GPU utilization in Eagle?

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I am considering upgrading my laptop. My current one overheats when I use Eagle, and it is sometimes painfully slow.

I am wondering if a gaming laptop with a decent GPU would have any positive effect on my use with Eagle?

Thank you!

[rachaelATWH4 · Accepted solution]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

I am considering upgrading my laptop. My current one overheats when I use Eagle, and it is sometimes painfully slow. 

---

What is the spec of your current laptop? I've run EAGLE on various machines from high spec to relatively low and it's not been a problem. Do you have additional screens attached? If so then you may need a better spec machine with a better graphics processor. I think there is a preference towards NVidia based graphics rather than AMD for EAGLE, I don't know if that is a genuine issue any more, my iMac uses AMD graphics and is fine with EAGLE. 

Also, have you got the latest graphics drivers installed and how much other software is running? How much memory is in your laptop, maybe it just needs a memory upgrade?

---

@Anonymous wrote:

I am wondering if a gaming laptop with a decent GPU would have any positive effect on my use with Eagle?

---

Is this for business use or is it your personal laptop? For regular use for commercial purposes I would buy a high end laptop that's intended for workstation purposes as they'll likely be designed for rock solid reliability rather than all out performance. I use EAGLE on an iMac and a MacBook Pro and it runs really well on both so that's another option.

I also run EAGLE on a Intel Atom based Gigabyte BRIX which is running Linux. The combination of an OS that doesn't needlessly sap resources and a lower end spec seems to work fine and although I haven't done lots of EAGLE layout work on that machine it's not been noticeably slow so if your current laptop is higher spec than a Gigabyte BRIX then maybe trying running EAGLE under Linux might be an option.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[Anonymous]

I'm using Eagle for a university project on my personal laptop, and I am
running two screens. I am planning on running Windows.

I often have more than one instance of Eagle running at once, as I display
older revisions of a board on the second screen.

Any suggestions on this? I've pretty much narrowed it down to either a
gaming laptop (for the GPU) or a mobile workstation.

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

I'm using Eagle for a university project on my personal laptop, and I am
running two screens. I am planning on running Windows.

I often have more than one instance of Eagle running at once, as I display
older revisions of a board on the second screen.

Any suggestions on this? I've pretty much narrowed it down to either a
gaming laptop (for the GPU) or a mobile workstation.

Thank you!

[rachaelATWH4]

---

@Anonymous wrote:
I'm using Eagle for a university project on my personal laptop, and I am
running two screens. I am planning on running Windows.

I often have more than one instance of Eagle running at once, as I display
older revisions of a board on the second screen.

Any suggestions on this? I've pretty much narrowed it down to either a
gaming laptop (for the GPU) or a mobile workstation.

Thank you!

---

Unless you're into gaming then personally I would go for a laptop that is intended more as a workstation but that's just me and your usage might be completely different. Just make sure it has a decent GPU, you get plenty of memory and I would go for an SSD too if budget permits.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[C.Nicks]

Back when I switched to Altium for a few months, my company had to invest in a high grade machine to handle the strain that Altium places on machines.

Switching back to Eagle, I've noticed that Eagle does not use any of the high end resources it has available. It doesn't use more than 1 cpu core, and never even goes above 12% even when it's running sluggish on a large design. Switching between the Intel integrated graphics and the dedicated Nvidia 870 doesn't seem to change anything.

I don't have the Linux perspective, but my 2013 MacBook runs it fine as well.

With all of this in mind, I would say currently the most important aspects of a new machine are RAM and hard drive access speed. So I would say find something with plenty of really fast RAM and an SSD, no need for powerful graphics (for now). Hopefully there will be more features added in the future that can take advantage of graphics and multithreaded cores.

If you do have any large designs that bog down movement, the only thing I can suggest is turning of polygon processing. That's the only thing that has helped me.

Best Regards,

Cameron