I am wondering what is a the best budget choice for a laptop to run Rhino 6 for windows. Thinking about a budget of 600-700€
This is for a student that now has an Asus with built in intel HD5500 with only 1GB memory. This system often hangs when using Rhino and the video driver from 2016 can’t be upgraded anymore. I tried intels 2019 driver but it seems this laptop doesn’t support it.
It depends on what you are doing. Rhino even works well on weak machines. When modeling geometry there really is no big problem.
When I was a Student 10 years ago, I also had a tight budget. But still I could run Rhino and Grasshopper quite satisfactory. The difference is just that you need to wait longer for a Solution or Rendering to be computed. I think there is not much of a difference in that price range. You may look for higher RAM and more single core performance. Onboard graphics are not nice to have, but today they at least have enough power to run everything smooth enough. My cheap and old 600€ Asus laptop 10 years ago at least was good enough… If you run in performance issues, then its more likely a reason of too heavy data or inefficient processing of it. But thats also indicates you are doing something wrong. But then a better laptop doesn‘t do things much better anyway. That laptop still runs for my linux projects. Reliability also matters! Although I wouldn‘t have thought about getting this from Asus…
The student has had issues even doing very basic stuff (doing the Rhino level 1 exercises). It’s certainly not the geometry or heavy stuff, I am quite sure it is an openGL issue, as the system just locks up after shorter or longer Rhino use. She had worked with IronCad on this laptop without any issues. Other than with Rhino the laptop is fine. Now that I think of it, I’ll ask her to try to disable GPU tesselation, maybe that makes a difference.
ok, but that wasn’t Rhino 6. Rhino 6 just demands much more from the graphics processor.
No I was testing Rhino 6 on it. I just bought a new laptop 3 month ago. I was never a big fan of laptops (too expensive for the power you get), but since I had to sacrifice my hobby room for my daughter, I decided to replace my desktop pc with a “high-end” laptop. I really don’t think its normal that she has performance issues with tutorials. There must be a hardware or software related issue causing this!
check the hard drive activity, I 've been seeing similar problems on windows 10 laptops recently. the update orchestator service tend to use the HDD to the 100% and I don’t know why it only affect the Rhino workflow.
about the drivers, you should look in the asus page since the onboard drivers are commonly modified by the assembler. that’s why the intel drivers doesn’t work.
Most schools now have render farms. So buying a laptop for rendering can be a troubling question. That just means you need something to render low quality. Which is just about any laptop.
Buy a 2017+ laptop on fb marketplace in good condition (preferably from an old person lol) and then switch the HDD to a SSD. And consider bumping ram to at least 8gb. Find something with min 6 cores.
I’ve been running rhino on around these specs for 4 years(because I’m a student and don’t feel like buying a new laptop). And never had problems…forewarning I’m not a tech guy so I know these “specs” prob aren’t ideal, but they work for a really good budget ~350
I’d try to find a i5 or i7 processor. i9’s won’t give you much benefit in a laptop form factor generally. i5 is where I would consider the sweet spot for budget laptops. if its a ryzen try to get like a ryzen 5 3600. CPU is defiantly whats most important in terms of specs. Don’t even bother looking for gaming ones with dedicated GPUs. if you want to game on it later maybe get one with a thunderbolt USB type C connector. That way you can get an external GPU later with almost no loss in performance. Other than that get no less than 8GB and make sure you can at least change it to a SSD. HDD don’t last long on Rhino laptops. In terms of brands I’ve found Dell to be the best in recent years.
Thanks all for the replies. I think I’ll ask her to post her system info here and see if somehow this can be solved without investing in new hardware.
@DiegoKrause thing is that once it locks up all that can be done is a computer restart so can’t monitor anything then. The latest driver from ASUS directly is unfortunately from 2016.
It seems disabling GPU tessellation has actually solved the issue completely. So no new laptop was needed.