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ptc-1699471-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 8, 2013
Question

Laptop recommendation

  • October 8, 2013
  • 23 replies
  • 7916 views
Hi all,

Any recommendations for a high end laptop for running Creo?
Processor speed?
RAM: 16G or more?
Graphics card?

Thanks,
Stefan

    23 replies

    R
    RonGrabau1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 8, 2013
    It would not be fair for me to comment since I work for HP but these are the things you need to consider.


    1. CPU speed is important. I have been running some tests and the I7 Chipset is really good. (Ocus benchmark). I get better results with a laptop than an older workstation running a lesser chip set.

    2. Having a good graphics card is also important. Get one that has 2Gb of memory at least.

    3. RAM is really dependent on your work set. I plan on normal operating functions, outlook and such to take up at least 4 Gb of my RAM (I know a bit high but it gives some wiggle room) From there I would see what you need to bring up your assemblies and drawings. I personally would want 24GB

    4. Drive is the last item to consider. I REALLY like the newer Solid State Drives (SSD). They boot fast and access data fast. While not a big portion of your daily work, it still makes you feel like you are working faster when your computer boots and loads faster.

    Ronald B. Grabau
    HP PDE-IT
    Roseville, CA
    916-785-3298
    -<">mailto:->

    P
    ptc-3369081-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    November 10, 2023

    I think any Gaming Laptop is good enough for ant 3D software (Mechanical/Architecture Software/Simulation Software).

    For good performance, I would recommend 32GB RAM, GPU with 8GB dedicated Memory and good thermal management.

    A
    A.DelNegro1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 8, 2013
    Thanx Ronald. Since you work for a computer company, I was wondering if
    you could answer this...



    I was looking to upgrade my workstation. It has a Xeon processor. When
    I looked up my current Xeon chip on CPUBenchmark.net (using PassMark -
    CPU Mark benchmarks) it scores a 3951. When I looked up the new
    workstation's Xeon cpu it only scored a 3499. I was astonished that a
    new CPU would be slower and this would imply a new system would be
    slower. Could this really be true? My current system is 3 years old!
    I would hope that the newer CPU on a newer motherboard would be quicker,
    but how does one really tell based on this sort of test?





    Do you have an opinion?



    Regards

    Tony


    B
    23-Emerald III
    BenLoosli23-Emerald III
    23-Emerald III
    October 8, 2013
    You did not mention the clock speed of the Xeon processor. A 2.8Ghz Xeon will be slower than a 3.4Ghz, even if the 2.8 is the newer chip.

    The i7 series seem to be good for CAD work, too.

    K
    kevin.brault1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 8, 2013
    Pay attention to the number of cores. PassMark scores will scale with the number of cores but Creo performance will not.

    I have found it more helpful to divide the PassMark score by the number of cores for comparison purposes.

    Kevin


    J
    JonathanHodgson13-Aquamarine
    13-Aquamarine
    October 9, 2013
    You beat me to it, Kevin...

    Passmark actually has a single-thread benchmark score too:
    A
    A.DelNegro1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 9, 2013
    I looked at the speed... The old Xeon is running at 2.66 GHz. The one
    in the new workstation was only 1.8 GHz. It would certainly follow
    that it would be slower. I guess I'm just really surprised that if I go
    to a major manufacturer and order a brand new workstation to replace a 4
    year old workstation, I am not guaranteed better performance. Amazing!



    T


    J
    JonathanHodgson13-Aquamarine
    13-Aquamarine
    October 9, 2013
    Graphics cards (at least in the gaming market) are even worse.

    It's all too easy these days to buy an 'upgrade' video card that turns out to be slower than the on-board graphics in a relatively modern machine!

    Jonathan
    S
    23-Emerald III
    StephenW23-Emerald III
    23-Emerald III
    October 9, 2013
    Computer manufacturers have switched gears from speed to # of processors. You can get nice performance boosts from increasing the # of processors EXCEPT IN CREO PARAMETRIC and some other programs.

    You actually do get a bump with Creo on a few things like assembly retrieval and, well, that's about it. Of course, outlook and excel loads really fast too.


    I
    iceblink11-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 10, 2013
    On 2013-10-09 16:31, Tony DelNegro wrote:
    > I looked at the speed… The old Xeon is running at 2.66 GHz. The one
    > in the new workstation was only 1.8 GHz. It would certainly follow
    > that it would be slower. I guess I'm just really surprised that if I
    > go to a major manufacturer and order a brand new workstation to
    > replace a 4 year old workstation, I am not guaranteed better
    > performance. Amazing!
    >
    > T
    >

    The hardware peeps are doing their job. They hit the speedlimit for
    being able to empty the small capacitance within the cpu's and hence
    went to even smaller components. The latest machines use ultra-violet
    light for the manufacturing process in order to get smaller building
    blocks on the silicon. You won't believe how much trouble that causes.
    You need to work in vacuum, you need a special kind of lense, etc etc.
    The 'easy' way out is to create more than 1 core on each CPU. The only
    problem is that software makers have trouble adapting their software to
    use the multiple cores.

    Personally I think (but this is just a hunch) that PTC is pushing their
    direct modeling software more, because that will be easier to adapt for
    multiple cores. In the current parametric models, each feature has to
    wait for its predecessor to finish, i.e. only 1 cpu is of any use. For
    direct modelling I see some possibilities to use multiple cores at the
    same time.

    Best regards,
    Patrick Asselman

    "Guns Are One Thing But Phone Calls Are Too Dangerous To Go Unchecked"
    T
    TerryMcFall1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    October 10, 2013
    I always thought multi-threaded processing was a logical limitation of ProE (pardon me... Creo Parametric Two-Point-Oh). How can feature 1297 regenerate before feature 1296? Yes, other modeling functions take advantage of the extra processor cores, but (and correct me if I'm wrong) the longest wait times most often occur from simple model regeneration.

    And if this is true, then the fastest individual core processor is the Holy Grail of the modeling community since everything is going slower speed multi-core/multi-threaded.

    Does anyone know if other CAD programs such as Solidworks or Catia are limited in this way?

    -Ter
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