AMILO NOTEBOOK LI 3910 and Autocad

[montero]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm going to buy laptop Fujitsu AMILO NOTEBOOK LI 3910 for learning of Autocad 2D and 3D and similar application in future.(18.4 inch display is the reason)

I can get this one for less then £400.

Do you know that Mobile Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M (shared memory) can handle 3D acceleration for Autocad.

I can't find any information about this.

I don't want to spend hundreds of pounds for latest spec laptop, by the way.

[ReMark]

You do not want to buy a laptop that does not have a dedicated graphics card if you are anticipating doing 3D work on it.

[ReMark]

The laptop uses an integrated graphics chip (Intel GMA 4500M). That means it will have to "borrow" from physical RAM (of which there is 3GB installed) when demand exceeds capacity thereby slowing your system down. If price is really critical then opt to max out physical RAM at the upper limit of 4GB. It shouldn't be too much of a hit on your wallet.

 

Were you planning to have Vista or XP installed as the OS? Remember that Vista's "appearance" places some heavy demands on the system as well. You may have to dial back some of the features to gain computing power running AutoCAD and doing 3D.

[manhattan]

Remark has hit upon the main stumbling blocks of any CAD machine being the graphics card & RAM, and in the case of a shared memory graphics card they are somewhat one and the same.

 

I understand you dont want to spend vast sums of money for the latest specs but i would recommend looking at somewhere closer to double your budget for even a capable machine. Obviously i dont know which model you are looking at but the processors available for that particular range are all a bit lacking and i would aim for 4Gb RAM preferably faster than 667Mhz (which is not available in this range afaik)

 

I know this is not what you want to hear & largely im assuming what you want from the machine but bear in mind 3D work is very resource intensive. Quite a few years ago i made the mistake of buying a mid range laptop (pretty much the cheapest i could find with dedicated graphics card) for use with Alias Studio and IDEAS NX (now unigraphics) and it was really a waste of money. If id saved up for a bit longer i would've had something capable of doing what i wanted, instead i ended up with a machine which could only cope with my 3D models in their early stages before they got too complex