TR Forums

Hi,

I am usually fairly up on computing tech and regularly read the forums here etc.. But I have to buy a lap top for my next job and find my knowledge of where to buy from lacking as I have always built my own Desktop PC's.
Time is tight and I have less than 10 days to buy the item so I was hoping some one could help me out. The sort of thing I am thinking of is listed below, but am open to your wisdom!!!

Athlon 64 3000
512MB ram minimum
15" minimum preferably widescreen format
ATI Radeon Mobility card or CAD card FireGL etc.. (with dedicated mem)

Also not sure what connectivity is required for some amount of future proofing, Wi-fi etc..

As you can probably tell from the spec it will be used for CAD work, actualling designing some bits of the next Boeign aircraft. I like the athlon 64's as I think this gives soem sort of future proofing and they should see a performance hike when windows goes fully 64bit, I also like the radeons for there cool so please help.

Also why are there no laptops with CAD cards FireGLs etc... or am I just looking in the wrong place! Even Acers Ferrai doesn't have an engineering quality card very strange?

I am also looking to buy a laptop and i think i am going to get this one.

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productprese ... ARRYA03RN4

Also i think you will be hard pressed to find a laptop with a pro vid card in it.

Thats a good machine, what do you think about the need for soem sort of Wi-fi capability? And yeah I reackon I am going to struggle to get one with a pro vid card to. ATI Radeon mobility's don't look too shabby though.

Merlyns Ghost wrote:

Thats a good machine, what do you think about the need for soem sort of Wi-fi capability? And yeah I reackon I am going to struggle to get one with a pro vid card to. ATI Radeon mobility's don't look too shabby though.

The need of Wi-Fi really depends on where you are going to use it. But anyway the machine i just linked to has Wi-Fi built in and has a wired gigabit NIC. So it really does have all the bases covered.

Working on the graphics side of things,
http://tech-report.com/onearticle.x/5880
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm ... 64189.html
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/product ... l=en&s=bsd

Products with Firegl and quadro graphics to look at. Not A64, but Pentium-M, which is more of a "real" laptop chip, so the selection's a lot better. Also, Quadros generally outperform FireGLs, as something to consider.

Thanks for the pointers, anyone else got any thoughts I could do with some more in put. I know for some of you its a bit of "broken record senario" and it doesn't interest you to repeat the same boring info. But I would really appreciate it?