Laptop advice for UF

Hi All
I'm looking at upgrading my laptop at some point & wondered if any of you have any thoughts on the best technical specs to go for, to get the best performance for UF. My laptop is OK but trying to work on other fractals whilst rendering really slows things down & doing anything else whilst rendering is almost impossible unless I'm happy for the render times to go through the roof which obviously isn't ideal.
Any advice would be welcome.
Ta very much.
Anne

Hi Anne,

I don't profess to be terribly knowledgeable about this area, and especially laptops, but as nobody else has answered...

I think you probably need to aim for the most powerful processor you can afford as this will crunch through fractal calculations faster. Multiple cores will help too as will "Hyper-Threading" as UF is able to distribute the work among the cores and in a series of "threads" (potentially doubling up on the number of cores Windows thinks you have)... this is from the Help file under Calculation details:

If you have a processor with Hyper-Threading, Ultra Fractal will recognize this and split up its calculations accordingly. In most cases, this will result in a significant speed improvement. Otherwise, you can force Ultra Fractal to use just one processor.

RAM is probably less of an issue but having plenty is always a good thing and can improve general performance and multi-tasking so get as much as you can afford. You may not have much choice in this area with a laptop, though.

I believe it is a fact of life that multitasking when rendering is nearly always an issue in some circumstances regardless of machine spec. Just recently I have been using UF6 to zoom into some deep areas of the Mandelbrot set. Rendering such areas takes many hours and has caused significant slowdowns, despite my having a reasonably high spec PC*. Normally I enjoy quite speedy renders for most of my work which, though heavily multi-layered are relatively "shallow" and thus quicker to compute than these recent deep zooms. I also don't often do very large image renders - another factor determining the impact of rendering, of course.

So look carefully at laptop specs. I imagine some will be presented as being optimized for certain popular uses - perhaps lots of hard drive space for storing videos or a beefy graphics card for gamers. These are not necessarily the best for your purposes. Machines aimed at graphic design or video encoding work may be more suited. Whatever they call it I think your prime focus should be on the processor.

Just my opinion, of course. I don't know if anybody else has any other recommendations.

*My PC has a Intel i7 3.60GHz CPU (6 cores) and 16 GB of RAM.

An alternative to buying a new laptop could be to buy a desktop PC and use UF's network-calculations feature to perform the rendering there. I must admit that I don't have recent experience with this, and it may be that you cannot cleanly configure the system to use the remote (desktop) machine for background rendering and your laptop for interactive purposes. But if its behaviour fits your needs and your laptop is usually online, having the heavy lifting done by a desktop PC at home should be cheaper and also easier on your laptop's battery.

I would recommend something with a Core i7 processor. This has four cores with hyperthreading, so 8 logical cores and is about as fast as you can get.
Personally I really like the Apple MacBook Pro 15", but if you're a Windows user you might want to consider something else. I've not tried it myself yet but I would consider a Surface Pro from Microsoft in this case.

Thanks Chris, that's a big help. Being new to UF I wasn't sure what the main needs were. I'm not a complete novice with computers but must admit multiple cores & hyper threading are beyond me.
At least now I can make a list of essential needs.

Thanks Urs, I did think about a desktop PC but as I like to work whilst away from home as well, a laptop is a lot more convenient.

Thanks Frederik, that's brilliant. I am more familiar with Windows based machines so maybe need to look at the Surface Pro.

Just to clarify: I was not suggesting to sit at that desktop PC, but to connect the two so that while you are working on the laptop, away from home, UF could automatically send part of the computations to be done on that home PC.

Of course, only few programs offer that functionality, and if you relevantly run others beside UF, then getting a faster laptop is the only alternative that would help well with them.

Thanks Urs being new to UF I wasn't aware that could be done. It may be something I could look into once I understand a little more how to do it & if it would work for me.

Just some further info about this procedure. You will need the Extended version of UF to use Network calculations.

As I understand it, doing this over the Internet while away would not be very efficient. It's better accomplished at home on your LAN.

More details in the Help file here: Network Calculations
and useful tips about usage here: Tips