W3V or Z70V for CAD and 3DSMax

I'm trying to figure out which one would be better for AutoCAD and 3D Studio. I really like the higher resolution of the Z70V, but the lighter weight of the W3V would be great. I may be taking this laptop to the library quite a bit during grad school.

The price of the w3v was a bit high, but the much talked about rebate has made it a viable option.

I don't need to make a purchase until August. I might wait for the x700 in the Z70V, but if it will be much more expensive and will lack the hyper-memory, then probably not.

Should I get the W3V now with the rebate or should I just wait and get a z70v later?

Please help!

 

I think you should wait for the x700 model.

 

Lewis,

It's a very simple and hard question to answer at the same time. I love the W3 for many reasons and one of them is how well I can run 3ds max 6 and arch desktop 2006.

Supposedly hypermemory is only being enabled on the x600 gpus......

Both systems will handle what you want to do, screen size is the most important thing to consider. For me, when I am away from my desk, 14" is great to carry around and I still have the computing power...... when I'm at home and I'm working on a big project, If I don't just happen to use my desktop... say if I started something on my W3... I just plug the unit into my 23" widescreen and bump up the res and go to town. In my seven years of being hardcore into 3ds max, arch desktop and photoshop, the W3 has made it easy for me to get away from my desk when I want to be, yet still have the power to do what I want.......... I carried around an M6n (no the Z70 series) ...... for almost a year... it'll get heavy if you're really moving around with it. If you're used to carrying 3-4 college text books around everywhere you go, then just carrying a 6 pound laptop is nothing..... but it gets taxing. If a ton of people don't eat up this rebate, I'd be surprised...... In the last month the W3 has cooled down a bit from the frenzied pace it sold in the first two months it was out... but we still sold a couple hundred of them in June.... I'm almost curious if Asus will have enough stock to handle this promo.... As of today, they only had about 500 on hand ... and that's remaining stock in all of north america.....

 

If you can wait than wait. There will almost always be a new rebate or a better deal coming out as newer and better tech is released older models will go down in price. The rebate may make the w3v a good deal now, but eventually the price with rebate will become standard or the model will be replaced with something better.

 

.... well no kidding, that's called life. We're only talking about a month before he *needs* to make the purchase. Right now his needs can be met extremely well with what an x600 can offer.

 

true, but the new model may be a better choice depending on the price. And though I'm just supposing (since I don't have psychic powers) the W3V will still be around the rebate price in a month should the price be more than he wants to pay. Also just so you're clear... hyper memory is something you do NOT want!! It's basically a marketing gimmick where they take away your faster dedicated memory and uses your system RAM. It sounds good, but it isn't since first off the amount is limited. That means it is like 1/6th the speed of dedicated memory since with PCI express there is support for about 4gigs/sec - 8 gigs/sec while dedicated can get speeds of about 36 gigs/sec. It does not give you the consumer better speed, but it is cheaper for OEMs and other companies to produce. Read a few benchmarks and you'll understand a bit more about what hypermemory is.
So not supporting hypermemory is a BIG plus.

 

hypermemory is only bad for graphic intensive games where its constantly having to render things but for 3dmax i dont think it'll be a problem.

p.s. proportable: i love that gif lol

 

"will be much more expensive and will lack the hyper-memory, then probably not."
True it won't be a problem, but I'm just trying to clarify something since he thinks that hyper memory is important and a good thing. Hyper-memory is a bad thing since they take away fast dedicated memory. Might be good if they had like a 128 MB deicated with the possiblity of using another 128 MB of system, but they don't and it's probably not really necessary.
Hyper-memory is better than completely integrated graphics from Intel, but still not a desirable thing. Also be especially wary of the 64 MB turbo cache or hyper memory gpus that support "256 MB". nVidia uses slower RAM in these types of cards (not sure about ATI) so these are actually slower cards than the 32 MB version that only supports 128 MB.

