Advance Steel on Laptop with eGPU

[AzzaRazzamataz]

Hello,

Very quick question, has anyone had any experience with Advance Steel on a laptop using an eGPU?
I know PCs are better and laptop 3d modeling is not ideal but its the situation at hand, anything to give it a boost.

Thanks.

[pendean]

What are the specs on the laptop so far?

And why, if I may ask, are you trying this? What problem are you trying to resolve?

[AzzaRazzamataz]

Current laptop is the HP ZBook 14u G5 with extra ram added (32gb total).

Drivers are all updated and performance tweaks made to Windows & Autodesk products.

Latest services packs & hot fixes installed for 2019 & 2020.
Advance Steel doesn't run that great on them. Tried Advance Steel 2019 & 2020 for two different users (same machines) both crash quiet regularly where the models are currently only small.

Even plane old 2D AutoCAD runs a bit jumpy.

[pendean]

Onboard Radeon WX vid cards, correct?

What is triggering the crashes exactly? Find out what actions are being used, what commands, what sequences, very specific details are needed so others can replicate here with AS2019/AS2020 and confirm if the problem is the software, just a workflow issue, or your shared laptop hardware.

I honestly doubt an eGPU is going to solve regular software jumpiness and crashes (especially in two versions) unless you are receiving detailed error messages from the program or OS stating your video card/driver is having issues. But you can always go ahead, spend the money, then come back and tell us if that really fixed it all or not.

[acbsdesign]

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@AzzaRazzamataz wrote:

Current laptop is the HP ZBook 14u G5 with extra ram added (32gb total).

Drivers are all updated and performance tweaks made to Windows & Autodesk products.

Latest services packs & hot fixes installed for 2019 & 2020.
Advance Steel doesn't run that great on them. Tried Advance Steel 2019 & 2020 for two different users (same machines) both crash quiet regularly where the models are currently only small.

Even plane old 2D AutoCAD runs a bit jumpy.

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Hi,   

As the others said-it is hard to believe this is a video card issue. Unless it is defective and if it is-call HP, they will take care of it.

I have a similar HP Z G17 4K and it runs great for a laptop,

not a BOXX product, but it does the job even with 1,000,000+ pounds projects when away from my place.

Best I would recommend is call HP, even if you don't have a warranty left, pay a small fee, they are pretty good and responsive.

But in no case spend extra $$$ for eGPU if you run only AS2020.

Have a great day.

[Adrian.Mangan]

Hi,

From buying laptops and building a PC for Advance steel, in my experience a good GPU is necessary but not the most important factor, AS works off of a single core so you Processor speed is most important and also try not to work in 2D wireframe (like I like to use) on a larger model as the performance will change from using CPU to GPU when you rotate the model,  which will create a lot of stuttering. I have a 5 year old Lenovo Laptop which has been working great (not as good as PC of course). Bottom line is CPU speed is most important in my opinion, and you will need good GPU for rendering and other stuff. I put the P4000 in my new system and don't notice a huge difference, I would still put it in but if my budget was tight I would back up on the GPU to P2000 (newer versions out now.)

[AzzaRazzamataz]

That's correct it has the Radeon Pro WX 3100.
Lots of trial and error in the Radeon Pro settings to tweak the graphics to run as good as it can.

Most of the errors are the usual within Event Viewer:

Windows Error Reporting 1001 None "Fault bucket , type 0

Application Hang 1002 (101) "The program acad.exe version 29.0.162.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.

The only error that leaves a file trail is this one -
Application Error 1000 (100) "Faulting application name: acad.exe, version: 29.0.162.0, time stamp: 0x5b9b9c27
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2019\ASMFCT224A.dll

Which I assume is the shapemanager file?

We do have a different laptop coming in soon to benchmark against these ones, the Dell XPS 15.
Understand it does not have a "certified" graphics card within it, but really in the last many years I've never had a problem with non-certified graphics cards on PCs within Autodesk software.

Thanks again everyone for replying with your help.