Buying a new laptop

[Boot_WB]

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop for stress analysis work (Ansys), design using 3d cad (Solidworks), and general day-to-day stuff.

I'm really not arsed about gaming, it doesn't float my boat, but I'll need reasonable 3d capabilities for the design stuff.
Processor needs to be capable of lots floating point operations.
The more memory the better.
The lower the cost the better.
Oh, and in the UK.

Any suggestions of good retailers?  Cost is a real issue, but I'd rather pay £50 more and know I have the support.

I don't know what's what in world of laptops at all - any suggestion of model/makes?  Have had bad experience with toshiba, so will be staying away from them.
 :-?  :-?  :-?

[zombi]

Don't forget that: cheap models have slow rams and harddisks. You can find two laptops with little difference in cpu speed but one is in double price. The real difference is in ram speed. This will really effect the performance, especially calculation time in Ansys.

[tonyvdb]

Dell is making nice solid laptops nowadays and so is Ailenware. A 1.5gHz machine with 1gig of ram is plenty do not go less then 512 if you plan to run widowz XP.

[InTheSand]

Hi,

I agree with Zombi - beware laptops with slow hard drives... The cheapest ones will have 4200rpm drives and these are absolutely DOG SLOW...

Mid-range and some high end laptops will contain 5400rpm drives - still slow compared to a desktop, but at least tolerable.

Finally, 7200rpm drives are the fastest you'll find in the 2.5" IDE form factor (as far as I know!) and these make a marked difference to the feel of the speed of the machine.

Generally, laptop drives these days are very easy to replace (one or two screws and a slide-out compartment), so you could always get a laptop with a slower drive and upgrade it later.

Or you could go for a "desktop replacement" laptop - these can be bulkier than traditional slimline laptops but use desktop parts, meaning they use faster 3.5" drives.

 - Ali

[hppacito]

Hi,

I don't know if you already bought the machine or not, but may be this helps you:

I own a 2.8 GHz P4 Toshiba P10 with 266MHz memory (DDRI), and is slower than an Athlon XP 2600 with the same kind of 266MHz DDRI memory, regarding FP (povray 3.5, linux, hours of rendering).

I also have a Centrino 1.73GHz with DDR2-533, with a 5400 rpm hard disk. (FSC Amilo M3438G)

I just (for you) compared the rendering time of my desktop AthlonXP 2400 with this notbook...

Both gave 1 minute 1 second to render a scene with 300 objects.

From this you can infer that this centrinos are quite poor in FP performance, something already known.

If you don't mind with something a bit heavy and 2Hs battery life, I'd recommend an Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 1667G:

Athlon64 4000+
Radeon X700
Screen 15,4" 1280x800
1GB RAM
80GB Hard disk.

Costs around 1200 Euro, here in DE.

HP has also Athlon64 notebooks.

If you plan on Linux, may be a notebook with an nvidia will be most recommended, ati drivers (I heard) have problems. (The amilo M has a GeForce Go 6800, and the Toshiba a 5100), and they work qite well.

in www.trustedreviews.com they make interesting reviews... and is an UK site qith UK products and prices.

(I really wanted a turion notebook, but with a 17" screen, but there were none, so I ended with this Amilo, Is a really nice notebook, big screen, fast disk, not that fast processor, horrible battery life (2Hs), and fast graphics card. But for FP performance, get an AMD, cheaper, faster.

Notebooks with shared graphics are 100-200 (minimum) Euro cheaper than an equivalent with discrete graphics.

My next notebook will be a Dual-core Turion, next year !

I don't know how good a CoreDuo are in FP performance, but for not that much more, you get 2 procs. Some of that soft can take advantage of them, so I think is the way to go. (I saw a "cheap" one for 1500 Euro today), too much.

regards

[Albannach]

Hi Boot_WB,

I have an Intel 3 GHz Alienware.  This machine runs XP Pro, is uberPOWERFUL and rock solid.  I have had it for about 9 months and it has never once crashed on me.  I regularly leave it on for days at a time and can run loads of programs at once (watching a DVD while using a P2P proggy, having a MMORPG macroing away in the background and moving files onto my A4000 hard drive via WinUAE is quite common :-D).

I'd imagine if you are feeling liquid cash-wise then an Alienware laptop would be ideal for 3Dwork or anything else (such as running HL2 at maximum specs - very important) that you care to throw at it.  These machines are expensive but then quality always is  :-)