Laptop recommendation for inventor/pro/e/etc

Technical CAD
1

I’m a mentor for a couple of local teams, I would like to purchase a laptop for use with inventor/pro/e etc, so that I can brush up on my modeling skills, get some seat time with inventor, and when I’m somewhat comfortable with the various software, bring the computer with me and encourage the students to use it. I use pro/E at work, but have never used inventor. Anyway, i’m looking for a good laptop recommendation to do this with preferably one with a smaller screen (11-14?). I’m looking at a macbook pro with 13" screen, or maybe the recently announced alienware m11x? any other recommendations?

Thanks,
Alvin

2

I recommend a Laptop CPU with hyper threading. 4 to 8gb of DDR3 (preferably) Ram. As for the Graphics Card, you’re better off getting a Nvidia card (Radeon has serious issues with Inventor). I cannot comment on OpenGL because I’ve never used it.

I don’t know if you can get a laptop that’s smaller than 15.6" that’s this powerful.

M15x is good, but idk about M11x (i’ll check)

One question. Will you be doing any rendering?

3

I would steer clear of alienware in general.

If you can get an Nvidia Quadro graphics in the laptop that is the best for inventor and most workstation programs in general.

4

If you’re doing rendering in a multithreaded application (like 3D Studio Max), then multiple cores and hyperthreading would be helpful. On the other hand, most CAD software is singlethreaded, and won’t benefit significantly from that stuff. Therefore, if you’re just doing CAD, get the processor with the highest single-core performance that you can afford. (If you’ve got a big budget, this is going to be a quad-core, hyperthreading Core i7 anyway…they have a turbo mode that increases clockspeed dramatically when some cores are idle.)

Check the certified driver lists before choosing a video card. It’s all in the drivers—the hardware itself doesn’t matter very much for CAD work. Anything midrange with good drivers will be adequate for most teams’ needs.

I’m not a fan of small screens or low resolutions for CAD…I’d reconsider that if possible.

5

heres an example of the best price/performance you could possibly get

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834146613&cm_re=i7-720qm--34-146-613--Product

easily at the same level of power as a desktop with a .5 TB hard drive, a quad core and to top it off a dedicated graphics processor with 1gb of dedicated video memory.

6

Thanks all! i’ll look into this!

7

2 GB RAM, 256 MB graphics card, and a dual core processor minimum. I do my work on a lesser computor at the beginning of the season and it is still liable to freeze and crash.