I was looking for a new mobile workstation mainly to use with Rhino 4, for a little time until I can learn Rhino 5. Also for rendering purposes I use V-Ray for Rhino (latest). The laptop I can buy with custom specs from where I live is an HP Elitebook 8570w with i7 (4 core), 8GB Ram, 500 GB HDD (7200RPM) and for the future I will use mSata SSD if it is supported. The problem is that I don’t know what Graphics Card to use so I won’t have laggs or the render becomes too laggy and time waste. The options are : Quadro k1000m / k2000m and AMD FirePro M4000. What of these 3 do I use ?
Currently, the CPU does all of the render calculations, not the video card. The video card is helping you navigate the viewport and avoids lags in movement … not in rendering.
Until recently, that is. The new nVidia Quadros K series (Kepler) allows for use of the GPUs during rendering… a huge boost when it works.
Could you please specify what you are referring to? I am not aware of any new Kepler supported feature, because Nvidia has supported Cuda and OpenCL for years, but the render engines has to be specifically written to take advantage of this.
Personally I would go for the K2000.
Nvidia has much nicer AA linedrawings and the K2000 has more speed and probably more ram than the K1000.
I have an 8570w with a Quadro K2000 2Gb. It’s a brick (3.3 kg + a huge 150 watt charger), but it works very nicely.
I would double the RAM though (that’s cheap enough to do with aftermarket units and they just pop in).
–Mitch