Keep the budget reasonable, meaning below 2500. Preferably below 2000, but I would be willing to spend more if I really need the power. I’m looking for something that can run Vectorworks, Autocad, all the major design and rendering programs.
I realize I can spend the money for a mac pro, I understand this. And I have the budget to do it. However I’m simply looking for an alternative
I am real happy with my HP Envy 15. The 15 has two batteries, goes up to 16 megs of ram and sports an I7 quad core. 6 months old and there may be something better for sure. But at the 2000 price point 6 months ago it was worth it and I have been very pleased over all with the performance. You might find it cheaper now even. But keep in mind - I have no idea why - it has no numpad. But HP has a real nice numpad/hub combo. Also mine came with an external DVD drive. The concept is that it is supposed to be thin. With one battery it is very compact and light. My only complaint is that the second battery always comes loose. A very poor design. Other than that, I bought it to do heavy work and it holds up very well next to some of fastest desktops I was looking at around the same time. Needless to say I am running win 7 64 and so far so good. But I have only been using the 6 gigs of RAM mine came with. I’d say this is a very good choice overall and I’d buy one again and in fact have thought about buying another to make a mini farm.
maybe look for a laptop with a dual nvidia gpu
than you can use them for gpu rendering.
How is the heat production and power consumption with the i7
with that HP laptop.
hello friends
I have Dell Studio 1555 (New Premium Series). I just love it.
it’s Intel® Core™ 2 Duo 2.2 GHz , with 2 GB DDR II, 320 GB Hard Drive, having 8x slot (DVD±R Dual Layer /DVD±RW/CD-RW), 15.6" LED, 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon
the feature I love most is HDMI… also it has a fire port, so less heat production…
I live in a very warm climate year round and it is expensive to run the air conditioner here. So, it is all about a fan on me and the door open. Some days very hot on me but tolerable with the fan. The laptop is fine. Apparently they optimized the heat production on this model. It has a fairly heavy fan that shoots air out the side. It has never overheated and I have left it to render for long periods without a crash.
The bright screen eats up a lot of juice. So you have to set it to powersave mode to get any decent time out of the batteries. (part of which is to set the screen brightness to low) I recently used it on battery power but forgot to switch modes and I only got about 3 hours out of it. They say 8 hours out of the two batteries but I think 6 would be stretching it in power save.
Overall, happy with this model.