Just getting started, what hardware? I am just getting stared in Blender and am enjoying the heck out of it so far.

I have two systems I could work from and I'm trying to determine which would be better


A 2.5Ghz i5 four core laptop with a 1060
Ryzen 5 3.7Ghz four core / 8 thread with a Vega 11.


I honestly don't yet know much about 3D modeling and assumed that the system with the better GPU would render faster.

I loaded a few test scenes on each system and did a casual comparison and was surprised to see the  RYZEN system pull way ahead on my first test.  However the next scene I rendered favored the Intel system.  Over several scenes it varied back and forth.

So can the individual scene render better on one type of hardware than the other?  If not, which system should be better?
The 2nd system would be better at rendering only using the CPU, but the 1st system would be better at rendering with CPU + GPU combined, along with running EEVEE better, since it uses a dedicated GPU. I'd suggest the 1st system, since the GPU should be able to pick up the slack of the weaker CPU, though you'll have to go into Blender's settings to enable Blender to use the GPU at all. (Also the fact that rendering with only GPU is faster than rendering with only CPU. Still turn both on though.)

Go to Preferences > System and tick off both CPU and GPU to enable this.