The most important features content creators should look for when choosing a laptop

Content creation workloads are some of the most demanding you can put a laptop through, and require hardware that's up to the task.

You've got to have enough internal grunt to make sure rendering and editing don't take an age, plus a good quality screen that makes your project look as it should, and enough battery for when you're away from the mains.

It can be quite difficult to know which features to look for in a laptop if you're a content creator, but fear not – for TechRadar's Content Creator Week, I'm here to give you the lowdown on what you need in a laptop that's up to the task of content creation workloads.

1. Lots of ports

A good number of ports is very important to look for, particularly multiple fast USB-C ones. These are handy for connecting to an external display that can supply power to your laptop, plus for plugging in speedy external storage. Also having one USB-A for legacy media types may be handy when it comes to accessing files on older hard drives or similar.

To go with this, look for an SD card reader, be it full-size or for microSD. This means you can ingest video footage directly from your camera, for use in your preferred editing software, rather than needing to hook up a clunky adapter that gives you access to a card slot.

You might also want to look at a thicker, gaming-style laptop with an ethernet port for wired networking. If you're uploading a video to social media or to YouTube (a very network-intensive practice) having as stable and reliable a Wi-Fi connection as possible is vital.

We've got to the point where wireless networking is fast enough, but a wired connection just keeps things reliable. This one isn't a must-have, but more of a nice-to-have if you can find a laptop with it.

2. A dazzling and detailed screen

A sublime screen is a must for content creation. Nowadays laptops up and down the price ladder are going for OLED screens, which dazzle with their deep blacks, immense dynamic range and virtually perfect colour accuracy in a lot of cases.

Some laptop screens can have solid HDR support, which is useful if you're working on an HDR project. Make sure to look out for high coverage of more specialist colour gamuts such as DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB if you're handling video or photo tasks.

Moreover, you want a resolution that's going to be able to handle what you throw at it. If you're working on hefty 4K footage, you'll want a laptop that can display that content as true to life as possible; a 1920x1080 or 2560x1600 screen isn't necessarily going to cut it.

This isn't necessarily vital for a content creation laptop, but having a high refresh rate screen can help from a quality of life perspective. It helps to make on-screen motion that little bit smoother and more responsive with a 120Hz or 240Hz screen, which becomes very hard to live without once you give it a try.

3. Enough internal horsepower

Perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle is making sure your laptop has got enough power to deal with whatever you're undertaking.

At the very least, it's worth having a processor that's fast, with lots of cores and threads, and that's strong in multi-threaded workloads. Granted, single-core speeds are important for general navigation and lighter loads, but the intensive tasks, such as photo and video editing requires good multi-core performance so they don't feel choppy or slow.

To go with this, making sure the graphical component is up to snuff is just as important. The integrated graphics of modern Ultrabooks have become very effective, meaning rendering and editing is more plausible without a discrete card, depending on what you're doing.

Getting more of a gaming-oriented device, or a 'Pro'-branded laptop with a discrete GPU, can provide an immense helping hand for tasks that need the extra graphical horsepower, taking the load off of the CPU and potentially yielding a smoother experience and faster rendering times.

Outside of the actual chip inside the laptop, you'll also want to make sure you've got enough RAM for content creation tasks. 32GB seems to be the sweet spot at the moment, although don't hesitate to look for more if you're a real power user - and have the budget of course.

The same goes for storage, especially if you don't want to rely on a litany of external SSDs. Getting a laptop with 1TB or more of internal SSD space is key for storing media libraries or large project files. Make sure it's fast storage, too, so you aren't waiting around for an export to finish, for instance.

It's even possible to get laptops with replaceable or sometimes additional M.2 SSD slots if you want to add more storage in a pinch.

Long battery life

If you're going to be away from the mains for some time, make sure the laptop you're eyeing up can last for as long as you need it to.

A ten hour target is usually a good place to start, as you'll be able to get through a working day with some juice left to spare before you need to plug it back in.

For this purpose, Ultrabooks with integrated graphics will last longer than a bigger laptop that has a discrete GPU. A lot of gaming models really struggle in the battery life department, so do be careful if you are going down that route.

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