ATI Radeon X1400 and Dell E1505

I need to purchase a laptop for home use. I currently use a Dell M70 at
work. I know that's one of the better ones for Pro/E, but I don't
want to shell out the cash (and deal with a super hefty laptop).



I am considering a Dell Inspiron E1505 (1.83 GHz Duo Processor) with a 256MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1400 graphics card.



I don't need this to be a perfect Pro/E machine. I'll only use it
occasionally. But I would like it to work. Does anyone know if this
system will work? Do other Radeon graphics cards in this family work?



Much thanks.

I would stay away from ATI. You should be able to find a Dell with a Nvidia Geforce, the Inspiron 9300 has one. That is my personal machine and works great for Pro as well.

I can get the E1505 much cheaper, and since I'm only occasionally using
Pro/E I'm hoping to make it work. As long as it works, I'd like to go
with it.

I don't know about that particular laptop or video card, but as far as ATI goes, my laptop has a 128MB Radeon Mobility 9700 that I used ProE WF2 on last year in college and it worked fine for me. But like I said, I can't comment on the X1400 specifically, only another ATI card.

As long as you do not need to use the MECHANISM Dynamics Option (MDO) from Pro/E you will probably get away witha ATI card most of the time. You may suffer from the occasional "unexpected exit" and some performance issues, especially concerning highlighting. When using MDO the story gets bad: highlighting takes forever, the system even becomes unstable. In our experience you would be better off using a standard G-Force card, which do not show major issues although they are officially not supported. For best stability you need to stick with the platform support hardware on the PTC webpages, I'm very happy with my HP NW8240 laptop (Centrino 2.13 GHz, ATI FireGL v5000 with 1920x1200 15.4'TFT, 2 Gb RAM), but I have to demonstrate Pro/E and MDO and MECHANICA to customers as part of my job.