Help with slow processing and rendering times

[kennethobscuritis]

Hello, I've been using Maya and Arnold for roughly 6 months now but I'm constantly battling slow speeds and crashing, usually when I'm doing some actual rendering. I am working on a laptop, and the specs are listed at the bottom. Based on what I'm told and my somewhat limited knowledge of the technical side of computers, I believe I have what it takes if not more to run this software. I will admit, I am not savvy on optimizing AA sampling/render preferences, and I usually just trial and error until I get a sufficient looking picture.

The problems I am having are the slow speeds of when I do have to render something, and crashing if I make the wrong move (turning off a light linking relationship while the renderview is open is one example of a crash will undoubtedly happen.) Despite endless searching for answers through googling, I feel like I still don't know if I'm missing something. I make sure to have all other applications closed, but my CPU performance is always maxing out. I would like to get into some actual video rendering (or render sequencing) but rendering a 15 second video at 400 frames and 24 fps had my computer running all night and still wasn't complete in the morning. Also had to lower the sampling to the point where I wasn't totally satisfied with the result, which I believe was 3. GPU doesn't seem to let me adjust anything after Camera so I suppose it doesn't matter what I had those set to before they became greyed out, but if I'm comparing to CPU it doesn't look quite as good. I am always wondering if I should be using my CPU or GPU to render as well, and it seems like the common answer to that is GPU and I do notice that it is faster, but that 15 second video was with GPU so I'm still scratching my head. Not sure what to set my fallback error to either. And to top it all off, my most recent problem is "maya fatal gpu error occurred" seemingly out of nowhere.. so now I can't even use GPU at the moment.

So I know I'm all over the place, and maybe I need to just pay a tutor or someone to go over everything with me as I go, but essentially I would like to know what the deal is and what can I do to optimize my speeds/prevent crashes errors etc.

2019 Lenovo Legion Y545 15.6" FHD Gaming Laptop Computer, 9th Gen Intel Hexa-Core i7-9750H Up to 4.5GHz, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD + 1TB PCIE SSD, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB GDDR6, Windows 10

[Christoph_Schaedl]

I fear you expect to much from a laptop gpu. It does overheat to fast and does only have 6gb of ram. 

[kennethobscuritis]

Appreciate the response, yeah I wasn't under the impression that that was a little low, what would you say be an ideal starting point for GPU ram? My CPU is high but that's significantly slower.. do you think investing in some kind of cooling unit for my laptop to sit on can make much of a difference?