Laptop graphics for Ironcad

[pdomenicali]

I'm thinking of replacing my laptop. Looking at Dell's Inspiron 8600, they have a choice of ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Proturbo. I've read good things about this for gaming compared to nVidia GE Force 5650, which is their other choice. But how would it be for Ironcad?

 

Dell also sells the M60 "mobile workstation" at a premium of about $700, but that is with the nVidia Quadro FX Go1000 graphics, which I assume are somewhere near the workstation Quadro's in performance.

 

Does anyone have experience or know of benchmarks for these laptops? Are there other laptops I should consider?

 

I will use the laptop 90% docked with a large monitor and external kb/mouse. I don't need a large screen, and would prefer lighter weight for the times I do travel with it, but of course that is not compatible with high-end graphics.

 

Regards,

Peter

[Sterry Shaffer]

While I don't know if I would want to use the laptop I just bought as my main desktop (although of late I have been working a lot at one of our remote plants with it). I would like to recommend ASUS S5Ne lightweight - 2.8 lbs with 12.1" TFT screen that preforms remarkably well with IC v7. I love how easy it is to take with you. Its about the size of a 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper and only .9" thick. While it is by no means a power machine, but I have been working on some 5-6 MB files and it handles the graphics very well. And it only costs $1400. A good review can be found at: www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mobile/print/asus-s5200ne.html

[Chris Lohman]

Peter we have that inspiron in-house with the Radeon chip and it's a very capable system.

 

The primary issue for laptop graphics is not the graphics chip so much any more (since all new chips are quite powerful compared to a few years ago), but instead the issue is the screen refresh rate. Most laptop screens run at 60hz, which creates a horribl environment for IRONCAD. Our inspiron runs at 120hz and so the refresh rate when orbiting a scene in IRONCAD, for example, is very nice. So whatever you do, insure that you can find a laptop which has a refresh rate that is higher than at least 72 hz. (IE, the best graphics card in the world will perform quite poorly on a 60hz screen)

 

I can't comment on how the laptop will perform through the external monitor. You may not be able to get the higher refresh rate through the external port; I don't know. I don't know if you will experience enough lag through the external bus that the more powerful Quadro2go chip would be justified. If I can find a minute of free time today, I'll try to test that locally.

 

So we're very happy with our Insipiron with the Radeon chip. While a real benchmark would show you that the radeon would outperform the geforce by a minor amount, there really is no noticeable difference between those to graphics chips.

 

As for using a laptop as a primary workstation; that's a completely different issue. Laptops have far slower hard drives (so files take longer to load/save), a slower system bus, and they hold less ram. Definitly put as much ram as you can afford into a laptop in order to compensate for the other slow components.

 

By the way; our inspiron has the Pentium 4 chip in it. We have not yet used a Pentium M chip, but I have heard many reports that while the Pentium M clockspeed is lower, it still performs just as fast (an in some cases faster) as the latest Pentium 4; and it's better for a laptop because of heat and battery requirements.