D830 Owner's Lounge

Let's see... At the time, I had the following programs open:

Adobe CS2: Illustrator (6 documents), Photoshop (batch processing about 4GB of images) and Bridge.

Maya 8

Outlook, Word (2 documents), Firefox (3 windows, 17 tabs).

And various explorer windows.

Call Of Duty 2, Quake 4 and Half-Life 2... just 'cause I could.

Running All of CS2 open has shown little to no performance degradation. Batch processing could be done simultaneously with various Illustrator renders... all while coding flash at the same time. I believe the Quadro series drivers are more geared towards performance 3D authoring applications (as opposed to high performance multimedia applications, aka games) and you'll feel the card helping you along on those terms. It won't be as powerful as the higher-end Quadro FX's but it's still something.

As for the Vostro vs. Precision M90 - you can always upgrade your hard drive. Buy the lowest spec you can get from Dell and purchase your choice of 7200rpm HDD from other suppliers. That's what I normally do with most laptops I get my hands on.

And as for the perfect notebook... it all boils down to what you want to do with it. Once you know what you want, you'll find your perfect notebook.

 

Hey Freefisheater

Thanks!! This is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. If you can run all those apps at once and feel comfortable that you aren't killing it too bad then the card may not be as bad as I thought.

I did spec out a m4300 and its around $500 more than the d830. What that gets you is a better video card, and updated architecture for what thats worth. Other than that the specs are virtually identical. I suspect the m4300 isn't worth the $500 more than the d830? Thoughts?

Cheers, and thanks again!
Jeremy

 

If you're going to be doing some hardcore 3D rendering, or a lot of other very GPU-intensive programs, the extra horsepower will go a long way. Look up a list of the various cards and their 3dMark05/06 scores, and it might help you out. Are you going to be using it exclusively for work? The Quadro in the m4300 might be a bit better, if only minimally.

Good luck with your decision! If there's anything else I can do to help, just let me know!

Michael

 

I will be buying this primarily for my work yes. My bread and butter though is Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, AfterEffects and Dreamweaver. I use Cinema 4d as an illustration tool to complement my other work and I am learning game modelling and texturing. So my point is that 3d isn't my primary focus, but that the card needs to be able to at least run C4D smoothly for basic to mid type work. I am also considering Acrobat 3d for some interactive web 3d work as well so the notebook should be able to demonstrate this tech without too much trouble.

As I discovered I can acutally spec out an m90 for cheaper than the m4300 so that may be an option to.

So you are 100% confident that the card works great with the Adobe Apps? Have you tried the cs3 suite? For animation and illustration? I know video encoding is more a cpu thing so I am sure the d830 is more than capable in that regard.

Cheers,
Jeremy

 

Isn't the 140M only capable of using 512MB even with the Turbocache? How are you getting that 840 figure?

 

If Adobe's suite is the question, I can say I've got absolutely no problems running CS2 at full speed. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of CS3 yet (as I don't have the money to make that investment yet - besides, CS2 is working just fine for me), so I can't help you there. I will note, however, that I lost Aero transparency in the Photoshop and Illustrator windows on about three occasions. Unfortunately, I can't replicate it so I have no idea what caused it. That bug, however, had no effect on the apps' performance.

I'm in advertising and special events, and I use CS2 primarily for collaterals layouting, perpective renders and area map layouting and plotting.

My Flash is still from Studio8 and I've had no problems with it at all.

 

Here's a snippet from the brochure:



So while XP can only Turbocache an additional 256MB from the system memory, Vista will allow the card to Turbocache up to 1GB total video memory, meaning it'll take around 750MB from system RAM.

 

Hey Micheal

You should really download the trials of cs3 and give them a whirl. Adobe, for once has done a really nice job with the updates. In particular, the integration with Flash and Illustrator and Photoshop is worth the upgrade price alone. NO MORE GOD AWFUL COLOUR FLASHES AND INCONSISTENCIES!!!!! Hurray!!!!

Its has taken me a long time to get used to Illustrator. I have been a die hard Freehand user until Adobe killed it

Anyways I have spec'd out it seems millions of variations on m90's, m4300's and D80's along with some Vostro's and Inspiron's and dollar for dollar I just keep coming back to the D830. I can't justify the $500 difference between the precisions and the latitudes and I want XP pro so that elminates Inspirons and the 1700 vostro. In the end the 1900X1200 option on the D830 pretty well cinches it over the vostro 1500.

So ladies and gentlemen we have a winner!!!! The Dell latitude d830 LOL!! At least for today anyways

Cheers, and thanks again for your help.
Jeremy

 

Woohoo! Congratulations, Jeremy! I'm glad you found what you were looking for. I also hope you'll be just as happy and satisfied with it when it arrives.

As for CS3, I'm currently running it as well - on my MacBook Pro (actually, it's my wife's, now). Yes, I like it very much - Flash integration and all the new interface updates are wonderful! I just wish I could afford a copy of it for my PC. It took me a while to get the hang of Illustrator as well - I was a Freehand user for the longest time, too. But now I find I like it much more than I ever did Freehand. And through the years, I've moved from tablet and pen to mouse to TRACKPAD and I still enjoy playing with Illustrator. Well, sometimes you just gotta get used to what you have, right?

Good luck with your order, once again! Let us know how it goes, okay?

Michael

 

WOW another Freehand user. Let me do the math here.....

That'd be 2 out of a possible 20 total Freehand users here in this forum

I still miss Freehand...sigh.. multiple page work flow is so much more efficient.. Anyways I digress. I won't be placing my order for a couple of weeks as things fall into place regarding money. So who knows what tech innovations might come out by then. Maybe Dell will have a m4300 deal running and I will get it instead

Anyways as I move forward I will update here so everyone can see what I end up with.

Cheers,
Jeremy