphics and graphics with high resolution.

RAM

Designing graphics for the web is a memory-intensive process, as the various shapes and textures that are added to your design grow in size as the raw file is completely on the other hand, drawing large designs also tends to take up a lot of RAMS in your system. Adobe Illustrator has a recommended 8 GB memory requirement listed on the official Adobe website.

If you plan to juggle several different tasks while you design your graphics, then it’s recommended that you choose a laptop that offers at least 8 GB of RAM Although 8 GB should cover most tasks if you’re going to multitask, it’s important to get a laptop with at least 16 GB RAM.

GPU

This laptop comes with a powerful GPU which is designed to help you create high-quality images and designs while preventing any annoying lag or freezing issues that would slow down or prevent you from being productive. Basic onboard GPUs are good for basic graphic design The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Illustration of the effect of nanocoating in the enhancement of the mechanical and tribological performance of orthopedic implants. Creating complex designs can be accomplished using only a powerful GPU. Reducing render times can be accomplished with only a powerful CPU.

If you want a laptop with a discrete graphics card, but you’re concerned about battery life, I don’t recommend any laptop over the Acer Aspire E 15, as it’s equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GT 720M.

Storage Space

When you’re working with high-resolution graphics, you often need to load them to a local system before you can view them. This is problematic, because if your computer’s hard disk has a low capacity, you could be left with no free space for data. It is highly recommended to purchase laptops that have at least 1 TB of hard drive storage, and should include a flash drive for an added convenience feature.

Conclusion

It was our extensive and thorough research that led us to the Acer V17 Nitro as the best laptop for graphics design. The combination of a big screen, good hardware, and excellent performance is too good to pass up. That being said, the laptop’s memory is not as limited as it appears at first glance. It does come with 1 TB of storage, which will give you ample space for the files you need. If you liked this article, find out what kind of laptop has the latest NVIDIA GPUs for gaming.

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