Quadro FX 3500M / Dell M90?

Got a good offer for a dell m90 with Quadro FX 3500M GPU. Before buying it, I got a couple of questions.
As the offer is expiring tomorrow any info would be highly appreciated.

Does a quadro card offer any advantages in touch designer, compared to the consumer version?

Are there any known issues in touch designer with this (or any Quadro) GPU and/or the notebook itself?

Thanks
Achim

Hey, there are no known issues with Quadros and Touch (we use them quite a bit ourselves). But also there are no real benefits for using them except maybe performance, but you are paying for that performance with the increased cost anyway.

I think Jarrett has an M90 so I’ll ask him to make a post here about any issues he may have had with the notebook itself.

I have an M90 with a Quadro 2500. Its been a great laptop. Super stable, nice feel. I have the 1920x1600 screen. A lot of people complain my screen is too high resolution but I find it quite comfortable. I still havent found a better laptop on the market. Its fairly sleek considering it’s size. The fact it takes 4GB of memory is a plus as is the fact it supports XP64 nicely. Only negative is that the 2500/3500 doesnt support geometry shaders. That puts it one generation behind already. Not sure you can get an 8000 series upgrade?

P.S.

Dont run Vista yet. I bought my dad a laptop over the weekend and I have never been so annoyed with an operating system. Crazy slow doing the most mundane things. I am completely blown away how poorly that OS behaves - takes 2 minutes just to turn off a brand new HP laptop. I will continue looking at why and hopefully overtime Mircosoft will get its act together.

J

Thanks jarrett,

since yesterday you can also get a precision m6300 with a FX 3600M (= 8800M). I’m gonna go for the m90 anyway as it’s half the price and I’ll probably not use/learn geometry shaders anytime soon. Almost all “gamer” laptops with 8xxx series GPU have glossy display, no xp(64) support … so the m90 still seems to be the way to go.

The screen resolution is a real issue. I wanna to buy a laptop where the screen resolution matches the one of most external monitors. My hope is that more monitors/projectors will be able to work with that “close to 1080p resolution” than with 1400 x 900 (or 1680 x 1050) signals. Do you have experience in this regard? Or anyone else?

One more question. If my synth renders in 720p and it’s running on a system with 1920 x 1200 resolution, what kind of impact does the additional resolution have on performance? I mean, is it very expensive to scale up the fullscreen output for the second monitor and draw the touchUI/controlpanel at a higher resolution?

The Dell 24 inch monitors all run at 1920x1200 which matches the resolution of the m90 (Jarrett’s post was a type, the M90 is actually 1920x1200).

I haven’t seen a case where the upscale/downscale operation on the 2nd monitor causes any slowdown. In theory its the exact same thing as a Resolution TOP, which is the cheapest TOP we have.

Thanks Malcolm,

I’m more concerned about all those LCD TVs and video projectors. I think I read that these can’t always easily handle non HD resolutions (1400x900 or 1680x1050). As the M90’s 1920x1200 is closer to a real HD resolution I’m hoping that more devices can handle the input signal.

I agree with Jarrett that the m90 is nice. A friend has one and used it for tough quite happily.

I have aM6300 and agreee that the big-ass screen resolution is great for making big touch networks. The M-series tend to have a nice screen, more matt than the XPS game machines although the latter probably deliver more speed but the M’s give more beauty :slight_smile:

I was actually trying to get a XPS but they weren’t available in singapore at the time, but I really like the non-shiny screen on the one I got.

rod.