ArtU is pleased to be able to partner with Apple and Dell to provide students with recommended laptop configurations at a discount to help ensure a successful start to the school year.
Below you will find Apple Macbook and Dell/Alienware laptop configurations broken out by different programs. These are intended to serve as recommendations on specs that are appropriate to run the various applications that are used by each area of study.
Please make sure to review the instructions for each program before finding the area of study that applies to you for your specific recommendation.
Apple
Apple’s program is simple. Clicking one of the links below will take you to Apple’s education site. Once there, please make sure to select the appropriate specs as listed below. Apple only allows links to the “base” specification of a certain MacBook, and you may need to select options for more memory, or hard drive space, etc. to match what is being recommended.
Dell/Alienware’s program works a little differently. The first step is to go to www.Dell.com/MPP . Once there, click on the button marked “Student” and enter your art.edu email address. You will receive an email to that address with a discount code to apply at check out. Once you have the discount code, use the links below to go directly to the recommended devices with their configurations already set.
Thanks to the rLAB students can remotely connect to our powerful lab workstations (Dell Precision Towers with Nvidia RTX A4500 GPU, Intel Xeon 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM packed with all the professional animation VFX software you’ll need) as well as our massive render farm which allows each student to render on 20 workstations at once. All this is available to students 24/7 from the comfort of home, provided that you have broadband high-speed internet.
To use this remote connection, a simple laptop is perfectly fine as far as speed and performance goes. However, it can feel crowded working on a smaller screen, which is why a larger monitor (27-inch and up) is also recommended. You will also need a 3-button mouse for 3D Software.
The laptop and monitor below serve as an example of what kind of device would suffice. Those listed are Windows OS, but MacOS will work great too.
Additionally, a tablet is important for any digital painting. You will likely not need this for your first semester classes, but may as you get into more advanced classes. The tablet below has been tested to be compatible with the rLAB.
