Good Mobiles for CGI?

[ThomasMahler]

Hey guys,

Since I don't have that much time for private work right now and since a friend of mine is getting married, I thought about giving him my home machine as a wedding gift and getting something smaller, mobile, yet still powerful.

So I thought about the usual suspects - Apple, Dell, etc.

But basically, I'd need the machine just for multimedia stuff, to paint with Photoshop/Painter, sculpt with ZBrush/Mudbox and doing some 3d with Maya. So the problem is that the thing should be small and comfortable, yet have enough power to not suck when doing CG work.

So my questions are:

1) Are there actually any TabletPCs out there that are worth a damn? I don't want any integrated intel gpu, I'd love to have a nice, large tablet PC that has the same power as a Macbook Pro or something similar.

2) Are the new SantaRosa Macbook Pros good enough for 3d work? I hear that Bootcamp makes problems (drivers, etc.) when installing XP x64 (which would be my favourite choice), which is a huge downer for me. Also: Why the hell is Apple charging over 600 bucks for a memory upgrade? That's insane!

3) If 1) and 2) are out, do any of you guys have experience with the Dell M1710? Its design is darn ugly, but the specs are neato and I'm sure XP x64 would run nicely on it. Als, the 7950gtx should be fast enough for 3d work.

So, actually, I'm just looking for the optimal mobile machine for 3d artists - I so hate that there are no powerful TabletPCs ou there that are using Wacom Tech and are 2-3 years behind, performance-wise.

Any suggestions? Fire away!

[davijin]

1. I havent seen any of the tablet pcs with anytype of decent graphics cards. though i did hear something about a modified macbook pro with tablet tech. its not official from apple though. I think there is a big need by our community for a tablet with wacom tech and good graphics capablilties. if someone were to release something like that at a decent price it would be awesome.

2. imo the macbook pros are good enough to run 3d apps. 8600m should be about as fast if not a little faster than the 7950. not sure about the x64 problems, and yeah they overcharge the hell out of everyone for ram upgrades that you can buy for alot less from corsair or crucial.

3. I dont have any experience with that dell but they are usually pretty good machines.7950 should be good enough to run 3d scenes. i have a 7400go on my notebook and dont have to big of a problem running decent sized maya scenes and max scenes,(300,000 polys or so) zbrush and mudbox run pretty good too.

[ThomasMahler]

Okay, so I'll see if I can get a Macbook Pro or this guy here:

http://217.172.172.50/shop2/index.php?user=powerpc6481&proid=3087

It has a Santa Rosa Chip, 4 gigs of RAM, a Geforce 8700m and the rest sounds nice too, so that should definitely work as a desktop replacement.

It sucks that there are no great tablet PC's with decent configs - I'd totally go for one and use it for painting, sculpting and surfing the web, checking mails, etc.

[Cometsoft]

I'm not really into benchmarking, but I just got a Macbook Pro 2.4 15". I also have a Dell Precision M70 2.13 GHZ. Rendering the same scene in Maya using Mental Ray ran 1:45 minutes on the Dell, 49 secs on the Mac. Maya is running on OSX on the Mac. The Dell is over a year older, but I was really suprised by the difference.

Haven't installed bootcamp or parallels yet.

Also the 15" Macbook pro has an LED screen which according to the Rob Gailbraith photo site is the most "calibratable" laptop monitor available for a color managed photo workflow.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-8741-9027

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.