I am looking to put together a laptop from which houdini will run nicely.

Toshiba P500's are customizable for a reasonable price and I can pick up 8 gigs of ram and a nice nvidia chipset for around 1300$

My only concern is that the 6MB cache of the i7 may make a considerable difference over the 3MB cache of the i5 but i really have no idea.

To my knowledge Houdini does not use hyperthreading when baking geometry or doing cloth sims. So is paying the extra 200 bucks for the i7 over the i5 430 really worth it?

Perhaps forking out the cash for a solid state drive would be better for houdini?

I duno, What do you think would be best?

Thanks,
John-

I'd rather buy the highest or the lowest….not the middle…-.-!

As I know, i7 is much faster than i5, if I were you, I will get i7.

^_^