I am getting a new laptop in a few hours, and I have to decide between some models. One of them has something called optane memory, which after reading a bit about it seem to be kind of pointless and I am not sure if I will be in need of it for rendering and architectural drawing, but I’d like to know if any of you have it and how it affects wow.
If I don’t pick that model I will just go with a cheaper model and additionally buy a SSD.
It appears to just be a form of M.2, or NVME drive.
Basically, it’s an SSD that plugs into your PCI slot as opposed to using SATA, and as a result it is very, very, much faster than any other drive you can get.
I put one (A Western Digital, not an Intel) into my desktop this past weekend. I basically go from computer off to loaded in and moving around in Dalaran in about 30 - 45 seconds.
Optane appears to be just what Intel has decided to call their stuff.
SSDs in general are always a good choice. Most laptops that you get nowadays usually have SSDs anyway so really you should be looking at other specs based around what you plan on doing. I mean you can still find laptops with regular HDDs but it’s becoming less and less common.
I noticed most of them have a 128 GB SSD installed, which is not enough to install all of the crap I am going to use. If I pick the one I need (500 GB) it will go way out of my budged reach. That is why I want to go with an external SSD for now.
That is pretty impressive, and I am sure it might be useful for rendering stuff faster. I just consulted one of my co-workers about rendering speed because my laptop is so old I don’t how to compare all this stuff, according to her optane is not that really necessary but a SSD is a must if I want to get things done faster, but your post makes me want to buy the one with optane for the sake of loading things faster.
The smaller 128GB Drives are intended to be used as boot drives, where you load the OS and one, maybe two critical/important programs and everything else goes on another drive.
If your objective is a system that is going to be doing a lot of rendering or video editing a laptop is not going to be an ideal system.
They have a tendency to run hot, are difficult if not impossible to upgrade reasonable in order to keep up with new technologies, and because of the heat will have a limited lifespan.
For a time I was eye’n up those System76 laptops. Right now their top end laptop decked out in rtx2080 8gb video, 64gb ram, and 8TB of SSDs runs about $6K. Could most likely get a cheaper version of the same thing somewhere but Linux laptops always fascinated me.
Yeah, I am well aware of the limitations, I will try to get a desktop next year.
The thing is that I have to move from my house to the university to my work with said laptop several times a month, the rendering part is something I will have to do like once or twice every year, but it has to be done fast as it is the last phase of the project.
Ah, okay. That should be fine, then. 
I just get worried sometimes about people who try to get a laptop and use it for hardcore gaming or heavy duty video editing… and it’s just like… Dude, you’re going to spend so much more for the laptop capable of doing that and burn it out so much faster.
For what you describe, though, you can probably get away with just using a SATA SSD as your large-scale storage drive. Depends a lot on your budget, and sadly I’m not where I can go poking around the store pages to dig into the other options right now.
NVME(Optane) drives are really awesome, but consider it a luxury and not a necessity.