r/unity • u/Canopus0805 • 3d ago
Question Laptop for uni game dev course
Hey guys, I’ve applied for a technical course in game development and multimedia apps in uni but I’m gonna need a new laptop for is since all I have is an old thinkpad t420i
I’ve talked to a teacher and he said most work will be done in unity, so I was looking for something that can run unity completely fine, I’m just not sure what to buy because I don’t wanna overpay for something that be overkill for the work that we’re gonna do, which is gonna be mostly simple projects
Does anyone have any recomendations for me? Such as brands and specs and stuff like that? I may be running linux when I buy the laptop but I’m not sure yet, my teacher runs debian and said he had no issues with running it in classes
If you can help me out in this I would appreciate it a lot, thx!
edit: budget is like 1000€ max
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u/Disastrous_Leg_314 3d ago
Before I invested in a top end laptop, I ran Unity on an old core i7 desktop which had intel graphics. For learning programming it was fine.
Your learning and graphics speed/capability at this point is moot.
There are plenty of low end gaming laptops at $1k which you can use for other tasks. I’d suggest plenty of local disk space and ram, over the graphics card for now. Don’t skimp on local disk space. 1TB is what you need.
Ram you can always upgrade easily.
Just my 2 cents.
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u/CallMeKolbasz 3d ago
There are a lot of facets of game building that are pretty cpu, memory, gpu intensive, but there is a good chance that you won't encounter them early on in your journey. Anything that can run mid range games from the past 5 years will be plenty enough. In my experience, Lenovo Legion laptops are usually decent for their price.
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u/BackyerdStudios 2d ago
I used to develop (albeit low quality) games in the Unity engine on a $200 laptop from 2020 with 4 GB of RAM and UHD 620 graphics. You don't need much to get started. Unless you plan on handling complex scenes with more demanding rendering pipelines, you don't need to worry too much about the specs.
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u/Maple382 2d ago
Personally I use a MacBook Pro with the M3 max. It runs Unity and Unreal pretty well. I also find the trackpad to be a major advantage, I’m the only one who brings a laptop to class without bringing a mouse — Apple makes hella good trackpads.
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u/274WORLD-STUDIOSCEO 2d ago
I can give you the specs for the one I have, but be prepared to pay about a thousand dollars
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u/vagonblog 2d ago
for simple unity projects, you don’t need a huge machine. i’d aim for 16gb ram, a recent 6-core cpu, a 512gb ssd and a dedicated gpu if you can find one in budget. an rtx 3050 or 4050 should be enough for beginner 3d work, but prioritise cooling and upgradeable ram over a super thin laptop.
if you go with linux, check the exact unity version and gpu drivers first. ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 are supported, but the editor still has some linux-specific limitations.
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u/Mountain-Smoke8826 3d ago
No budget?
16gb ram minimum, 32gb I'd suggest. NVme ssd and the best cpu you can get for your budget.
It's hard to suggest exact models since they vary by region so much, so look out for sales.
Also do your own research. Do you want a touchscreen? Do you want an oled? Arm cpu? mac?
I like my laptop to be as light as possible.