Video card advice

[TXS]

Looking at getting a laptop to run pro on. Have found a coulpe of systems with the 128Mb ATI mobility radeon 9700. Anyone had experience with this card (its in a Dell Inspiron 9200). IBM's similiarly priced system comes with a 32Mb ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, how about that one. Neither is listed in PTCs certified hardware, but then again none of the cards we are using now are either.

Thanks

MM

http://www.txsdesign.com/

 

[looslib]

WIldfire is getting to te point that uncertified cards just don't work anymore. The code writers are conforming more to the OpenGL spec and certified card specs.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
"Fixed in the next release" should replace "Product First" as the PTC slogan.

Ben Loosli
CAD/CAM System Analyst
Ingersoll-Rand

 

[HDS]

As a general trend the drivers for the Nvidia cards are better for pro/E than the ATI cards. There are exceptions especially for the CAD cards. Both Dell and IBM offer laptops with certified CAD cards.

I recently ran the OCUS benchmark on a Compaq laptop it had the same Athalon64 3500 processor as my desktop but a very weak geforce4 440go with 64mb dedicated video ram. The desktop has a quadrofx 1100 video card.

Desktop laptop
Total 855 1279
Cpu 427 441
Gr 390 809
Di 115 111

I would look for an athalon64 based system with a better video card. Of course there are lots of other factors like battery life to think about. This Compaq was around $1300 which is a very good price.