Autodesk Inventor

[#1]

I am looking to find a laptop for running Inventor 2012 on.

I have found several that have plenty of RAM etc, the issue is with the graphics card.

The ones i have found tend to have NIVIDIA Geforce GTX560 or GT520M, would either of these do the job.

If not could anyone recomend somewhere that I can find a laptop to run Inventor 2012.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You could find the system requirement for Inventor 2012.

http://usa.autodesk.com/autodesk-inventor/system-requirements/

And you could also check the graphic card is certifies or not.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/cert?siteID=123112&id=16391880

[#3]

I had already looked at the recomended and certified part of the site and the laptop spec matches everythign appart from the graphics card. I was asking if the graphics card spec that i was given would do the job.

I have not been able to find a laptop yet with a certified video card in it.

[#4]

For Inventor, only graphic card is limitation, we have no laptop to suggested.

[#5]

The video cards you mentioned are fine. The GTX 560 is my preferred.

[#6]

Did you purchase a system?  What exactly did you wind up getting and how satisfied with it are you?

[#7]

I’m also looking for an Inventor capable laptop as an Autodesk Product Design Suite 2013 user.  By following the link provided by “jingy” it seems Autodesk is still tied to the Quadro line of graphics cards, as far as Nvidia is concerned.  Others who use Inventor and post here have stated that they successfully use high end gaming cards, which are a lot cheaper and provide excellent performance and results with Autodesk products.  They generally believe that Autodesk has a vested interest in researching in depth the Quadro line and therefore doesn’t have the resources to investigate the compatibility of gaming cards or to design their software to be compatible.

The following is a link to a laptop with claims of being able to run Inventor.  The specs seem to confirm the claim:

EUROCOM Configuration

This is a rather interesting link that behaves quite differently than any other I’ve accessed.  It takes you to a web page where you can select the laptop configuration for your needs.  It does have processor speeds well over 3 GHz and all other specs exceed Inventor requirements.

It is a bit pricey, unless for you it is no object, and somewhat like Dell, the more features you add the more the price escalates in a hyper inflated fashion.  I usually start at specs like this and back down to some minimum that will do the job from another competitor.

Note that this is an English company.  I haven’t looked into whether they have US sales offices.

[#8]

I am running 2013 fine on an Alienware 18" with game card. (specs below)

[#9]

Thanks for your input.  Have you challenged your system using Inventor with any models having, say, 5000 parts or more?

Incidentally, besides EuroCom, I looked at what Dell has to offer.  Their pricing and features are comparable to EuroCom, and they are US based.  A workstation laptop is about $3000 with minimal add-ons.  The EuroCom seems to have a little bit better specs including higher processor speeds, more memory capacity and higher end video card options.

One thing I noticed about Dell is that they use the optical drive bay if a hard drive is selected, so that means an optical drive cannot be added.  Otherwise an SSD drive is standard and an optical drive can be specified.  I guess the option then becomes a USB flash drive for removable storage.  I’m not sure at this point whether SSD drives are a good idea from a reliability standpoint.  A hard drive will usually give some hint that a failure is about to take place and the user can back up before the drive becomes unusable.  I suspect an SSD will give no hint of failure until all of a sudden it stops working.  On the other hand most who comment on SSD drives say they last longer.  In a laptop they will generate less heat, which is a plus.