Laptops for 3D work

[plastic]

pentium-m cpu's offer amazing onscreen performance. they are not very fast for rendering though...a p4 should outperform them.
notebooks with p4 cpu's are big, heavy, noisy and hot though.
for gfx card, i recommend mobile quadro cards, they are very fast, compareable to desktop cards.
i've seen many people who had problems with gaming cards on laptops and 3d apps like max and maya. (radeon, geforce).
i got a dell precision M60 noetbook and it's great.

[Sanna]

I'm not that concerned with noise, unless it's not worse than an ordinary desktop computer. As long as the cooling is sufficient for rendering I'm ok. Thanks for your comments.

[iC4]

The main advantage of the pentium-m is the longer battery life. An AMD Athlon64 or a Pentium4 will give you an average battery life of about 1 - 2 hours. With an Pentium-M you can get up to 3-5 hours (depending on the Model)

Mobile GFX cards are not as fast as the desktop cards - for example a mobility radeon 9700 is much slower than a deskto radeon 9700.

There are some models with Mobility Ati Fire-GLs (IBM, Compaq, Dell) but it's just a mobility radeon 9600 with the fire-gl driver.

[Sanna]

This is frustrating. A laptop would be sooo practical in many ways, but paying what a workstation laptop costs and not get the performance a desktop for half the price offers isn't fun. Oh well.

[iC4]

This is frustrating. A laptop would be sooo practical in many ways, but paying what a workstation laptop costs and not get the performance a desktop for half the price offers isn't fun. Oh well.
I don't know what your job looks like and what your main work area is/will be, but for normal modelling and animation a laptop will do the job fine.

offcourse if you start working with realtime shaders and millions of polys you should better go for a decent desktop system, but otherwise I don't see any problems.

[Goon]

I paid $1500 for a laptop which has served me very well. However I would switch to a desktop in a heart beat.

Why?
Heat
Battery Life for acceptable performance levels: the video card gets its power cut really low when battery convervation is on.
I really don't use it as a portable. Lugging 8lbs+ around.
Exapandability
Upgradeability
Cost


Maybe you should investigate a shuttle pc? They are very small, rather inexpensive, and while you would have a certain degree of setup time, it wouldn't be too much hassle. Plus you could grab a nice lcd screen with the money you save, and bammo, a portable, cheap, upgradeable Pc.

[mattregnier]

I just recently bought a dell inspiron 9100 as a desktop replacement, and can honestly say I'll never go back to a desktop pc again. I've been in the business of repairing/building computers for most of my life, so naturally I liked to tinker with building my machines at home.

I can say that hands down, getting a preconfigured system(notebook), that has already been tested and all the components work together, is 1000 times better then saving a few bucks trying to put together a whitebox pc that is reliable and stable.

Oh and to comment on what goon said, the upgradibility and expandibility isn't that big of an issue anymore. Alienware (too pricy, but first to implement it) and Dell both offer notebooks with upgradable video cards, cpu's, and memory now.

-my 2 cents-

[Sanna]

Thank you for your comments!

Just another question: What kind of work do you use the laptops for? I'm working in architectural vizualisation, so I do mostly hi res rendered stills, rarely animations, but with sometimes quite detailed models, and then compositing in Photoshop.

I'm also used to tinkering with my computers, and like to extend their life by upgrading and repairing them myself. Recently I find that it does distract me from my work a little though. I did consider the Shuttles (great design too!), but one of my friends had some problem finding a RAM type that worked with it. I might get one of those though, but the potential problems of getting everything to work smoothly it a big disadvantage. On the other hand With a laptop I'm concerned about the support should anything go wrong...

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