New laptop, need help (should I buy this?)

[Gabryel Karolin]

Appearantly they do not plan to upgrade the 1710-series at all, instead it will be discontinoued in favour of the 1730 series. Which by default has double gfxcards. They do still have decent single 512mb graphics cards... but then as I mentioned earlier you will have to settle for a 15' screen.

The guy I spoke to claimed that the first option I looked at shouldn't weight more than 4kgs though. That's not ridiculously high.

Argh, this is frustrating.

 

[mdwh]

If you can, replace the 8700s with a 512MB 8800GT. I suspect if you're planning heavy video/image editing, you'll want a damn powerful graphics card.

Do these applications utilise 3D graphics hardware?

The main thing I thought of is with 3D modelling, he wants to be able to display complex models whilst editing, but I don't have any experience of how much of a problem that is on modern cards (or if the bottleneck is even on the graphics card at all).

Annoyingly most benchmark sites are only concerned with game performance (also on that note, NVIDIA and I think ATI actually have a separate line of graphics cards aimed at work rather than games, though they are much more expensive - I don't know if that's been looked into?)

 

[GVBN]

I think it's mainly the rendering process which requires a powerful card

At least Photoshop CS3 Extended uses 3D acceleration

 

[Genocidicbunny]

The nVidia and ATi work video cards are first off very expensive (1000$ and more for the newer ones ) And I dont think they come in the mobile variety as well.