That's a good question, Jerlin. Many people have "brand" loyalty but what I will focus on are some of the system components that are paramount in a mobile CGI system.

First, the processor. These days, I would recommend Intel processors over AMD for 2 reasons; power and performance. While a little more expensive, most of the Intel mobile CPUs over a performance advantage over AMD’s offerings while maintaining slender power requirements. Choose at least a 2GHz speed or higher and try and stick with the T7000 series Core 2 Duos. These support the 800MHz Front Side Bus (FSB), a large 4MB cache, 64bit OS support (good for XP and Vista 64bit) and incorporate excellent power management functionality.

Second, the RAM. Any CGI notebook should contain at least 2GB RAM, though many of the newest notebooks can support 4GB. This ultimately comes down to budget so purchase as much as you can as you can never have too much RAM.

Third, the graphics card. While I am more partial to NVidia cards myself, choose at least a DX10 capable card or greater and make sure it has as much RAM as possible. On the NVidia side this includes the GeForce 8000 series cards as well as the Quadro FX 360M, 570M and 1600M cards. The Quadros will incur a significant price premium compared to the GeForce, however, these are ideally suited to CGI applications and even required in some cases. On the ATI front, this includes the Radeon Mobility HD 2600 XT. ATI does not have a DX10 capable mobile card yet in the FireGL series, but I anticipate something will materialize in the next year.

The last component, the hard drive, is somewhat important, but this is an area where you can fudge in my personal opinion. Go with at least an 80GB drive and 7200RPM if you can. This will be speedy on various functions, but it will generate more heat and use more power.

Hope this was helpful.

Mark Kauffman
Technical Lead / PA
Project Visualization TEC
Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc.
Kauffman@pbworld.com

Howmuch this will cost approx.? If I run out of Budget which part I can tolerate?

I had experienced the difference of AMD over Pentium on PC! We couldn't even open an animated 3Dmax file in a Pentium machine which was done and rendered by an AMD machine. And also i've seen some sample works tested in different processors (from internet, i'll post the location later.) which states that AMD can handle much more polys than Pentium.

Meanwhile, which brand you suggest for the best performance ie. Toshiba, Dell, Acer, HP, Siemens etc. Because, all of them are using different brand Cards and components. ie, which brand suits your requirements?

Thanks in advance.

You should not see a difference in a scene file as a result of a CPU, though you can see performance or compatibility issues that arise from using one CPU or the other. For the most part, you should experience a greater level of compatibility when using an Intel CPU as most of the Windows (and now MacIntelitosh) applications are compiled using Intel’s compilers. As for one CPU that is able to handle more polys over another, I find this data highly suspect as software does not function this way between comparable CPUs. Yes, it might seem plausible if you opened a 5 million poly scene on an old P3  compared to a Athlon 3800, but you experience the same result if you compared an AMD slot 1 CPU (P3 era) to a Core Duo. In fact, each processor would work; it’s just that it would take a week to manipulate the 5M scene with the old CPUs. Take these types of reports with a grain of salt. You can only really trust benchmarks and even these can be suspect.

A little over a year ago, AMD was the king of performance until the entry of Intel’s Core Duo technology. During a project last year, we have just purchased a new Dell 690 workstation and were able to accurately benchmark it against our AMD Opteron based render racks. At the time, our AMD racks were easily between 150 and 190% faster than our fastest Intel Xeon workstation. However, once we put that new workstation into the farm, we noticed a 200% or great increase in render performance over the fastest AMD processor. With the subsequent release of the Quad core machines 6 months later, we saw again another near 200% increase in render performance (that’s 400% over the AMD racks). We were looking at dumping Intel at the time, but in hindsight, I’m very glad we did not. Ultimately, Intel’s Core Duo and Core Quad architecture is a hands down winner regardless of your choice of Desktop or Mobile versions.

As for brands, I personally like the Dell Precision workstations, but Toshiba and Sony make a good machine as well. HP used to be on my S*** list, but have since become more reliable and good performers. I’m sure that there are a few others out there that are manufactured by smaller manufactures, but I like a machine that has good backing, i.e. support, warranty, and an ample supply of replacement parts if I should need them. IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads are definitely on my s*** list as of late. These are quite possibly the most unreliable laptops I’ve ever worked with. I’m sure many of our fellow PB forum members who have had to endure the units we have here at the Denver project visualization office can attest that our t60p’s are raging pieces of garbage! My Dell Precision M70 is old, but what a tank of a notebook! This thing has been beaten hard and still keeps humming right along. I’ll take reliability over performance any day!

Cost, that’s another factor. Some systems will set you back nearly $3K, but a decent fast laptop can be had for under $2K. Go for CPU and RAM first, then GPU and finally hard drive. I am pricing out a replacement to the M70 that will run me about $2200, but that’s with a fast CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 256MB Geforce 8600 GPU and a 17” screen. You might also consider one of the Macbooks with the Intel CPUs running boot camp. I hear this works fairly well, though there are the occasionally driver stability issues on Windows.

I hope this helps.

Mark Kauffman
Technical Lead / PA
Project Visualization TEC
Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc.
Kauffman@pbworld.com

Many laptops are still sold with the 'Core Duo' processors. This is not the same as the Core2Duo processors. The Core Duo processors are a little bit older tech and don't have 64bit support. Core2Duo are the current generation of processors from intel (and core2quad, which is just 2 core2duos on the same die). Clock for clock the core2duo is going to be 20-30% faster depending on what your doing.

Many of the 'bargain' laptops will be the coreDuo processor, which I'm sure is left that way for ambiguous marketing.

Most big box store salespeople will have no concept of the coreDuo or core2Duo differences (or coreSolo or PentiumM or CeleronM for that matter, all of which are available in laptops (along with all the AMD flavors))

SJ

I am sure that not only me, but also some of the memebers have got a pretty good information about the Viz laptops.

Thanks a lot.