Laptops as workstation for working with Grasshopper

In September I will start to study at London Metropolitan University. For this reason I’m looking for a laptop that has the same characteristics of a workstation, with the opportunity to do great works with Rhino & Grasshopper and Cinema 4d(rendering).

I found this two good laptops!

Hp Elitebook

Windows® 7 Professional autentico 64
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-720QM (1,60 GHz, 6 MB L3 di cache)
8 GB di SDRAM DDR3 a 1333 MHz
SATA II da 500 GB a 7200 rpm
Scheda grafica NVIDIA Quadro FX 2800M con 1 GB di memoria video dedicata GDDR3

Price 2.200 Euro

SONY VPCF12S1E

Windows® 7 Professional autentico 64
Processore Intel® Core™ i7-740QM
8 GB di SDRAM DDR3 a 1333 MHz
Serial ATA da 500 GB a 7200 rpm
Scheda grafica NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 330M con 1 GB di memoria video dedicata GDDR3

Price 1.400 Euro

Looking at the price, I would buy the second one…but I would ask you one thing....Considering that using Grasshopper I will create really complex works, using a GeForce instead a Quadro processor could it be a problem??

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Saimon Conti on August 2, 2010 at 10:33am

for the same price i can suggest to take look the Lenovo Thinkpad series, really a professional workstation

Permalink Reply by dima on August 2, 2010 at 12:27pm

by no means I wanted to post any adds here, but just to suggest/save money for you... There is a place where I have bought my laptop (a friend of mine suggested me a while ago) www [dot] ibuypower [dot] com
they sell custom machines for gamers and the computers have real good parts + you can customize it the way you want (hardware wise)
I checked and you can build yourself a laptop w/ same specs as you are referring to for around 1600 USD (assuming you are talk about 15")
I'd also recommend not to overpay for a videocard - really depending on what you will be doing it might be unnecessary to pay lots since it is the most expensive part of the laptop. I have been doing GH for some time and I haven't had much trouble w/ 512 mb nvidia (unless the geometry goes astray - in which case it would be heavy for any existing card to keep up with)

Permalink Reply by Jon Malkovich on August 12, 2010 at 1:04pm

probably SONY is a better compromise. Price is good and perfomance is not worse than HP. Have also a look at Dell laptops.

Permalink Reply by Luca Biselli on August 12, 2010 at 1:10pm

Hello. In my opinion the best one in term of equipment is:
Dell M6500 Precision 17" with Quadro FX3800 and i7-720QM. According to my Cinebench 4D tests, Windows XP Pro is still faster than Windows 7 on this machine.
Fantastic Laptop workstation, with also a nice design.

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