notebook computer suggestions

I am curious to know if anyone can recommend a good notebook computer
for running SW2004.

Also, any tips as to choosing the video card, minimum recommended RAM,
processor type and speed, etc.

Any help is greatly appreciated...

Jim

 

save yourself some headaches and go right for the quadro card in a dell or
alienware setup. i got the hp zd7000 and it is awsome EXCEPT for the geforce
card i can not successfully quadro hacked it so i live with it. you have to
have a gb of ram at least and get the fastest cpu you can afford. get the
very best you can afford . how much $$$ u got to spend? i heard of an hp8000
but not sure what video card will be offered in it

 

Hi Jim,
Recently i was interested myself in the subject and discoverd that the
computer giants do not pay much investment in seriuos workstation
laptops which will be appropriate for SW or many other CAD/CAM/CAE
applications -from what i managed to dig out, here are the results for
basic configuration which include a professional GC:
Dell Precision M60 - starts with 2,123 US$
IBM ThinkPad T42p - starts with 3,000 US$
HP Compaq mobile workstation nw8000 - starts with 1,925 US$

check also IBM ThinkPad T41p

cheers,
Gil Alsberg

 

Siemens' Celsius H is supposed to be quite good, if frighteningly expensive.

I'm running a 2GHz M60 with a Quadro FX Go 700 - lovely. Some cheap
(well...) ones turn up randomly on the Dell Outlet site - worth a look.

Chris

 

I would have to agree, the M60 seems to be the better the available laptops
for working with SolidWorks......

John

 

I'm with '3D'. The video card is the key; 'ya gotta have a quadro for
full functionality, and that narrows your choices down real fast.
Having said that, I've been running SW2005 on a zd7000 since July, and
it works fine unless I try to open multiple parts. For professional
use I'd go with an M60; if you're an amateur like me, the zd7000 will
work. Dell's new Inspiron 9200 has a 17" screen; dunno what card it
runs.

 

I recently purchased a laptop over the internet that was made by
Uniwill for about $1800. Here are the specs:

AMD Mibility 64 bit 3400+ processor
1024 MB PC-3200 ram
ATI mobility 9700 video processor 128 MB video ram
60 GB 7200 RPM hard drive

I was able to hack the video card to an Mobility FireGL T2 x 128. I
now have realview capabilities!

Ship in a bottle benchmark on SWX 2005 SP0.1 is around 23 seconds.

It is fairly new, so I have not put it through the paces to fully test
it with SolidWorks but so far so good.

Wayne

 

We have 3 laptops here with ATI Mobility graphics cards - how did you manage
to hack yours to a FireGL?

Merry

 

I tried several different things for about a week, before I found the
right combination. Check out www.nvworld.ru It is a Russian web site
but they do have a forum in English. I found the instructions under
the topic "Noobtweak with fast results for (all?) Radeon-FFGL-Users".

You have to download the FreeFireGL drivers which are already hacked
with Rivatuner and download an additional driver. Remove the old
driver with software called DriverCleaner, Install the FFGL driver and
then overwrite some of the FFGL dll's with the dll's from the
additional driver you downloads.

I do not want to publish the complete instructions here because I do
not want to be blamed for laptops that no longer work because of
something that I said. Read the articles on the above mentioned forum.
It is risky hacking a laptop.

Wayne