Laptop power and Chessbase

I am steeling myself to shell out for a new laptop (has to be a laptop rather than a desktop) to replace my 10 year old current one.

One of my priorities is Chessbase running as speedily as possible on it. Anyone gone through the same thing and want to share any tips/info particular models they shortlisted? Finance-wise £2000 is the limit, but less would be better. I want to avoid refurbed machines as had a bad experience with one in the past and it must be Windows so as to run software I use for work.

Any thoughts gratefully received about particular models, but if you just fancy chatting about Chessabe and computing power etc that be fine by me.

Any modern Windows 10 laptop will run ChessBase 15 just fine, the DB searches will go quickly as long as you check the create search booster option for each database. If you use a very large database (like MegaBase) and add games to it, there's no way around having to get a cup of tea or whatever while the new games are integrated, but that's a weekly (at most) occurrence and completely up to you.

In terms of using it for analysis, again any modern laptop will have sufficient computing power for good engine results. Everything these days is multi-core and easily supports running an engine and doing other things at the same time, as long as you don't use all of your virtual CPUs on it.

Agree with ChessAdmin's recommendations. Only add is to go solid state memory.

I built my laptop years ago, an Intel Core i7 with solid state primary drive and a second internal hard drive. It's fast, no waiting for the system to boot or programs to load.

Modern engines are so strong that I set them to run on a single core since I am only checking for mistakes and alternative moves. Occasionally I will turn on Chess Aquarium and run multiple engines, and having a quad core is helpful in that situation. ChessBase now has an online feature that gives different engine evaluations so running Aquarium is redundant unless you need some industrial strength analysis.

I used MegaBase as an initial starting point, but I create smaller working databases to keep things meaningful and fast. Also, I created a smaller "good games" database using the CB Filters and set that as my reference data base to improve performance.

I stopped subscribing for updates, now I download games from Chess Tempo when necessary for recent games, it's less complete and weeks behind ChessBase, but it saves a few bucks and meets my needs.

Thanks for the responses - I'm not sure about every modern laptop being able to run it fine though. Gotta have a bit of power in there looking at the recommended requirements.

At present I am still looking. I quite like the HP Zbook and the Lenovo P53 (IIRC), but also looking at the Dell Precision and some others.

Lotta money to spend so wanna get it right!

I am in the camp that it doesn't matter what the specs are, it will run chessbase just fine.

However, RAM and CPU cores do play a big part, so an i7 with 16GB RAM would be a minimum, preferably 32. And for that sort of money, you should have a decent SSD.

Thank, BQ - this was my thinking also. 32gb RAM and strong i7 (or plus) with SSD and things should not only be whizzy, but also future-proofed for another 10 years (he says hopefully).

So what was the purchase?