Like other professionals, computer programmers also need good devices to support their daily tasks. Programmers should get a perfect setup for their daily requirements. However, not all programmers are the same. Programmers who do front-end development will need laptops that can do graphics editing. For back-end developers, it could be somewhat complicated for them. They need computers that excel in multitasking. They will need to run programming software, local server engine and browser to test results. Regardless of who they are developers need laptops that provide plenty of resources. So, you need to make sure that your laptop is really up to the task. For 3D game development, programmers will need a powerful desktop PC, but in some cases, they need to be mobile. So, they should have high-performance laptop that can render visual elements in real time.
In fact, it’s a good idea for game developers to use gaming laptops for their work. These devices are equipped with strong processor and graphics card, as well as ample of RAM. For mobile app developers, they will need to constantly run simulation of the app inside a mobile operating system. This will require plenty of system resources, because you will run a mobile operating system on top of your laptop’s primary operating system.
- Processor: Processor is the primary component of your laptop and it’s where most of the computing tasks are done. Today, processor performance is no longer determined by frequency speed, number of cores and number of threads. A 2.5GHz processor today could be faster than a 3.5GHz processor released years before. It’s better to check benchmarking performance of these processors and find the fastest model within your price range. A Core i5 quad-core processor is enough for most development tasks, but it’s better to get a Core i7 or Core i9.
- Graphics card: Graphics card is the secondary processing unit of your laptop and it focuses on handling graphics rendering tasks. If you are doing plenty of graphics-related tasks, such as 3D modelling and rendering, then it’s a good idea to choose gaming laptops. Their graphics cards should help in the rendering process and testing game scenes will also be quite smooth. There are laptops that are aimed for graphics editing, but they can be prohibitively expensive for most developers. Also, these graphics cards don’t perform too well for testing game scenes.
- RAM: RAM connects processor with the hard drive. Data that are about to be processed will be transferred to RAM, so they can be brought to the processor faster. Commonly accessed data will remain in RAM, but if you have too little RAM, some of the data will be obtained directly from hard drive, which will reduce performance. 8GB of RAM is adequate for casual development tasks, but if you multitask a lot, 16GB of RAM is recommended.
- SSD: Instead of getting a laptop with hard drives, it’s a good idea to choose a laptop with at least 320GB of SSD. You will multitask much faster and loading programming components will be very swift.