Laptops for Modeling

[John Scheffel]

There have been some notes sent to the "solid" E-mail list about laptops for Modeling. Since I think this may be of interest to people who don't subscribe, I am copying them here. If anyone has other Laptop experiences to share, feel free to post a reply or new thread.

Original Note
I am thinking about getting the following Laptops for running Solid Designer and ProE. Has anyone used this model before or using laptop for MCAD application? If so, do you have any recommendation on memory size, CPU speed, and the graphics card option?

Dell Latitude D800
Intel® Pentium® M Processor up to 1.60GHz
Graphics: NVIDA® GeForceTM 4 4200 Go 4X AGP with 32MB or 64MB DDR video memory

OR:

Precision M50 model
Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor - M 2.0GHz, 2.20GHz, 2.40GHz or 2.50GHz with 512KB L2 cache
256MB to 1GB using 266MHz DDR SDRAM (standard min/max)

Replies
We are very satisfied with the pair of 2.4GHz/1.5Gb M50s we have. Bargains on M50s are available through Dells online outlet store if you would rather not pay full price.
We have a few people here using the M50. It is a very good laptop for CAD, if you can spend the money I don't think you would regret it. Don't know anything about the D800. How much RAM you need really depends on how large your models are, but in general get all you can afford. These days I would say get at least 512 MB. You might want to check out the following threads in the forum for more info.

http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=173

http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4519

http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3863
I purchased the Inspiron 8200 with ATI Radeon 9000 video with 64MB DDR, Intel® Pentium® M Processor up to 1.70GHz, 384 Mb Ram, and XP Pro. Solid Designer and another MCAD software works very well with this setup.
We also have few M50's in house, I use one with a replication port and have found it to be a very robust machine. I have also recently seen one from a company called Sager that is very impressive for the prices. I will attach the url below.

http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.html

[pkehoe]

We have many people here who have the Compaq Evo N800w
laptop. The performance is very good, comparable to my HP
Workstation x2100. Many people are using it as their only
computer (no desktop plus laptop, just a laptop). It is a bit expensive, especially to get it loaded with 2 GB of RAM, but
it is not bad if it can replace 2 computers.

[Sam Porter]

One thing to keep in mind with laptops is the graphics card. There are a few laptop graphics cards that are now listed on the support graphics card list that can be found here:

CoCreate OneSpace Modeling Certified Graphics Card List (http://www.cocreate.com/downloads/gfxbrd/gfxboards.htm)

The ATI Mobility and nVidia Go cards are laptop cards.

Performance wise, the Compaq Evo N800w that I tested was very good. It did very well both in graphics performance and CPU performance.

Sam

[John Struthers]

A colleague is looking for an economic laptop solution to run OSD Modeling. I would welcome any recommedations regarding CAD capable laptops that aren't too expensive ...

[clausb]

Can't give any explicit model recommandations, only a few general hints.

If you want the security of using an officially certified system, buy a laptop using a certified graphics chipset (see http://www.cocreate.com/osd_graphicscards for a list). Currently, this means a chipset from either the ATI FireGL Mobility or NVidia's Quadro Go family.

If you are willing to accept a small risk of running into (often minor) graphics issues, you can also buy laptops using an ATI Radeon Mobility or NVidia GeForce Go chipset; these are the "consumer-level" versions of the professional chipsets and less expensive.

In either case, you'll get very good 3D HW acceleration.

I'd be wary of laptops using so-called integrated chipsets. Many of these will have only mediocre HW acceleration, and will use shared memory in RAM to hold video data, which means less RAM for the model, and slower interactive performance. On the other hand, CPUs are fast enough today to deliver decent interactive performance even for slow graphics chipsets, as long as your models are not becoming too large.

If money is an important factor, don't just go for the fastest CPU. Experience shows that the fastest CPU versions are a lot more expensive than CPU #2 and #3 in the benchmark charts, but not a lot faster.

Hope this helps,

Claus

[John Scheffel]

I recently posted some benchmark results for a HP Pavilion laptop with NVIDIA GeForce4 488 Go with 64 MB. See this post (http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=12118#post12118) for more details. I didn't do much work with Modeling, but saw no obvious graphics problems during a short test.

[John Struthers]

Claus and John:

Many thanks for your comments regarding laptop specification for OSDM. It's great to have some guidance on the latest developments in graphics chipsets etc.

My colleague may run through the 3D benchmark tests when an appropriate laptop has been selected and purchased!

John

p.s. Laptop related ... CoCreate Support has confirmed that the license server app, MEls, should operate OK with Wireless LAN network hardware. (I was a bit unsure about Wireless LANs and their physical address LAN IDs.)

[clausb]

On Wireless LAN support: Haven't tried license codes tied to a WLAN ID, but then, there's probably hardly any laptop out there without an onboard LAN interface anymore, so even if for some reason you cannot use the WLAN's ID, you can bind your license codes to the onboard LAN interface instead, and everything will work just fine.

Claus

[John Struthers]

Thanks for the tip re WLAN IDs.

My colleague has just informed me that he's looking at a laptop with an "ATI RADEON 9000 - AGP 4x 64Mb" graphics processor. I'm just about to check the CoCreate graphics list ...

John

[clausb]

The Radeon chipsets are not officially supported. This is mostly because ATI provides full support for high-end apps (such as CAD applications) on their professional chipset lines only. This doesn't mean that the consumer-line chipset don't work, only that you will get better support (read: bugs, if any, will be fixed much faster) for the FireGL Mobility chipsets than for Radeon Mobility graphics.

There are also a few differences in HW and driver capabilities between the consumer and the professional line.

Because of ATI's limited support for the consumer-line chipsets, we had to decide to officially certify the professional chipsets only. It's the same story with NVidia, BTW.

Technically speaking, OSDM only requires a reasonably stable OpenGL driver which adheres to the OpenGL standard version 1.1 or later. We don't even use a lot of fancy OpenGL features (and if so, they are optional, such as occlusion culling support for Econofast mode), so pretty much any OpenGL-capable graphics card will usually do.

Claus

[John Scheffel]

Originally posted by John Struthers
My colleague has just informed me that he's looking at a laptop with an "ATI RADEON 9000 - AGP 4x 64Mb" graphics processor. I'm just about to check the CoCreate graphics list ...
Some people have reported good success with Radeon chipsets on HP notebooks (I believe 7500), so it will likely be fine. The Radeons seem to be better than some of the older ATI chipsets used in HP notebooks. On many of them we had to disable hardware acceleration.

[clausb]

Originally posted by John Scheffel
The Radeons seem to be better than some of the older ATI chipsets used in HP notebooks. On many of them we had to disable hardware acceleration.

The old chipset line were called "Rage Mobility". Those really had some issues. The Radeon Mobility chipset is completely new stuff and much better suited to 3D.

Claus