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Need new laptop - Tiebreaker assistance requested


nickvaphiadis

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Ladies and Gentleman,

 

I've been getting infinitely frustrated with my current mobile Vectorworks solution so its time to upgrade. I have pretty much always been a windows guy but not opposed to a Macbook at all. There is a lot of conflict on optimization, ease of use, etc that I've considered over and over and cannot make a decision. For the amount of money each of these computers are I would really like to potentially future proof as much as possible as well. I can consult the equipment list that  Vectorworks has published but I would really like some first hand info from people who have used similar equipment.

 

I have a well spec'd desktop computer that I do a lot of the work on, but I need something that won't turn its nose up at me if I need to render a file while I am away from my desk.  I'm aware that laptop solutions will always take longer, and stay hotter, but i'd just like it to do this with the fewest amounts of crashes in between attempts. My current situation has it auto saving after each action. Current computer is a Razer Blade 15" i7 8750H, 16GB Ram, RTX 2060 6GB. Thermals throttling is absolutely horrible and it crashes constantly, tried it all. 

 

I appreciate any help in advance thank you guys!

 

The two laptops that I have in my sights are:

 

2020 16" MBP -

Hardware

2.4GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz

32GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory

1TB SSD storage

 

Or

 

Lenovo P53

Intel® Xeon® E-2276M with vPro™ (2.80GHz, up to 4.70GHz with Turbo Boost, 6 Cores, 12MB Cache)

Display Type

15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS, anti-glare with Dolby Vision™ HDR 400, 500 nits

Memory

32GB DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 16GB) ****I believe ECC ram is available for this computer as well, if that is something that is worth it for Vectorworks***

Hard Drive

1TB SSD PCIe

Graphics

NVIDIA® Quadro® RTX 5000 16GB

Edited by nickvaphiadis
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I would always choose the Windows over the Mac as you tend to get more bang for your buck, unless you are committed to the Mac sandbox of accounts (icloud/itunes/apps etc).  

But I don't think you are going to get a lot of bang for your buck with your windows laptop either from a VW point of view.  The quadro is not going to give you better performance than a GeForce, it might cause you more problems because of driver support.  The xeons are great but again I don't think you are going to get better performance than with a higher end i9 or whatever they are up to these days.  

 

I use high end MSI laptops for my mobile work and found them to be pretty great laptops.

 

 

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I would always choose the Macs over the Windows ....

 

🙂

 

As VW runs great on mac.

The 16" MBP is exactly the specced as I would do.

 

The Lenovo Specs sound similar "Pro", reliable and not bad.

Depends if you have otherSoftware beside VW, that will use or even need the Quadro Drivers.

It is just that you may get the same mobile PC power and Specs, for VW only, a lot cheaper if you go

with consumer parts. Like iX CPUs, standard RTX GPUs and standard DDR4 RAM.

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Interesting takes. 
 

At the moment I only use Vectorworks so other than that it will just be a general use laptop. I had always heard amazing things about the quadro cards but mostly in reference to friends that do editing. So perhaps I’m off base. And after looking at the fine bench scores for that particular Xeon vs the i9 counterpart it doesn’t seem to be a huge notable difference in multi threaded performance. 
 

I saw that Lenovo carries isv certifications for vectorworks though so I wasn’t sure if that meant seeing there is very little information past just stating it exists. I’ve been leaning Mac just because in 95% of the videos and tutorials and stuff I watched when I was learning the software originally and nearly every webcast that’s done the people use Mac. Not to mention there are people that say they use the same MacBooks for years and years. 
 

i appreciate the feedback. I’m just conflicted. Might be time to take a leap. 
 

As you said, that Macbook is what you would do. That said how do you think these do in the heat department?  Unless the fans on this razer are cranked all the way up the cpu is always boiling regardless of work load. They are built fairly similar so I’m worried that noise will always be cranking in my ear. 

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In the interest of sticking with windows i gave the Lenovo a shot. It was hot garbage so i returned it and my mbp will be here today. 
 

I went with a Max’d out p73 and it thermal throttled all cores down to 500 mhz under base clock at full load despite the package temp only being 65*C. 
 

lesson learned. Thanks for the help guys!

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