 

Well actually.. this rebate on the W3 is around for 15 days... opps.. 14 more.... I did find out that it was really just a promo to find out how well Asus' ads were working in Mobile mag....... so much for proving that, right?

Anyway, I can truly attest to hypermemory actually being a MUCH better thing for 3sd max and autocad. Both programs are video ram intensive.... but not gpu intensive by any means. They WON'T use system memory as a cache like some programs will. Therefore, w/ 64mb you are limiting yourself.... 128mb is better.... 256mb is ideal for situations like this...... but with the cooresponding cards you get more expensive and the systems get larger and they use more battery life... and get hotter. With hypermemery, you can allocate up to 512mb of your system ram (w/ 1.5 - 2gb of system ram) on top of the 64mb dedicated. That's 596mb total and effectively, I'm seeing that my rendering times are just about a quick as my 256mb x800 in my desktop. This is something that was not close prior to the latest bios opening up hypermemory... and was never like this on my M6ne w/ 64mb ati 9700..

For gaming, it's not better as far as framerate and things go, but it wasn't designed for that anyway.. it was actually designed for this very reason. If the reason for the system is as the post says, and they want a small system...... it's not worth the wait because it's not going to be an improvement for what they want to do... for gaming, yes..... but the next z70 model isn't just replacing the one that just came out.. it's going to represent a higherend model which is going to bring the price up at least another $100

 

Is ASUS planning on changing the gpu in the W3 to x700 as well, or just the new model Z70? I am looking for a laptop that would work well in autocad and 3dmax/viz as well and right now am heavily leaning toward the W3. However, I don't really need it until middle of fall (although it is tough to wait it out). I figured I would wait until then, but worry that this current model with its x600 could possibly be better for 3d applications (not games) than one they might replace it with. Just curious if there is much likelyhood of this and the likelyhood that the W3 will remain at its current price until say october. Thanks for any comments :asus:

 

BTW Justin - that clip is funny...even funnier with sound.

 

No x700 in the W3... its too small and it doesn't have the competition even with the x600. The only upgrade I can see them having is jumping to a 2.0 in a month and a half - two months due to the price drop at the end of this month.... Personally, I've tired a 2.1 in my w3 and the performance is not that much better in even my most cpu intensive applications, but the battery life was much worse if you don't know how to use powergear efficiently...... a 2.0 is sort of in the middle, but for some reason the jump from 1.8 to 2.0, even on last years 400mzh fsb dothans showed the most difference in battery life....

 

I work for engineering firm in Austin, I'm actually planning on using w3v with microstation, it's another type of application for Cad/3d program. I just switched my notebook from Heavy Asus L5 to the lighter weight asus W3V. I'm not sure how it can handle gaming though... but I just purchased my w3v yesterday, it's still in route from UPS, i'm getting the package next week very Exciting! I brought my for about 1799 after bargaining... and currently they gave me another 200 dollar mail in rebate from Asus. that lowerd it to $1599 which is a really good deal for me - compared to people who brought W3V over a month ago at 1899. even got 3 years of warranty covered for free. I was planning on to get a Sony at first, but I'm glad I waited it until now.

 

Question for you.... who'd you buy it from? There's no such thing as "bargining" with an emsemble notebook as Asus sets the price on them. If you have you're most likely not eligible for that mail in rebate or that extra year warranty. Just curious because Asus would love to know who's doing that.

 

Thanks for all of the input. You guys are awesome!

I think if Asus really wanted to cram an X700 into the W3V, they might be able to. I've noticed that Acer is coming out with the TravelMate 3210, a 14 inch wide-screen carrying an X700. Of course, I have no idea what the price will be and it really worried me when I was able to twist a recent Travel Mate to the point of breaking with my hands at the store.

By the way, you can't do that with a carbon fiber Asus, can you?

Back to the CAD issue. I have the feeling, and I may be wrong, that a 64-bit processor would help these programs run better, especially the next generation of these programs. Is this true? If it is, when and will Asus release a moderately portable 64-bit laptop with useable graphics?

