Hey Guys,

im about to buy me a Laptop for University. Since I am doing Houdini and other 3D Stuff beside my studying I need a Computer to take with me and do some Work. I don´t want to do huge Sims or Renderings on it. But it should be able to build and test Setups for Simulations.

Last Year on the FMX I saw some of the Live Presentations of Houdini done with a Mac Book, so I first looked at the Apple Store. The Mac Book Pro I considered is about 2200€. Then i found an Dell XPS with a pretty similar Setup “only” about 1600€.

Dell XPS 13 9350 Ultrabook 13,3" QHD Touch / Intel Core i7-6500U / 16GB DDR3L RAM / 512 GB SSD / Windows 10

or a Mac Book Pro /16 GB 1866 MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM / 2,9 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 Prozessor (Turbo Boost up to 3,3 GHz) / 512 GB PCIe-based Flash-Memory

I would prefer the Dell ofc. But is there any Point in going with the Mac? What do you guy think?

Thanks

That probably was me.

The mac makes for an excellent presentation vehicle. It has good Houdini support but for presentations, it is hard to beat.

If this were me, I'd go with the Dell for Houdini production work. The extra expense for the mac is not warranted in your case.

The Dell XPS is a very good laptop. I would see if the memory could be bumped to 32GB as that would give you more room to do decent sized sims without hitting swap. Other than that, the 9350 is a good machine.

I'd also look at the top end Microsoft surface. See how that price compares with the Dell. Probably the Dell is the best bang for buck.

Thanks for your comment Jeff.

That's what I already thought.
The surface is in a similar price range as the macbook so I'll go with the XPS

Houdini works best on dedicated graphic cards, therefore I would go for Dell XPS 15 with Nvidia 960m, it would come for a similar price.

but it will work with the intel hd Graphics 520? I want to go with a 13“, I think 15” is already too big. We have not much space in our lecture halls.

As I said I don´t need this for big stuff, I got a Workstation at home. Just doing some Stuff and Testing on the run.

Houdini works with the Intel 520, though it's not terribly speedy with larger scenes. Also, viewport HQ Lighting is unavailable on Intel GPUs. Other than those issues, it should work fine.

Does anyone know which laptop the SideFX presenters were using at the H16 launch event/VFX Festival this year in London? I saw Scott Keating's terrain demo. The machine he was using seemed to perform very well.

I had 2 Dell XPS laptops in the past. Both died in ~1 year. Meanwhile, my Macbook lasted for nearly 10 years. As a developer, Macs are a good unix-based machine. However, Apple appears to have forgotten about developers and (if you believe Hacker News) a bit of a migration is underway. Microsoft, with its open source initiative, is making all the right moves. It now has a linux subsystem and the Surface computers are very nice.

I've got a Dell xps sitting besides me - 12 years now.

It's pretty much dead now, although on a good day I can still run it so long as I don't run someething like SolidWorks that will take up all its memory, which is what causes it to crash these days.

If I knew exactly what was wrong with it and the parts were available I'd give it a whirl and see now much longer I could keep in running.

Has served me well though for all these years.