notebook video cards...

[kdsudac]

I'm looking to spend between $1000-1500 on a new notebook, and am not sure what I should be looking for in videocards. I'm going to be getting a Masters in Engineering, so the most complex stuff I'll be using it for is for some CAD programs such as solidworks. Almost all videocards seem to have shared memory... is that OK for CAD applications? One model I'm looking at has a GeForce4 420 Go. Are there any particular metrics I should look at? Fill rate, frame rate? Any good resources for mobile video cards?

 

[Bateluer]

There are a lot of mobile video solutions that ship with discrete memory solutions, the M9, M10, GF4 Go Ti4200, the Mobile Quadros, and the Mobile FX5600s. For CAD work and such, the Quadros would be ideal. But I am not certain you can get them in the 1000 to 1500 dollar price range. My notebook has an M9 in it, which offers excellent performance to battery life, as well as 64Mb of dedicated DDR video RAM. I would not bother with the 420, its a pretty low performance chip, especially for CAD work.

 

[kdsudac]

Thanks, I've semi-ruled out any laptops with the 420 Go for the moment. Went and checked out toshiba's P25-s477 which has the Nvidia® GeForce? FX Go5200 ... the display was nice... but it has a 17" widescreen display and the thing was an absolute beast. Would have been nice, but it was just too big.

I checked out a Sony (FRV25) that has the ATI RADEON IGP 345M 64MB... looked on ATI's website and wasn't able to figure out very much about this. Is this a quality video card, or just a cheap solution?

Also, thinking about getting the Toshiba A25-s207 that has a Trident CyberBlade XP2 graphics processor... I've never heard of this, and googling it didn't seem to help much.

Finally, thinking about the Compaq X1000... I don't want a compaq, but it has a 15.4" Widescreen display, 1.3 Ghz Centrino, and the ATI Mobility Radeon® 9200 for a reasonable price.

What do you think?