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Will this laptop handle Pro/E?

S

sils621

New member
Hello all,


I am now using Alibre Design which is pretty minimal. I can run Alibre pretty well on my laptop (though it lagsa little when working with fairly sizable assemblies that have 50+ part count). Today, my bosshas now suggested the possibility of upgrading my CAD software to Pro/Engineer (Wildfire 2.0).


My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a DDR ATI Mobility Radeon X300 PCI Express x16 (128MB). It's got a 1.73 GHz Pentium M processor with 512MB RAM.


My question is will this laptop be able to handle Wildfire 2.0 without gigantic delays when switching views or regenerating?





Thank you,


Sils
 
First off, 512 ram is minimal. The graphics card is not really a 'cad' card. Does it supprt open GL? 128 MB is also minimum when you want things to spin smoothly. At last i never liked M processors for Pro engineer. Even the M90 still has trouble with large assemblies. I would catch your boss in a good mood and ask a replacement 'workstation' laptop :) (M70, M90, Alienware, ...)


It will run, but productive?


Just talking from what i see at work where there is a M70, M90, Acer and my Alienware
smiley36.gif



Nick
Edited by: dojo
 
Hi all-

Dojo is rite, 512 of RAM for Wildfire 2.0 on a Precision 380 workstation (2.8Ghz Pentium 4 with an 128 MB PCI Express video card) cuased me alot of problems. I had to go up to 1 Gig or RAM and it still caused me problems. For Wildfire 2 or 3 I would STRONGLY recommend 2 Gigs of RAM minimum. This was enough to cease the famous Pro/E crashes for the most part.
 
Hey sils621,


Pro/E will kill your current laptop. The M90 does a decent job but I just got our IT guyto pop for this one:


[url]http://www.electracomp.com/product.php?productid=16249&c at=0&page=1[/url]


and it's pretty kick. It's got FX60, 2GB ram and a Quadro vid card. If I had to find a complaint it would be the somewhat 'vanilla' styling but the performance is outstanding. Battery life is better than I expected with an FX proc as well but not the best.


1GB RAM was enough for our CatiaV5/NX apps for the longest time but I do like having 2GB - it seems things load a littlefaster.


At a minimum, get a current middle of the road processor,a quadro card, and 1GB RAM.Pro/E is a hungry app - feed it right and you'll be rewarded :)


Hope this helps.
 
Oh, my poor laptop =(


Thanks for the replies guys.


I don't think my company's going to shell out for a 3,000 bucks laptop. If they really wanna push to change our CAD software to Pro-E, I foresee desktops being given to us engineers. We could probably get a better price for the same amount of processing power. I guess it makes sense--I haven't had to go to another facility to CAD--mostly it's just hardware installation/troubleshooting that doesn't require Pro/E.


Well, I'll give my boss the facts and see what direction we go to.


Thanks again,





Sils
 
While $3k or so may seem like a big investment, remind your boss that with the increased productivity will pay for itself many times over in the first year.


Skimping on the most important tool in an engineering department is penny wise and pound foolish.


When I think of all the downtime/slowtime I've had on machines that were<$1000 cheaper than aFerrari as a microcosm, I'm no longer suprised at the state of American manufacturing in 2006...
 
and dont forget a numeric keypad !! If it aint on the keyboard, you'll find that a sepertate one is well worth its money


Wulfgang, thats the same one as ALienware and Sager are offering, btw. Same casing but the logo and i think they even share the motherboard


Greets


Nick
Edited by: dojo
 
Pricing in pounds for mine one year ago. I think sager is about the same.


Now i would definitly go for the quadro 2500 card and they ofer dual core amd workstations to now. My previous one was a dell 360 workstation, and I havent regreted one second i switched to the lappy :)


SI-EU24111
06/15/2005
 
I was looking at the Duo Core from Intel. Does this mean thatsingle applications performance will be improved? Or will dual core just help multitasking (i.e. having ten individual parts open for editing when you're working in an assembly)?
 
Im not sure. I think in the past Pro/engineer did not use dual processors effectively. (compared to for eg. UG). Maybe this has changed since the wildfire versions. I dont know to much about it so i cant give you a conclusive answer on that


Regards,


Nick
 
Hey guys, it's Sils again,


Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0 came in the mail at work today =)


After about...2 hours of licensing issues I got the thing to stop giving me license error. And, as I expected, Pro/E didn't even run on my video card . I was quite disappointed and so was the tech support guy I was talking to. He told me that I couldn't expect much on a non-certified machine. And that summed with the fact that I had quite a crappy laptop(well... at least that's how I felt after seeing what you guys recommended to me for Pro-E use, hehe) made sense.


So I did everything I could to improve my graphics card, starting with changing some openGL settings and whatnot. I finally updated my drivers and as a last ditch attempt, I tried opening Pro/E. It actually ran!


Not only that, but it opened one of the machines I was working on (50+ parts) smoothly! Hooray for being a properly equipped engineer!


Sorry, had to vent after hours of hoping it would work, haha.


Thanks,


Sils
 
Hey sils-

By the way, dojo WAS right. Pro/Engineer Wildfire 2.0 recently came out with a patch (for active maintenance customers) for optimized performance with dual processor machines. I think it was Pro/Engineer M050 build. So, it should be ok to use dual processors on Pro/Engineer after this release.

Thanks.
 
I just purchased an HP Media Center 3.0 Ghz, 1.5 Gb ram, etc. $1,850 from Sam'sClub, INCLUDING a 21" wide screen flatpanel w/speakers.Runs WF2 like a dream! I am designing a table saw and am about done. Spins the whole thing like it was a simple block.
 
Update:


So today I had a chance to be introduced to a robot which was great until I got a chance to look its CAD model. Oh man, haha, this beast was huge and my computer was not happy about it. Once I had it onshaded view mode I could spin it without any video/cpu lagging. But once my cursor hovers over the entire assembly (which would trigger the highlighting of the wireframe) it's game over for my little laptop, hehe.


For now I don't need to work with the robot's CAD models so I guess I don't have to be able to open this thing smoothly. But it would have been nice to have a PTC approved laptop that could handle such monstrosities=)


Maybe when I get those student loan officers off my back I'll be able to afford such luxuries!
 
Pro/E support for dual processors hasn't changed - it doesn't. It's a single-threaded app.


Mechanicathoughwill utilize dual processors and/or dual cores. Mechanica is multi-threaded.


"PTC Approved" means very little. This is really only certifying drivers.


Sils, wireframe mode is what separates the men from the boys so to speak - this is where pro graphics and gaming cards part ways. You need a professional solution to get decent wireframe performance. Gaming cards are geared for textures which is why they can give decent performance in shaded mode but they fall flat with AA wire gen.


Wouldn't it be great if we could get one card that would give great performace in both F.E.A.R./HL2 andPro/E? Maybea card that automatically switched drivers based on the application being accessed.


As far asgetting "great performance" from an HP media center PC from Sam's:


Wait until you open aREAL Pro/E model - better have an extinguisher on hand :)
 
Haha Wulfgang I know what you mean--it's what happened to me when I opened up this robot! Thanks for letting me know about that PTC Approved meaning. I thought that they tested the performance of the cards itself rather than just the drivers. I should've known it would be something like that.
 
Wulfgang:


So, what constitutes a "real" Pro/E model? My table saw has nearly 200 parts and assemblies. Not huge, but certainly not small. The blade tilt mechanism can be tilted from 0 to 45 degrees within 1 second in shaded mode, and 1-1/2 seconds in hidden line mode. Too long?
 
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