kitchenlifestyle

Thank you! Alienware 17 r5 en route now!

Thank you for the honest advice.... Decision made!

My gut tells me you are right that the $400 for the older graphics card would not be worth it, even coming from the 765M. I was hoping to hear the dedicated memory upgrade would do the trick as both machines are i7, just 4 generations apart and my 16 gb ram is plenty adequate. I am in x10. Standard and vector views are smooth, although it slows significantly if i detail more than 5 rooms in a plan. My issue is when creating large layouts with tons of materials and cabinet details. Most of my projects are very custom and layouts can go up to 25 pages with multiple camera angles. Ray-tracing takes around an hour to produce anything decent.

I am upgrading my 4 yr old Alienware 17 with an i7 because i can only upgrade to the Nvidia 880 without killing my machine. This will bring me from 2 gb dedicated to 8 gb. So the question is, will i feel a big enough difference with this upgrade or am i throwing good money away and need to upgrade in a year anyway? **note: use a LOT of imported custom materials option 1: Dell Alienware Nvida Geforce 1080Ti (it is still an i7 or the new i9 ) option 2: just upgrade to the Nvida Geforce 880 for $400

Thanks for the reminder of the tax benefits. That really takes the guilt out of buying a new machine. Anyone have a great mouse to recommend? Also, any benefit to touch screen in Chief?

Great tip, Jon. I opened catalyst pro and found that under power, there is no tab for switchable graphics, which leads me to believe it is automatic.

Mark, no I am not orbiting in line drawing. It is just painful to even load it. I typically work in standard as it is the fastest for orbiting for me. However, it really stink when using dark finishes.

Wow. Great tips. Richard, I just checked my preferences in CA and it shows the radeon 4650, but I may be missing something. Jon, I was hoping to stay a bit under $2K as I also would like to add another monitor or 2 and upgrade to an orbital mouse (suggestions appreciated there as well). It is difficult to put a price on productivity though. Do any laptop brands have removable/upgradable video cards? At the rate of advances in graphics, I am sure whatever I buy will be short-lived before upgrades are necessary again.

I would love to see a picture of your set-up, it sounds perfect. Can you provide details?

ATI radeon HD 4650 built in to the mother board. I tried to upgrade the driver software and it actually installed a different card? I reinstated this one, but now think that I cannot move forward without upgrading my laptop. I don't want to have the same situation in 2 years, so I want to be careful about this decision. I see you have an alienware. I was considering that as an option. Do you have any issues with it?

My user library also disappeared after upgrading to X6. Any advice?

My 2 year old laptop is painfully slow and having issues with graphics since I upgraded to X6. As a kitchen designer, I tend to load a lot of different materials which exacerbates the problem. Chief Architect crashes when I try to pull an elevation view about 50% of the time. If I try to show a line drawing, it takes about 20 minutes to load. I currently have 8g of memory, and 1 gig of ram dedicated for graphics. However, my graphics card cannot be upgraded as it is imbedded in the mother board. When I spoke to tech support, they said that my set-up should be adequate. I am looking for a solution and am willing to upgrade. I do not want to have a desktop as my work tends to be mobile from office to jobsite. Please offer suggestions for the best laptop to solve the problem. I am also interested in setting up an additional monitor for docking screens, but hesitate in the purchase as the local "experts" don't seem to know what I am talking about. I would appreciate some technical help. Thanks