Laptop recommendation?

[hand471037]

I might be needing a decent laptop soon for moble work. I'm looking more for performace than moblity, for it's going to be more of a mobile workstation. I'll rarely be working off of the battery. It will be used mostly for Revit and Radiance, however I might be using it for some heavy 3D with Blender or MAX.

So I've got a few questions:
Should I advoid the 'moble' P4 processors, and go for a 'real' P4?
Should I try to get something like an Alienware, that has a 'real' and upgradable graphics card?
What brands have people had good luck with?
Should I just get something cheap that's good enough to run Revit on the road, and leave the 'real' 3D work and rendering to my home dual AMD box?

Thanks for the help!

[hand471037]

One other thought:

Should I buy a mini-pc, equipt it with a P4 and plenty of RAM, then get a Wacom 15" Flatscreen instead? Part of me thinks this would work, for you could put together a kickin' mini-pc for under a $1000, the Wacom would cost you $1500, and that would be one great little portable system... Maybe I should do this anyways, for I'm obsessed with the Wacom Flatscreens...

[JamesVan]

I'm using an IBM ThinkPad T40 with 1.5G Pentium M with 1Gb RAM and a 32Mb RADEON 7500 display card. I can reun Revit quite effectively for most functions, but it is a bit sluggish when rendering or spinning complex 3D views. I don't have much say because the ThinkPad's are standard company issue, but I'd definitely spend extra for better graphics ability.

[GuyR]

Should I advoid the 'moble' P4 processors, and go for a 'real' P4?

There's mobile and mobile. You've got the P4 mobile and the centrino series. A 1.6Ghz centrino is equivalent to 2.4Ghz P4 as I understand it. You can get up to 3.2Ghz P4 HT mobile now. I've also noticed with most of the centrino's laptops I've seen they don't have a great graphics card. So unless you are interested in battery performance I'd probably steer clear of the centrino's.

Should I try to get something like an Alienware, that has a 'real' and upgradable graphics card?

http://catalog.us.dell.com/CS1/cs1pa...474&l=en&s=dhs

This is what I'm running although not with the HT processors. And my 5150's got an ATI card. It has an upgradable graphics card because I've already got a price for upgrading to the Nvidia card.
Works well and I can get about 3 hours on battery as long as I'm not rendering etc.. I can do about 40 seconds of AVI video overnight so performance doesn't seem to be too bad.

The other thing to watch with laptops is the HD speed . A lot like this Dell use 4200rpm drives. Not sure of the effect this has on Revit.

HTH,

Guy

[hand471037]

Hey Guy, that looks like a good laptop, however 2 gigs of Ram costs $1000

How much Ram you've got? I just stepped up at work here from a old P-III 512 Meg machine to a dual-xeon 2 gig machine, and I really don't wanna go back to less memory if I can help it. The 2 gigs rocks and has made a huge difference, esp. in Rendering ability (lots of plants no longer choke Revit).

[GuyR]

Hey Guy, that looks like a good laptop, however 2 gigs of Ram costs $1000

Yeah I know, at the time they were doing a double your RAM deal. So I've got 1GB. I'd give them a call if you are interested they might do it cheaper.

Guy

1GB seems to be enough. I've never seem to go beyond 600MB with most of the projects I'm doing.

[lennartik]

I got one of these. Great performance short battery life


http://www.sagernotebook.com/pages/n...oductType=5680

[PeterJ]

I have a Taiwanese baby locally badged but made by a company named Clevo Co. It has the P4 3.2 Ghz, a gig of RAM and the ATi mobility radeon 9600. Nice fast machine. Very stable. 15.1" screen capable of 1600 x 1200 native but will output up to around 2400 x whatever if connected to an external monitor.

Nice bit of kit.

Built in wireless and a DVD writer too.

The 80311b is a little slow if you use the briefcase functionality of Windows as, unless you are careful, you can find yourself shunting ten or firteen 10MB files across the network unnecessarily. Possibly better to consider CDRW

[BomberAIA]

I'm looking into upgrading my laptop. What processor is best for Revit? 3.0 ghz P-4 w/ HT Tech or a P-M 1.7 ghz? P-M is the latest processor, but does Revit takes advantage of HT? Both processors have 128 mb graphic cards.

[lennartik]

I found this laptop with the new 64-processor. Here's a review of it:
Seems like the fastest thing out there + decent battery life for this perfomance:

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1916

Manufacturer

http://www.voodoopc.com/systems/m855.aspx