Laptop Specs for revit 2011 architectal suite?

[speedfreak5150]

A friend is looking for a budget (student) laptop for revit wat would u suggest?

[reluma]

A friend is looking for a budget (student) laptop for revit wat would u suggest?

any brand that has 8GB RAM and a VideoCard that can handle pixel shader3!

[Dave Jones]

A friend is looking for a budget (student) laptop for revit wat would u suggest?

that's like asking "what kind of car do I buy to drive to the grocery store?". Any car will get you there, some more smoothly and more quickly than others. I run Revit 2011 occasionally (when I travel) on a Dell Precision M6300 with 2GM RAM. It's acceptable and that's about as far as I go.

[vgonzales]

A friend is looking for a budget (student) laptop for revit wat would u suggest?

Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
8 GB RAM
300 GB HD
512 MB video card (must support DirectX 10)

Currently, my company buys HP ProBook series of notebooks for $1400 (with the extra RAM installed) from CDW with 3 year accidental damage protection coverage.

[goodtastingsteak]

check this thread and other threads in this section:
http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=70738

i recently purchased a refurbished dell inspiron with a 25% off coupon and it's doing me fine for the work i do at home after work. The file sizes I'm working with at home, however, are usually no larger than 30MB; if your friend already has projects s/he's done in Revit, s/he should check the file sizes of those projects as that will be a good indicator of how powerful of a laptop will be necessary. I didn't want to spend a lot on a computer and have to try to stretch it out for 4+ years so I spent less and got something that (so far it seems) is moderately more than enough.

specs on my laptop (dell inspiron):
17"
win7 64
processor: i5 450m
ram: 4gb
hd: 500gb @ 4500 rpm
vid card: 512mb


Since your friend is a student, the pro version of win7 shouldn't be necessary but definitely get the 64-bit version.

When I was searching out laptops, my ideal was:
win7 64
i7 processor
6gb ram
7200 rpm hard drive
512mb-1gb ram vid card
Specs like that will easily run you over $1000, however. Mine was $550.

If your friend is getting a laptop (or desktop for that matter), I definitely recommend budgeting for a 2nd monitor as well. Working on a laptop alone is fine when you need to, but if you're at studio for hours on end, you might as well invest another $150 for a 24" monitor.

[josh.made4worship]

that's like asking "what kind of car do I buy to drive to the grocery store?". Any car will get you there, some more smoothly and more quickly than others. I run Revit 2011 occasionally (when I travel) on a Dell Precision M6300 with 2GM RAM. It's acceptable and that's about as far as I go.

Dave has a good point here...a "budget" laptop isn't gonna Run Revit that well, most likely. All that said, if you want to do a little more research, I made a few posts here that help describe what things you should get in your computer.

[speedfreak5150]

another question if getting a i7 processor how many Ghz do you need?

[Scott Womack]

another question if getting a i7 processor how many Ghz do you need?

This is again, a slightly obscure question. The easy answer is as fast as possible!

To be more pragmatic, how large are the files going to be? 100 meg or so (without a lot of warnings) 2.93 gHz will do nay larger and 3.33 or 4 will be needed. Yes, buying the laptop for "today" allows you to get away for less, but looking at the requirement jumps of the last two releases of Revit, you've got to buy for at least 2 years ahead on "now" to make the purchase worth it.

[Mike Sealander]

I bought a Dell Studio XPS (which is hard to find on their web site), but it's like butter. Windows7-64, 8 gigs of RAM, i7 1.60 GHz processor. Only thing is it's very crashy, and I haven't figured out why.

[dzatto]

This is again, a slightly obscure question. The easy answer is as fast as possible!

To be more pragmatic, how large are the files going to be? 100 meg or so (without a lot of warnings) 2.93 gHz will do nay larger and 3.33 or 4 will be needed. Yes, buying the laptop for "today" allows you to get away for less, but looking at the requirement jumps of the last two releases of Revit, you've got to buy for at least 2 years ahead on "now" to make the purchase worth it.

I'm running a Dell M6500 Covet with i7 820 1.73Ghz chip and it flies. I don't think the i7 chips are rated the same as the Core2 chips are. My device manager is showing 8 processors! lol

Full Specs are:
Dell M6500 Covet
i7 / 820 1.73Ghz
8G DDR 1066 RAM
Nvidia Quadro FX 3800M 1G video card
300G 7200 RPM hard drive
Edge to Edge display.

It's pretty sweet. I love it.