Well hello, and my first post on the forums! I recently made inroads to Rhino 6 as a new member of the design team at my workplace, coming from a TurboCAD and SolidWorks background. I’m quite the fan of small compact computers, but have a huge dislike of laptops (fixed screen, keyboard, trackpad, battery, etc). My current beau is an Intel 6i7KYK NUC (Skull Canyon) which happily runs a 4k display and has very reasonable 3D capabilities for what it is. Rhino 6 performs fantastically for the work I do, for now anyway.
Now, it’s entirely likely that I will have a guiding hand in a new desktop machine at my workplace. Generally they seem to purchase laptops, which is understandable being a straight from the box single product solution. I’d rather be a little more active and push for a NUC solution. Laptops get pricey in no short order, and are too inflexible.
My current shortlist at the time of writing (Q1 2019) is the top end of the current NUC lineup. That is the:
- 8i7HNK (Hades Canyon, Radeon RX Vega M GL, i7-8809G 3.1-4.1GHZ, 4C8T, 8MB)
- 8i7HVK (Hades Canyon, Radeon RX Vega M GH, i7-8705G 3.1-4.2GHZ, 4C8T, 8MB)
- 8i7BEH (Bean Canyon, Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655, i7-8559U 2.7-4.5GHZ, 4C8T, 8MB)
I’d suspect that the difference between both Hades Canyon NUCs are small when the rubber meets the road for Rhino 6. The GPUs are angled directly at VR and gaming, so I presume little more will be leveraged from them than from the (smaller, lower power) Bean Canyon i7.
So the real questions are;
- will Rhino (or even SolidWorks if anybody has opinions in that regard) benefit more from Bean or Hades Canyon, and under what instances?
- does the apparent hobbling in desktop performance from Meltdown/SPECTRE patching make newer machines less of an upgrade over say, my current 6i7KYK?
I’m asking more or less the same thing over on the SolidWorks forums and will feed anything useful from that conversation into here.
Cheers!