Dell Precision M2300 underpowered graphics Card???

Hi all, i'm new to the forums and was looking for some advice, specifically from a CAD perspective.

I'm doing a postgrad industrial design course and need to buy a laptop to use for day to day work in the design studio. I do a fair amount of solidworks modelling and rhino work as well as photoshop and illustrator work. I have a precision 390 workstation at home which can handle any very intensive work i need to do so i am looking for a laptop i can use day to day with all my programs but is light enough not to be too much hassle to lug around.

I am looking at a dell M4300 or m2300. I am very attracted to the light weightness of the m2300 but i'm concerened about the graphics card (quadro fx360m 128mb), i use the quado range and they work great with solidworks. I am not sure whether the 128mb will be enough to run cad smoothly. I have the quadro fx3500 in my workstation that works really well for what i need and that is only 256 MB.

Does anyone have any hands on experience of how these perform? i can't find any benchmarks using this card and i'm not sure if it will cause me grief. I generally do surface modelling and relatively complex multi part bodies but don't do large assemblies much.

can anyone give me any advice, i'd like to go for the m2300 but if the 4300 is going to be significantly better i'll go for that instead.

thanks
rich

 

They are both based on the 8400GS core. Idealy you should be looking for something with either FX570m or the FireGL V5600. The T61p and HP8510w are both good options.

Have a look at the Professional mobile GPU guide. (link in sig)

 

thanks jonny
I'm fairly price sensitive on these so its quite hard to pick the best option.
what sort of comparison is there if you get a better cpu and ram witha slower card
for example would you get similar performance from a
1. m2300 with 2.6ghz processor 4gb ram and 360m card
2 HP 8510w with 2.2ghz processor and 2gb ram witha 570m card

would they have similar performance because of the better card?
What do you think of the M4300?

thanks for your advice

 

The card is ususally the ''bottle neck'' so a better GPU would be far more benificial. The T61p's price is pretty low, probably the cheapest option.

The 4300 and the 2300 have the same 360m card. (4300 has 256mb right?) Their difference in performance won't be too big.

 

hey....go for the dell precision 6300
http://www1.ca.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/precn_m6300?c=ca&cs=calca1&l=en&s=biz

Actually I have both in my house right now and I'm testing them. I have one with a Nvidia Quadro 1600M and other one with a Quadro 3600M. So far the 1600m is beating the 3600. Read my thread here... http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=270305

Later

 

Both, meaning two Precision 6300 with Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 (2.50GHz) 6M L2 Cache, 800MHz Dual Core.

Works great with Autodesk combustion. I can't talk about other softwares.