hey all-
i'll be heading back to school this year for a graduate ID program after working as a ME/product designer for 8 years. the students in the program recommend a macbook pro for ease and speed of video editing, etc, and i was thinking of getting a MBP 15" i5/Nvidia GT 330M 512MB combo. however, i don't want to give up the occasional ability to do Solidworks/ProE on 3D bodies with complex surfaces given my background, and i am concerned that the lower end graphics card will give me problems. please help to educate me on what I can expect from this card.
I will use external screens at home for design work and as a student the portability is a must for me. i figure that i'll have access to school labs with both windows and mac systems to use for those instances when i will need the heavy lifting for rendering with textures, etc....but due to ergo issues, i would prefer to use my own optimized set-up at home as much as possible....so really my hesitancy with going to a MBP boils down to the graphics card.
my question are:
1) Is 330M a comparable graphics card to the 9600 in previous models for my design needs?
2) has anyone who has used the 330M or 9600 with solidworks used it for rendering or complex surface modeling and what were the results? under what load does the system start to get stressed?
3) am I going to notice a performance difference between 256MB and 512MB on this low end of a graphics card?
answers to these questions will help me to make my decision, rather than a recommendation w/o supporting info. i can't imagine that i will be working with assemblies over 50 parts while in school, but with a focus on industrial design I imagine that the parts will have complex surfaces with tapering and blends rather than orthogonal surfaces. i'm really concerned that this graphics card will not be sufficient for my design needs, as i have always used high-end graphics cards on my windows machine. if you can share what types of models you work with on the mbp, that would be very helpful too.
thanks!
i'll be heading back to school this year for a graduate ID program after working as a ME/product designer for 8 years. the students in the program recommend a macbook pro for ease and speed of video editing, etc, and i was thinking of getting a MBP 15" i5/Nvidia GT 330M 512MB combo. however, i don't want to give up the occasional ability to do Solidworks/ProE on 3D bodies with complex surfaces given my background, and i am concerned that the lower end graphics card will give me problems. please help to educate me on what I can expect from this card.
I will use external screens at home for design work and as a student the portability is a must for me. i figure that i'll have access to school labs with both windows and mac systems to use for those instances when i will need the heavy lifting for rendering with textures, etc....but due to ergo issues, i would prefer to use my own optimized set-up at home as much as possible....so really my hesitancy with going to a MBP boils down to the graphics card.
my question are:
1) Is 330M a comparable graphics card to the 9600 in previous models for my design needs?
2) has anyone who has used the 330M or 9600 with solidworks used it for rendering or complex surface modeling and what were the results? under what load does the system start to get stressed?
3) am I going to notice a performance difference between 256MB and 512MB on this low end of a graphics card?
answers to these questions will help me to make my decision, rather than a recommendation w/o supporting info. i can't imagine that i will be working with assemblies over 50 parts while in school, but with a focus on industrial design I imagine that the parts will have complex surfaces with tapering and blends rather than orthogonal surfaces. i'm really concerned that this graphics card will not be sufficient for my design needs, as i have always used high-end graphics cards on my windows machine. if you can share what types of models you work with on the mbp, that would be very helpful too.
thanks!