I’m not a computer guy, I’m an aircraft mechanic by trade. I’m also new to the CNC world. I have a Shapeoko XXL and am stumblimg my way through learning carbide create as well as fusion 360 for full 3D. My current laptop is a lenovo yoga 2 pro. It seems to perform some operations slow in F360, I’m new to F360 so I’m not sure if it’s my laptop or that is just how f360 is. I’m looking at buying one of these 2 laptops but I’m not sure if they would be any better for what I’m doing or which one to choose. HELP!
Under normal circumstances, I would recommend the laptop with the separate GPU however, F360 doesn’t take advantage of the GPU for rendering and relies only on the CPU. As a result, the nVidia GPU in the HP unit is largely out of the picture. Both the i5 and the i7 have 4 cores/8 threads but the i5 is actually running at a faster clock speed than the i7.
The Dell laptop has a larger display which may be useful in being able to see more of your dessigns without having to scroll around or zoom in and out repeatedly. On the other hand, the larger display means it is much less portable.
If it were me, and I only had these two options, I would probably go for the HP and take the difference in price and put it into a larger LCD monitor that I could hook up when I needed a larger screen area.
i have a yoga i7 2.5Ghz with built in graphic and 8gb of ram. the only ops that are slow is rendering and toolpath generation which is to be expected since theyre intensive.
Unless I’m mistaken, the Yoga 2 pro uses an intel i5-4210U. That’s a dual core processor running at 1.7GHz… While a lot of F360’s work is single threaded, the higher boost clock of 4GHz on the i5 should help there while the higher core count and base clock of 2.3GHz should help when parallelism is available.
Thanks for all the feedback. I ended up buying 3 different ones. I kept the one i liked best and returned the other 2. Here is whati stuck with. I got the 17.3" display model. On sale from $1400 down to $900 since this one in particular had been a return.