Dell Mobile Work stations

"Doug" wrote in message news:iExti.32567$_d2.12917@pd7urf3no... I am looking to upgrade my Dell M-60 mobile workstation to a new Dell mobile workstation. My options are M90 and M4300. PTC rates the M90 as only supported for Wildfire 4.0 and the M-4300 as certified. The problem is with the graphics cards. Dell offers only an NVIDIA Quadro FX 360M for the M-4300 and a choice of NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M 512MB, 2500M 512MB or 1500M 256MB for the M90. The M4300 has a slightly better processor.

Nvidea lists the Quadro FX 360M as an entry level card. All the cards offered for the M90 are listed as "high end" cards.

The mantra of PTC has always been to buy the best graphics card you could afford for ProE.

Has anyone had any experience with either of these machines or seen a benchmark test for them? At this point, it looks like the M90 is the best option but it is an older model and, again, not certified for Wildfire 4.0.

Thanks for your help,

Doug

Well, for $1600 for the 4300 I don't really see much sacrificing vs the M90. And the graphics processor isn't as bad as the shared memory, but still might not be that bad with DDR2 system memory and 667Mhz bus speed. For an application like Pro/e, you might not even notice the difference. Depends largely on what you use it for. Hell of a deal, for the price and at least good enough to get someone to come out and demo one with Pro/e on it. The only thing I really wince at is Core 2 Duo from Intel ~ tremendous overhead and no benefit for Pro/e, just 3 nearly unused processors churning, for the most part, garbage. Please, somebody prove me wrong, show me how I can run Pro/e on one of these beasts and actually benefit from its muliti-processor, multi-threading, multi-tasking environment. So far, I don't see it. I wouldn't even waste my money on a Core 2 Duo M90 (unless PTC finally pulled its collective head out of its corporate ass and finally started writing code to take advange of '90s technology. I'd be ecstatic if they finally decided to embrace the GUI revolution of the '80s [e.g. when will we ever be able to drag/drop a view from one drawing sheet to another or even just see two sheets side by side, something Windows software could do 15 years ago]). That Pro/e grew out of Unix and is both uni-threaded and uni-tasking is a sad legacy. But one that Pro/e carries today, and is hampered by, when confronting technology only dreamed of 20 years ago, when b-rep solids and parametric solid modeling were born.

David Janes

David Janes

Wildfire 4.0 is still in preproduction. There is no such thing as a "certified" computer for it as far as I'm concerned until it's released. Also, Dell nor any other vendor doesn't send every computer model in for certification or else they'd be paying PTC a whole lot of money for certifications that wouldn't help their sales much. IME, if the graphics card is recent and the computer or one almost identical to it is certified to the current release or the one behind it, that's about as good of a guarantee as can exist.

I wouldn't worry mucha bout the video card on-board ram. That is for texturing, which most Pro/E users never use. You want the best graphics processor really, and plenty of system ram. The slight downgrade in system processor on the M90s is a nonissue, if the difference is even measurable.

I think you want an M90. The M4300 seems to be an in-between - maybe good for graphics work or 2D CAD, but not really 3D CAD. Lots of sizzle but less steak. So I'm not sure the newer model is actually better. I am curious about the solid-state hard drive option in the M4300 though. Disk performance in general drives me nuts on a laptop, so anything faster is welcome.

Dave

Thank you both for your input. It never seems to be an easy decision to get the biggest bang for your buck. Doug