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AutoCAD & MatLab on Macbook Pro

D

DC Daniel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 6, 2011
11
0
The Netherlands
Hi,

I finally graduated this year and i'm going to study engineering (architecture (I hope i translated this right i'm dutch)). For this study i'm going to need a new laptop and I was thinking about buying a Macbook Pro 15'' 2,0 GHz with 8GB of RAM. Now i've done some research and it's really important that the macbook can run programs like AutoCAD & Matlab smoothly. So my question is, how is the performance of AutoCAD & Matlab on the macbook I picked?
THX!!
 
My 2006 MBP ran both those programs beautifully. Don't worry about it at all!
 
Okay thanks for the info :)
However i've heard from other people that because the AMD card in the macbook isn't a fireGL, CAD and Matlab run ''moderate''. Did your macbook have fireGL?
 
Sorry, I actually only searched google, ended up with not very useful info (a lot of info dated back to 2006/2007, some of wich were from MacRumors). So I pretty much assumed I had seen all there was to been seen. Also other people (not from apple dedicated forums) told me that my type of moddel could struggle with these problems because it's Videocard wasn't fireGL. So I posted here, thinking because this was a apple only forum, I'd get some useful hands-on experiences from people who actually used AutoCAD & Matlab on my type of MBP.
 
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DC Daniel said:
Sorry, I actually only searched google, ended up with not very useful info (a lot of info dated back to 2006/2007, some of wich were from MacRumors). So I pretty much assumed I had seen all there was to been seen. Also other people (not from apple dedicated forums) told me that my type of moddel could struggle with these problems because it's Videocard wasn't fireGL. So I posted here, thinking because this was a apple only forum, I'd get some useful hands-on experiences from people who actually used AutoCAD & Matlab on my type of MBP.
Click to expand...

I've used both like I said in the previous thread, I have yet to run into problems with either.
 
If you plan to seriously use the computer for engineering, plan on a Boot Camp windows install. I'm on the fence on even using Windows7. WinXP is still sadly the standard in the engineering world.

The native mac client of Matlab runs like crap. So bad infact, that i choose to run it in a Windows XP VMWare Fusion virtual machine inside of MacOSX and it runs much better. Running it natively in Windows is ideal.

I haven't personally tried the native mac AutoCAD client, but i've heard its also slower than the Windows client.

Beyond those apps, there is TONS of software you will be required to use for school that will simply not work in OSX. You will have headache after headache. The engineering world is simply not mac friendly. (I'm a tech savvy Mac fan as well an electrical/mechanical design engineer with 8 years in the real world)
 
DC Daniel said:
Sorry, I actually only searched google, ended up with not very useful info (a lot of info dated back to 2006/2007, some of wich were from MacRumors). So I pretty much assumed I had seen all there was to been seen. Also other people (not from apple dedicated forums) told me that my type of moddel could struggle with these problems because it's Videocard wasn't fireGL. So I posted here, thinking because this was a apple only forum, I'd get some useful hands-on experiences from people who actually used AutoCAD & Matlab on my type of MBP.
Click to expand...

I currently run AutoCAD 2011 for Mac. You are lucky because both of these programs run natively on OS X. AutoCAD 2011 runs beautifully (now). It used to be very spotty when it first came out. But after many updates, it now runs pretty smooth :)

Unfortunately, I can't say much for MatLab. But I've heard it was designed in Unix, so I dunno...hope this helps :)
 
TXBDan said:
If you plan to seriously use the computer for engineering, plan on a Boot Camp windows install. I'm on the fence on even using Windows7. WinXP is still sadly the standard in the engineering world.

The native mac client of Matlab runs like crap. So bad infact, that i choose to run it in a Windows XP VMWare Fusion virtual machine inside of MacOSX and it runs much better. Running it natively in Windows is ideal.

I haven't personally tried the native mac AutoCAD client, but i've heard its also slower than the Windows client.

Beyond those apps, there is TONS of software you will be required to use for school that will simply not work in OSX. You will have headache after headache. The engineering world is simply not mac friendly. (I'm a tech savvy Mac fan as well an electrical/mechanical design engineer with 8 years in the real world)
Click to expand...
Have you tried the 2011a release of matlab for OS X? All that slowness is gone.
 
I posted this thread, under the assumption that I was going to be using bootcamp. Maybe I should have mentioned that. And like you set, i'm going to need windows a lot, since I need other programs too that are windows only, like CAD from solidworks. Which reminds me, how is the performance of that on a MBP? :p
 
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