W500 for heavy CAD use

I have been doing all of my CAD work on my powerful desktop. However I travel to school and work and it would be nice to be able to do all of my work on a familiar computer.

I use CATIA v5r16 and work with large assemblies (690mb is the largest) and I do a lot of FEA. I also generate quite a bit of NC code (which can take a while to compute).

Essentially I am trying to get an idea from other CAD users if the W500 will run CAD quickly enough to make it worthwhile going with a mobile workstation? Any CAD users use the T61p as their primary system?

I think the GPU is probably sufficient. I am mostly worried about the 2.8Ghz CPU. Currently I do my work on a 3.33Ghz quad core.

Thanks for the input.

 

CATIA may be a little bit stress for the FireGL V5700, since it's only a mid-range card.
But other than that, CAD should be fine, T9600 is more than capable of handling those stuff, and the GPU is definitely sufficient enough.

 

The workstations at school use the Quadro version of the 6600GT and they run CATIA great. I don't think CATIA is a very GPU laden application. I think it is the CPU and the memory that it eats alive. I have seen it exceed 3.5GB and often pegs my CPU.

I am typing this message as I impatiently wait for a FEA calculation to finish.