Hi all,
I need to purchase a new laptop for my office that can run standalone .exe models effectively. The primary use will be to transport to clients’ homes for remote presentations of our enscape models and drawings. It is not a workstation and will not be running Revit simultaneously, we have beefier desktops for Revit/modeling production. The max amount of windows open at a time will be an Enscape .exe file and Bluebeam Revu for PDFs, possibly a web browser as well. We currently have a total brick of an Alienware gaming laptop from 2018 and it performs great, but is a bear to travel with. Hoping to swap it out with something more mobile even if performance takes a slight hit.
I know there are many threads regarding best specs for laptops, but in this case I really do put a premium on portability given that it is not a primary workstation. I’m considering the Dell XPS 15 with the NVIDIA RTX 3050 or even 3050-Ti (which obviously jumps the price) card. Other specs:
Processor: 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-12700H (24 MB cache, 14 cores, 20 threads, up to 4.70 GHz Turbo)
Memory: 16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz
Will this be adequate for our needs?
Thanks!
@mrr227 , I hope it’s not too late but the mobile 3050 or 3050 Ti is a decent card for Enscape or its standalones - Keep in mind though that both models only have 4GB of VRAM available compared to its desktop counterpart which has twice that.
Can you maybe let me know with which GPU you’ve been working so far? If that GPU had more than 4GB of VRAM and you’re planning to use the same projects, you may perhaps consider getting a mobile machine with a card that also has at least 8GB of VRAM, if that was the case with your current card(s) too. Simply put, the larger and more complex your scenes, the more video memory is required.
Thank you in advance again for any further messages.
Going a bit beyond what Demian said, from what I have seen so far the requirements to run a standalone model are almost exactly the same as those for the in-editor Enscape views, which is to say it is more dependent on the GPU than the CPU. If you’re going to forego the modeling software entirely you’re probably better off going for something like an ASUS Zephyrus or other gaming-focused laptop that gives you more GPU power. They’re about the same weight as the XPS but designed to dissipate considerably more wattage and have higher end GPU models.
There are also 2023 XPS models that use the newer RTX 4060 and 4070 lines but they are significantly more expensive and still power constrained.
Best thing to do is to find your most demanding model - export it and standalone and see what the VRAM , Ram and CPUetc useage is compared to having the model open with revit.
I don’t think the difference in requirements will be so pronounced.