Hey Guys,
I’ve been thinking about getting a new laptop to replace my old XPS 15 from early 2023, and I am looking for a device with premium build quality that is also reliable. I’m going to be starting an Computer Systems Engineering PhD soon and I also have side projects with regards to animation work in Blender and Web Dev. Battery life is also a point of concern as I like to move around- I would be doing GPU-intensive tasks while plugged in but doing things like writing notes and papers I would like to have at least 6-7 hours of productivity on battery.
My concern with battery is that my XPS started out with okay-ish battery life, but after the 2 year mark it significantly degraded to less than half capacity and now only holds 1 hour of charge. In addition, my XPS thermal throttles pretty badly on heavy loads to the point where I need to limit the CPU and GPU’s wattage, and 16 GB of memory + the 6 GB from the 4050 are often insufficient for larger Blender projects as rendering often crashes from having too little RAM and VRAM to load everything in the scene. The 6GB VRAM is also too little to run local LMs and image models.
I’m looking for something able to do fast renders and modeling in Blender, and have the capability to run local image and language AI models. I would also be doing web development alongside basic productivity like writing documents and papers.
I’m not a big gamer so that wouldn’t be a point of consideration to me.
I narrowed my choices down to either the 14/16in Macbook Pro with the 18/20 M5 Pro, the 2025 ASUS Zephyrus G14/G16 with 5070 Ti, or the ASUS ProArt P16 with the 5070. Although the M5 Max or the 2026 Zephyrus line look great they are definitely outside of my budget range, which would be about $2.5k max.
From what I understand the Macbook Pro with M5 Pro has had good improvements in RT performance for Blender renders, plus really good battery life and build quality. The premium design + excellent battery life is what draws me most to it. The main points of concern are the fact that Apple is reportedly sunsetting Rosetta 2 at some point next year which makes me uncomfortable for backwards compatibility. Also, looking at OpenData, the 5070 Ti still outperforms the M5 Pro for Blender workloads, plus I know from experience that CUDA is still industry standard for AI packages and frameworks. The other concern is RAM, I know Macs have unified memory but it would be still only 24 GB and my budget would not allow me to go for 48 GB.
In terms of the two ASUS products, I would feel a bit more at home with Windows and with Nvidia/CUDA, I know for a fact that my workflow would translate well since it’s the same as my XPS (x86 Windows with Nvidia GPU). My point of concern is build quality and battery life- do you know if the Zephyrus and ProArt are reliable laptop lineups, and if the build quality is around the level of the Mac? And in terms of battery life, would they be able to meet my threshold of around 7 hours of light use?
On a side note, what are the main differences between the Zephyrus and ProArt line? I noticed the Zephyrus is often branded as a gaming laptop whereas the ProArt is branded as a creator line, but I noticed the chassis and internal components seem very similar. Is there any compromise to using the Zephyrus as a mobile workstation rather than a gaming device?
Apologies for the long post, but I just wanted to make sure I was as thorough as possible with all my needs and questions! I suppose one last thing would be what the best time to buy would be, as I would probably be looking to get something by mid-Summer at the latest. I would wait for sales during the time, but I’m concerned if the current RAM shortage may cause prices to rise instead.
Thank you!