so Im finally going to buy a laptop computer to have something to use while I dont have access to my home workstation. This is not going to be for doing heavy work .... more for testing ideas in maya or realflow or trying some coding ideas. I am just wondering what processor will get me the most performance. The i5's have a much higher clock speed than the i7's. the i5's however are 2 core and the i7's are 4 core. I almost always do dynamics, so really the question is does siming in maya or realFlow take advantage of more cores/threads, or would higher proc speed benefit me the most.??

i5-560M (2.66GHz, 4 threads)

i7-740QM (1.73GHz, 8 threads)

the one advantage of the i7 is that that configuration allows for an nvidia card with 2gb of ram over only a 1gb card offered for the i5 conf. Again, that might not matter much in dynamics land unless im doing gpu related things...

Any help/ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Well its just a question of how much money your willing to spend really.

either configuratrion is within budget... the real question is if more cores/threads is actually gonna be utilized by the software mentioned, and in regards to simulation... faster rendering is of no concern...

Its not a easy question to answer, theres lot of other things to consider. The easiest is to try running on both machnies and then decide. However if thats not possible then ist not easy to say. See theres all sorts of complications on the way. The amount of memory and the motherboard capabilites play a important role here, as does the fact that do you expect the processors tobe run with OR without plugging the laptop to a power socket. The moterboard capabilities alone can tip the scales towards either of the solutions. Your personal workflow habits also play a wide role in what is going to be better.

So the processor alone does NOT say everything, bandwidth starwation is a real concern here. And thats not the sort of thing laptops usually are very good at handling properly in general. Second programs do not in general get a 1:1 speed increase per processor unless the problem can be easily bucketized into separate domains.

id consider the i5 my contention is this. 1 in most things you do outside simming its irrelevant. the i5 has alower power consumption and beteer suited for laptops. It has a faster single thread which makes many guis muh faster.


Now the graphics card. Dont get confused by how much memory they have on board what is more important is what CHIPSET they are built on.

>> just to test things while not available to use a big workstation. the 24core 48gig ram workstation i used at the studio is
>> MUCH more suited for siming..

and so what you do is you use the laptop with your gui. Then make a ssh tunnel to your workhorse send the files there over the network and retrive the results back.

cool. this is what i was thinking. as far as having a faster clock speed in general being more useful... its a pretty big difference, almost a gigahert.! and ya, i know ram isnt always the dominating factor in a video card, especially for siming. I dont even know what the specs are, in detail for the mobile cards offered, as far as cuda cores and whatnot... I will probably go with a maxed out i5 setup then... I found a company called segar, i think, that had ridiculously powerfull laptops, but they had absolutely horrible battery lifesapns, and were very bulky/heavy... Thanks for the input..

E.