Question about choosing videocard / laptop (sorry if in the wrong section)

[xkoeckiiej]

My employee needs a new laptop primarely for inventor and other "heavy" programs.
I was thinking about a video card like

NVIDIA GEFORCE 780GTX SLI ( 2x4GB DDR5)
or
AMD RADEON 8970M CROSSFIRE (2x4GB DDR5)
or
NVIDIA QUADRO SERIES

all above with intelcore i7 4800/4900 and 32gb ram.

Wich 1 is best? and is it waaay better then the others?

or
Macbook pro laptop

Or if you know a good / super laptop please say so to 🙂
We got a €3000 budget.

THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR THE REPLYERS!

[blair]

A good "Gaming" laptop will run IV well. Good gaming cards such as you have suggested will run IV fine. When I am out of the office I have a Alienware Mx17 with a 660m Nvidia card and it runs IV fine. Go with at least 8Gb of memory and a fast hard-drive system.

No need to go into dual SLI cards as they won't get used by Inventor (not sure about Studio and rendering there) unless you have other applications that make use of them.

I know JD is running a Alienware Mx18 and loves it as well.

[spackle42]

As Blair mentioned, go with a gaming laptop.  Inventor uses direct3D for rendering (a bit oddball amongst CAD programs) but it has the advantage that cheaper 'enthusiast' video cards are just as effective as 'professional' series cards like the Quadros.  Alienware or the Asus ROG series would be winners.  More video card memory will help prevent the machine bogging down when dealing with complicated assemblies, so make sure to check this detail.

Max out the memory to extend the useful life of the machine (buying extra memory down the track is a false economy as it always works out WAY more expensive) and then just spec as high as your budget allows.

Also, remember that a 32 bit operating system will only be able to address 4Gb memory so a 64bit OS is a must.

Hope this helps.

[xkoeckiiej]

Thanks for the fast reply!
And i can get the sli for the same price as the 1 only card , so the more the better 😛

[xkoeckiiej]

Thanks for the fast reply as well!