 

The next generation of these programs aren't going to be 64bit... you're looking at like 2 generations at least... I know the next version of max isn't supposed to be and the 2006 version of arch desktop just came out... or it might not even be out even though I have it........ You're not going to see them come out with these until Intel gets going in 64bit as AMD isn't going to make it worth it alone....... plus the 64bit windows has to be perfected before any company drops their money into put it out there......

 

i dont think your going to have to worry too much about Autocad 2006. If your rendering 3d CAD models you will want to use a program like Rhino, FormZ, or Viz instead. I hear that many firms are also switching over the Revit (which is a great program if you have a chance to try it). The way I figure it, if your in school the school labs should be what your rendering your final renderings on (most arch schools have excellent and updated facilities) and if your at a firm the office computers will always be enough to run these. The laptop just becomes a emergency tool if you happen to need something rendered while on the way to a presentation not something you rely on for everyday lighting models of spaces and buildings. I have been running photoshopCS, Rhino, Maya, and FormZ off of my Pentium4 2.4 ghz laptop and its a bit slow but gets the work done. I have ordered the z70v and am excited to see what it can do. Good luck with your purchase.

 

Revit is great for physical 3d models......... just awesome.

You're not going to use any other program more intense than 3ds Max..... even rhino, maya and form-z aren't as intense (doesn't mean it's better), but as far as cpu usage.... The biggest benefit you could have is a faster hard drive......... As a test with my alma mater, we installed a rapor 10,000rpm desktop drive in one of a series of the schools crappy computer lab systems there were running 7200rpm drives..... that alone made the productivity of that system sky rocket.......

Putting a 7200 into a notebook that you might usually have a 5400 is going to give you the same sort of performance boost....... you can certainly make due with 5400, considering the heat and battery life issues you'll have when you put the faster drive in, but if you find say the 5400rpm drive is doing fine in the W3, you may not want to upgrade.... but if you want even more performance, that hard drive is going to give you more than a cpu upgrade or even a ram upgrade......

 

I don't want to get too off topic here like I normally do, but (esp for Justin), does anyone know if there's much of a performance difference in 3ds MAX between the x600 and the x700? I know that in games, there probably would be, but I'm not convinced that 3ds MAX would benefit that much. As Justin mentioned earlier, it's much more dependent upon memory than gpu.

In my experience with MAX, it doesn't seem to matter what video card you get, they all bog down in complicated, high-poly scenes anyway so I just get something that's middle of the road and save my money for more RAM/CPU/HDD.

 

I have not used the x700 except for a bit on the w2 demo, but didn't use it for max..... I have an x800 for my desktop and that is considerably better for the top end games, but honestly, don't seem much difference between that and the x600 ...... this is only when hypermemory is enabled and I'm using more than 256mb of system ram is being allocated...... stock when you just have the 64mb, you'd see a hold up while rendering, but it's not bad at all......... with the hypermemory open, it basically evens it out.......

Your experience is mine as well....... I'm recently found out that it's all because a program like max ONLY uses video ram..... so system ram isn't going to do jack while rendering......... So even a 256mb card can get bogged down....... so with hypermemory it almost tricks the program into seeing 596mb (64 dedicated and 512mb if you have 1.5 to 2.0 gb of system ram) .......... in my experience, there's less of that bogging down, even compared to my x800 w/ 256mb...... but for gaming, hands down the x800 is better..... but I think it's mainly due to the gpu and not the ram on board.

CPU doesn't matter...... I could school most people w/ the right ram, hard drive and video card......... I always say... pick the hard drive you want first, the ram you need second and the cpu you can afford last....... it's a good thing to live by and is the best way to get a system that is going to work how you want and still stay within your current budget.

 

I would go with a Z70V. Doesn't it have a better resolution? I work with graphics also (print, not CAD) and I prefer a non glossy screen on the Z70V.

 

yes... V has WSXGA+, A has WXGA ...... Lower res would kill you in CAD.... it's horrible to work in.