Laptop for design.

[irneb]

at the moment General software ..photoshop and corel. only now i am looking at 3D and web software. since i need a matte based display i would rather get a proper power machine one time instead of gettign something weaker and then landing in a problem.

For those 2 the choices you've listed are way beyond required (probably even beyond recommended). 3D is probably going to be your highest demand software - there it depends from program to program (e.g. SketchUp is much more "lightweight" than Revit, but isn't doing the things Revit can do). Web? If you're just going to use a web page WISIWYG program like DreamWeaver - then that's even less power/memory hungry than the 2D editors, so I'd not worry too much about it.

Are you going to run a web server on your Laptop? You sure? Perhaps for development purposes. In which case you might want to up the RAM & hard drive and install a VM (i.e. a 2nd operating system running inside a virtual machine) for the server, that way you can pick-n-choose from many server OSs (including even Linux) and they won't interfere with the working of your "workstation". But I'd definitely recommend a true PC instead of a laptop for production servers, much more capability to extend stuff like disc space.

Whenever someone asks: "What PC/Laptop do I need?" The first step is always: "What do you actually want to do?" After which you need to choose the software which allows you to do those things. And then you look across all the software you'd need - listing their recommended minimums. Choose the hardware so it's on par or better than the highest minimum of your chosen software.

Note with 3D many of them require very good graphics cards. Some even require better than a high-end gaming card. Yet some "state" they require something awesome, but then when you test it you find it's not really the case. E.g. most AutoDesk products recommend Quadro instead of GeForce and FirePro instead of Radeon. But from my own experience if you go with an entry-level Quadro (around the same price as a very high-end GeForce ~R3000) the same priced GeForce will give you more performance - it's only once you get to the truly expensive cards (R10,000 + for the card itself) where there's a noticeable difference between a R3000 GeForce and a R12000 Quadro (same applies to AMD's Radeon vs FirePro's).

And that's usually the reason I steer clear of a Laptop as a graphics workstation. For the sort of 3D work I do it becomes exorbitantly expensive to get a decently performing Laptop in comparison to a PC.

As an example, we have one guy needing to travel to various countries across Africa and he needed a very decent Laptop to compare to his workstation in the office. His workstation cost around R30,000 total, but when we speced a laptop with the same capabilities we ended up with this: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellsto...n&s=bsd&cs=04&. And after configuring it to match the PC it was around $4500 ~ R48,000

[irneb]

Hi Irneb

This info u provided really was helpful. Also with a cuda enables gpu should make 3d rendering easier and more capable. I shall see what else i can find out .. appreciate the info you provided

You're welcome!

Anyhow, the cuda idea isn't bad ... but if the models are complex (like mine) the trouble is that the graphics card's RAM is too small to use as a rendering device. And moving data from the PC's RAM back-n-forth to the GPU's actually slows down the process rather than speeds it up - i.e. the massively parallel GPU is mostly waiting for the non-parallel CPU and bridge connections between RAM and GPU. So as long as the entire model can fit into the GPU's RAM then cuda "should" perform very well - i.e. similar to the real-time rendering inside games (which is exactly what it's designed to do).

E.g. the current project I'm doing now (http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showth...#post112853232) used all of 16GB just to open in 3dStudio - then when rendering it used an extra 12GB over that. When opening the working model in Revit it uses 13GB for just up to the podium level (i.e. below ground). Most graphics cards simply don't have that amount of RAM built in.

[adrianh]

Wow....those renders are mind blowing...

[Dragon]

HOLY HELL that really is awesome work,

well in the near future i do hope to do work that comes atleast 50% close to the type of rendering/ Designs you do i see what you mean, but for now im going to learn 3D so basics for now (might as well look at a machine)
but i still need a laptop for portability even if its not as good...

[Justloadit]

Looks like a magnificent project, but looking at the Discovery project, I just can not think negatively on the number of claims which are paid way late and rejected, I can now see where all the money is going to, and its not for medical benefits.

[adrianh]

Looks like a magnificent project, but looking at the Discovery project, I just can not think negatively on the number of claims which are paid way late and rejected, I can now see where all the money is going to, and its not for medical benefits.

Don't get me started on medical aids, banks & insurance companies!

[irneb]

well in the near future i do hope to do work that comes atleast 50% close to the type of rendering/ Designs you do i see what you mean, but for now im going to learn 3D so basics for now (might as well look at a machine)
but i still need a laptop for portability even if its not as good...

Yep, but this is what I'm on about. Doing those renders took all of a weekend (i.e. set 3dStudio to start on Friday and then got the PNGs on Monday) - this is where the parallelism comes in.

But actually making the virtual 3d model and setting all the materials & lights, adjusting levels and exposure, etc. took about a month - and this uses ONLY ONE SINGLE CORE on each change you do! Move a wall ... open Task Manager to see how many cores are actually working ... nope only one at 100%, the rest hovering between 0% and 1%! Thus having multiple cores (as on my current workstation: a dual Xeon X5650 6 Core - i.e. 12 true cores, 24 hyper-threaded, at 2.67GHz + 24GB 1600MHz RAM, GeForce GTX 560 Ti - cost around R30k) means squat for most of your actual work. What does help here is a fast Hz and fast+large RAM (i.e. upwards from 3GHz CPU and upwards from 1600MHz 16GB RAM). And this I've found works rather well on my home PC: i7-2700K @ 3.5GHz 4 core, 8 hyper-threaded, 16GB RAM, GeForce 480 (cost around R13k and 2 years older than the Xeon) ... to the point where I can edit stuff there faster (around 2/3rds the time) than on my workstation in the office, but renderings are around 2.5 times as fast in the office.

The "rendering" is only the final step (never more than about 10% of total time spent on the project, more usually around 1%). So the place where multiple cores actually help is infinitesimally small in comparison to where they DON’T. Then when you do those renderings it's also a set-and-forget action (i.e. overnight no need to baby-sit the process), not to mention you can use multiple PC's instead of multiple cores.

[Dragon]

Yes iread up on online rendering as well...was told it takes 2 to3 hours. Let me see what i can find out on that side...

I still need a matte display laptop though for moving around with... a power pc can always come later

[Dragon]

My bad not online. An interior deasign teacher informed me about online rendering

[irneb]

My bad not online. An interior deasign teacher informed me about online rendering

You can definitely make use of some on-line rendering. Just remember they're not cheap by a long shot. And usually cause extra issues making you less productive. As sample AutoDesk provides what they refer to as Cloud Rendering, when I tested it - it actually took longer to upload the model than it took to render it locally, and then you still needed to wait for the results to be emailed to you. And you needed to upload the model for each single image (frame / scene) you wished to render. But worse was that stuff like custom materials and lighting went all haywire. For small models using mostly built-in additives you might find it a good alternative. Best way would be to test though.

I still need a matte display laptop though for moving around with... a power pc can always come later

Matte displays are very nice in shaded areas - no reflections. But (be warned) they're worse than useless if any sunlight shines on them (even indirectly). I've found using a laptop while being driven around is impossible with a matte display. But "fortunately" you'd not do much work while running off a battery anyway - especially 3D stuff, it eats batteries for breakfast.