looking to buy new laptop for mastercam/cad use

[maxdsp]

anyone have any suggestions....its actually for a guy I work with, he wants to use mastercam and cad, and not be limited....going with dell.

 

mainly wondering, how much ram....should he be fine with 512, 1 gig?

32 or 64 meg video card? what video chipset, nvidia or ati or...? centrino mobile? or other Intel cpu? chipset?

 

any help would be appreciated

 

thanx

[Bullines]

-64MB video should be fine

-512MB of RAM would the minimum

-nVIDIA chipset if not upgrading to X (ATI is still unconfirmed on ATIs at this time)

-Centrino is good for a notebook that will be running off battery often, other wise get the real P4

-865 chipsets are good (is the 875 availalble for notebooks yet?)

[Bob_Looney]

I have been using a Dell 8200 for a cpl years. I have been looking at a Toshiba, they use regular desktop chips instead of the M chip. 17" screen, lots of memory, etc. I have not used them before though so I can't speak to reliability. I don't think anybody compares to dell.

I fell on the driveway last year with my Dell laptop. They had a guy here friday morning picking it up, he was back with it saturday.(yes... the next day)

 

bob

[crazy^millman]

Might look at the Precsion line of Dell Laptops can get up to 2 gig of Memory and Intel® Pentium® M Processor 755 (2.0GHz, 2MB L2).

 

In my humble opinion might do the trick.

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Have used toshibas happily for 5yrs. Just got a new laptop and went with an emachine with a wide screen and 2gig amd processor and 1 gig ram. other than a few conflicts with the ati video card initially, it is very fast and was very affordable.

[Trevor Bailey]

I have been looking at the HP 9000 series. The 17" wide models. They offer the most bang for the money from what I have found. The one I am looking at is a P4 3.2, 1 gig ram, 128 mb nvidia card, 7200 rpm drives, etc...ALL FOR UNDER $3000. Compare that to a dell....you will pay $5000 plus. I have been a dell fanatic for a while.

 

Times a changin'.

 

The second best value I have found is from Alienware. They make smokin' pcs. The price is the only thing holding me back from them.

[Don S at Barefoot CNC South]

Hi

Jimmy got his new laptop while I was there before he even turned it on he had it apart.

After an hour or so it was up and going. I am sure he has tweaked even more. Like the wide screen.

 

Don S

[Mct010]

I have the HP7000 with the 17inch screen, works great for just over $2200 even with solids.

[Jim at Gentex]

Click on the 'Information' link at the top of this page, then scroll down to the "A Discussion on Recommended Hardware' link near the bottom of the information page. I found this link very helpful since my employer is considering laptop use as well.

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Don

Now every one's gonaa think I'm some sort of geeterhead for tweaking my laptop straight out of the box. Right now it is doing better than some of the high powered desktops out there. I still need to replace the cooling fan to get cooler air. (Maybe K&N with start making cold air induction kits for laptops?)

 

Of course Katie said if I blow this one up then I have to carry around one of the old training computers. I told her I was going to rig up a liquid nitrogen cooling system for it like the cold fusion computers.

 

The way that I test the speed of new equipment is by calling up the 3dleftover example and regening it(you need to delete the regen file in order to get it to crunch #'s)

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Maybe we could come up with a surf model with toolpaths applied to it and all of us download and regen to compare processing speeds?

 

Not as a contest, but as a way of figuring out what works best. The tech tips forum has very good information in it for the master cam side of speeding up, but there are alot of things that you can do harware/other software wise inorder to get more out of your pc/laptop.