What hardware is important with Adobe Illustrator?

[garritynet]

I don't use it but a friend of mine is looking for a laptop to run it from. The problem is that neither of us know what matters hardware wise with Illustrator. Any input with would be appreciated.

Would an I5 based laptop with 4gig ram be a good bet?

 

[MalVeauX]

I don't use it but a friend of mine is looking for a laptop to run it from. The problem is that neither of us know what matters hardware wise with Illustrator. Any input with would be appreciated.

Would an I5 based laptop with 4gig ram be a good bet?

Heya,

I don't know too many people, if any, that only use Illustrator. They end up having several things going at once. I say that because I'm pointing you towards a Quad which helps with that. Using productivity software like that, your big players are CPU, RAM (*) and HDD speed. For a CPU, a good quad is fine... the i5 is great for this. RAM is something you want a ton of. 4G is fine. You could go higher. It's up to your needs. HDD speed is important when dealing with lots of files and when opening and saving several at a time. A lot of people have separate drives where they save their scratch material to keep it separate from the OS. Also, moving your page file from the OS drive to a separate drive as well.

i5 and 4G of ram is great for a start. For a laptop that's going to be expensive for what would normally be like a $500~600 desktop build, more of course with extra drives and double the RAM, etc. Personally I wouldn't use a laptop for it. But if that's what you need, that's what you need.

Very best, 🙂

 

[elconejito]

Illustrator is a weird beast. Most of the time I have no troubles with it (on my desktop and the toshiba laptop in my sig), everything runs smooth. But every now and again, I'll get a file that just brings my computer to it's knees. Files that have tons of complex paths, points, masks, and through in some pixel effects for good measure and the whole thing just bogs down on my desktop, and is pretty much unusable on my laptop.

A laptop should be fine as long as you're not doing hugely complex designs. But you know that going in that you trade portability for performance with laptops.

As far as what to look for, CPU comes first. The more cores and the faster they are the better. RAM comes second. I wouldn't worry about the hard drive and scratch disks. Firstly, I can't recall ever using an illustrator file that filled up my RAM. Secondly, you only have one drive anyway 🙂

The way Illustrator works is it uses mathematical formulas to draw all the lines, shapes, colors, etc on the screen. So the more lines and shapes on screen, the more math you have to do to draw the screen. The calcs for the drawings dont take up much room. So sometimes you'll see a really small 500k file with TONS of stuff inside. That's why the CPU is most important. A slow CPU will bog you down in illustrator ALL the time. Low RAM will only bog you down some of the time.

For solid all-around performance yeah an i5 based would be a good bet to keep the cost reasonable and get good performance for most if not all the illustrator work. If you know for SURE that they will be doing REALLY demanding stuff, then you're going to have to look up the i7 based laptops. I think they only have them in the larger 17" models, I can't recall seeing any 14-15" i7 laptops but you'd have to check... just in case the physical size of the laptop is important.

Get at least 4GB of RAM. Don't even look at anything less than that. You can buy a laptop that comes with 4GB and then upgrade it after you buy it. Buying the RAM separately is usually way cheaper and just as effective. So make sure to see what the max RAM it will hold. Probably 8GB is the max on most of these machines.