I’m finally upgrading to a newer laptop, and I’m looking at two options. I’d love to hear which one people would choose and why. Note that cost is a consideration.
Lenovo P16 Gen 1 (used, $1500 with 18 months left on warranty)
The RTX A5500 naming seems to suggest that it is a Quadro Ampere generation product:
The RTX 4000 Ada naming then states that this is an Ada Lovelace generation card.
The two may have the same CUDA counts, but I would think that the RTX 4000 Ada is the faster GPU on generation at the same CUDA core count.
I think this makes some sense in that the laptop equipped with the RTX A5500 also has an Intel Alder Lake CPU (12950HX), whereas the later RTX 4000 Ada version comes with the additionally later Raptor Lake CPU (13950HX).
The Raptor Lake (13950HX) is going to be the faster CPU on paper. However, at a full workload, it will depend entirely on the thermal solution.
The RTX 4000 Ada Mobile, in typical Nvidia style, comes with poor VRAM provision (12 GB) compared to the A5500 Mobile (16 GB).
Thanks for this. I’ve been weighing the variables, and it comes down to 1) a difference of $700, which is not a deal breaker but is something, 2) the age of the tech, and 3) the processing power. I have plenty of standard ram that I can add and external storage, so only concerned with gpu and cpu.
I will use the machine to model medium heavy scenes, and to do some test rendering with Vray.
Based on previous experience I think I prefer the 16 gigs of vram, but it looks as though the architecture of the ada lovelace cards allows them to do more efficient work with less memory. Do you know if this is the case with Rhino as well? Clearly the newer and more expensive laptop generally will outperform the older one: even with less vram the GPU has higher benchmarks, but I’m wondering if the difference will be negligible, or if the additional memory will specifically be a bonus when using Rhino. Confusing.