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Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg101101] Re: laptop recommendation to run mathematica fast?
• From: WetBlanket <Wyvern864 at gmail.com>
• Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:31:34 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <h1qcu0$7u9$1@smc.vnet.net>

On Jun 23, 6:05 am, John Fultz <jfu... at wolfram.com> wrote:
> Most people wouldn't consider the Eee PC a laptop.  Wikipedia lists it as a
> "subnotebook/netbook".  If you were looking for speed first and portability
> second, you're at the wrong end of the hardware scale.  The design of netbooks
> factors portability and battery life as strong primary and secondary goals, withperformance as a distant tertiary goal.  I have an Eee PC, too, which serves me
> very well.  I have Mathematica and a couple of other CPU-sucking applications
> on it.  But I understand that, if I expect to use them, I'm going to be
> engaged in some thumb-twiddling.  That's the price I pay for a six hour
> battery life in a two pound package.
>
> On the other hand, there's a lot more variety in laptops.  Some laptops favor
> portability strongly, some favor performance strongly, and some attempt to
> balance the two (this is a gross simplification...there are other factors, too,
> but you get the idea).  I don't follow laptops on a regular basis, so I
> couldn't give you any helpful suggestions for what's on the market now.
> But I replace my own laptop about every three years, and I never have
> trouble finding something in the $2500-$3300 range with a nice large screen,
> decent sized hard drive, and reasonably fast CPU.  Such laptops are
> available from all of the major vendors (e.g., Dell, Lenovo, Apple).
> And in the modern day and age, dual core is standard even in many of
> the cheaper laptops.
>
> Good luck in your shopping.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> John Fultz
> jfu... at wolfram.com
> User Interface Group
> Wolfram Research, Inc.
>
> On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:04:58 -0400 (EDT), underante wrote:
> > hello,
>
> > perhaps someone can recommend me a laptop to run Mathematica fast?
>
> > i bought a asus eee pc 901 recently, which tho very cute pink and quiet,
> > (when the fan is off anyway!) it does return a rather disappointing
> > internal benchmark of around 0.32 for both Mathematica v7 and v5.2 with
> > windows XP.
>
> > what with Moore's law and all that i had vaguely reckoned that in 2009 a
> > new machine should be running a lot faster than that since i have a circa
> > 2001, 8 years old 1 GHz pentium dell inspiron laptop with 128Mbyte of RAM
> > that benchmarks Mathematica 5.2 at 0.27 under windows ME, so that the
> > small increase in speed that i do see could be wholly put down to the
> > intel atom N270 in the asus running that little bit faster at 1.6 GHz.
>
> > anyway, i am looking to buy a somewhat bigger screened laptop in the next
> > few weeks, so if you have, or know, of something that will run the
> > internal Mathematica v7.0 benchmark at, well, lets say, 3.0 or more?,
> > i.e. about ten times faster than what i have now, i would be very
> > interested to know what make and model it is, as i have had little luck
> > so far trawling the web for such info, and tho the wolfram benchmark
> > report mentions various intel xeons running at speeds of 3.75 or more i
> > cant say ive ever seen a laptop with one of these chipsets inside it, and
> > no mention whatever is made of these ubiquitous intel core 2 duo things
,
> > quadcore or not, or what i could expect from them.
>
> > thankyou
>
> > f.c
>
> > (oh, i would just add that since i will be using the machine for other
> > things besides mathematica it would be best for me to continue with
> > windows a while longer, but if you get a nice turn of speed under
> > linux or mac OS please feel free to say so!)

Try Dell's XPS series for a large screen large format fast laptop.