Specced mainly for games, the Gigabyte G6X is also good for other rendering work. This laptop offers some promising performance but will work best with an external screen.There are laptops designed for creatives, and there are laptops built for gamers, and they tend to be very similar.
Take a laptop such as the Gigabyte G6X in its 2024 incarnation. It comes with an Intel i7 CPU - not one of the very latest, but a respectable 13th-gen model - plus 32GB of RAM and a GPU from Nvidia’s GeForce 4000 series. That’s a solid base for Lightroom and InDesign as well as playing the latest games, and with a full-size HDMI 2.1 port for an external monitor, plus 10Gbps USB for connecting to external storage, the G6X could be exactly what you need.Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, 1x USB 3.
The keyboard on our review model has a small issue, in that the top left-hand corner, where the QWAS keys are, is loose and lifts up. The laptop was sent to us across the Atlantic, so there's a chance it was treated unkindly along the way and that this has led to the fault, but it’s a little worrying when you can see the keyboard separate from its base as you type. We checked with a reviewer from another site, and were told they’d had no similar issues.
Battery life is also not the G6X’s strong suit. In our test, which keeps the screen on and puts the laptop through a looping series of office tasks until it drops, the machine gave up after less than three hours. This is likely to become an even briefer sliver of life if you’re pushing its processors hard, such as with gaming or anything to do with rendering.
A 2-in-1 laptop with a glorious OLED screen but no Nvidia chip, the Spectre relies on integrated graphics but is more expensive than Gigabyte’s G6X.Specced mainly for games, the Gigabyte G6X is also good for other rendering work. This laptop offers some promising performance but will work best with an external screen.Ian Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years, starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5.