Help to choose notebook for Fusion360

[takacsbalazs]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been searching the internet and reading Fusion360 forums for days, but I still need your help.

I’m currently using Fusion360 on a Dell Latitude 5431 with an i5-1250P and 16GB RAM, but it’s slow and not a great experience. So, I’m planning to buy a new laptop (desktop isn’t an option) that’s decent and won’t lag. I also need to do some local rendering. I read the system requirements, I think, my current laptop meets that, but it is still not pleasant.

I’m considering these 3 laptops:

• Dell Precision 3580, 15.6", i7-1370P, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX A500 4GB
• Lenovo ThinkBook 16p G4, 16", i7-13700H, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX4060 8GB
• MSI Stealth 14 Studio A13VF, 14", i7-13620H, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX4060 8GB

I like the size of the MSI, but the Lenovo might be better performance-wise for Fusion360 since CPU performance is important. Do you think these are good options or do you have other suggestions in this price range? Or should I go with some online virtual service, like Shadow?

I also use Corel regularly (which will run on these smoothly) and might start using Blender later on, so I would buy something which could be used for that as well

Thanks in advance for your help and suggestions!

Balazs

[HughesTooling]

Are you sure the slowness is not down to bad modeling? There are a lot of posts from people buying a new computer and being disappointed because it's not made any real difference. Fusion and CAD in general needs a fast CPU, single core speed is important as CAD is mostly single threaded.

Do you have any designs you can share for advice on the modeling techniques you're using?

Mark

[TrippyLighting]

Perhaps you can share some of your designs so we can evaluate them in respect to performance.

What exactly feels laggy?

I still can create performant designs on my 5 year old MacBook Pro.

[takacsbalazs]

Hey guys,

Thanks for your quick reply.

Most probably I didn't phrase my question correctly. Working with sketches or creating extrudes, other stuff is fine, sometimes lags a bit, but that's bearable. My problem is mainly when I want to create a drawing from a complex object with multiple components, or when I work with animations. In most of the cases the browser on the left goes to black for 5-10 seconds, which is not a lot, but if it happens with all new views inserted to a drawing, or all new manual extrudes in an animation, that doesn't feel good.

So I was assuming, that something more powerful would solve my issue and the whole experience would be more snappy. 

[HughesTooling]

Open task manager while you're working and see what the CPU is doing. I did see a thread where someone was complaining about rendering using the E Cores on an i5 that run slow compared to the P cores. Seems like you have no control over this so might want to avoid any processor with E cores.

Apart from that the fastest CPU you can afford but how much faster is it going to be percentage wise? Keep an eye on task manager and see how often more than one core is running at 100% then decide if more cores are going to help.

[takacsbalazs]

Thanks. I checked and it is interesting what I see.

CPU2 went up to 100% for a brief period of time, then went down, but Fusion360 seemed to be frozen, nothing happened, I was not able to do anything, only after ~2-3 minutes, when the 8 projected views were populated from the one in the middle. 

On the other hand it looks like the memory is nearly fully utilized. Can that be the bottleneck and extending that would solve the issue?

[HughesTooling]

In the image you posted the CPU is only running at 1.56Ghz. What was the max speed it ran at and for how long? Is it throtteling back because of heat build up? Looking at the specs it has a turbo boost to 4.4Ghz.

[takacsbalazs]

Correct, it didn't really go above 2.8Ghz. Even if it is not hot (like after a fresh start after being turned off for a few hours) it doesn't really go to the max. Based on this thread this seems to be a known issue with this laptop and the solution provided didn't really solve the issue to most of the users. I have the latest drivers and BIOS, so that shouldn't be an issue either.