Autodesk Revit Laptop

That was just the top spec’d model. Crazy my first motorcycle cost less than that haha.

 

#1 - REVIT IS NOT CAD

Is also a bit of a pig in general, but it’s what most of the commercial AEC space has settled on as their “standard” so we gotta play in that space.

I manage 25 people that use Revit all day every day. The machine selection, setup, deployment, and maintenance is all my responsibility. We recently switched to using desktop machines and if we need to be remote we actually remote into the desktop. Prior to that we’ve used HP Zbooks exclusively for over 12 years (cycle them out for new every 3 yrs)

Revit is a single core/single process platform. Maximize your clock speed over anything else in this regard.

it is also a RAM whore. Get as much as you can. Our last laptops were HP ZBook 17’s G6 custom spec’d to 64GB RAM. Our current machines (for the few that still use laptops) are Zbook Fury G10 machines (16” screen) with 128 GB RAM.

1TB SSD

$16 M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVMe PCI-E M.2 SSD Case Support UASP for NVMe SSD Size 2230/2242/2260/2280(up to 4TB) (M.2 NVMe)

M.2 NVME drive is a must. Don’t settle for less here.

unless you are trying to do a bunch of photorealistic rendering, you’ll be hard pressed to max out any current video cards - the processor speed and RAM will be your limiting factors for Revit performance.

Bluebeam is going to be fine with any of these options. RSMeans - what a pile of…

get yourself a portable USB-C flat travel monitor as a second screen. Revit on only one 1920x1080 screen sucks, and 4k on that size screen just means everything will be natively scaled to 200% and Revit is fucky about screen/DPI scaling.

I’ve had nothing but shit luck with every Dell I’ve ever used. Others have similar stories in other brands. You want to go workstation class regardless of what you get - that equates to a machine that is more robust, has a longer warranty, and has provisions for future upgrades or serviceability.

 

I would actually do the opposite here. That GPU is overkill for most Revit function, while that CPU will actually benefit you more in mobile platform. Revit just isn’t built to really leverage GPU power like other platforms, and it is purely single core on the CPU side.

 

I’ve ran dell for years, been good for me. Thinking of switching to fully specd Lenovo. You’ll be safe with 32gb ram and get a SSD hard drive. No clue on video cards in laptops but if work is render heavy move to a work station.

I always thought buy fully spec’d to “future proof” & recently been trying to just have an intern do the work.

Almost switched to archicad just to be able to run on Mac, but I taught myself revit quicker, also is cheaper license

 

One nice thing is that most scanner software will actually utilize multi-core/multi-thread when most CAD/CAM and BIM platforms will not.
The machine we process LIDAR scans on is a 24-core thread ripper with 192GB of RAM. When running a 60-70GB scan on that thing, it’s awesome to watch the CPU actually push out to full 100% utilization.

 

LOL
As a mechanical contractor, our average Revit models are 400-700MB in size with tens of thousands of feet of pipe in them. One we are doing right now is a 10-acre footprint chip manufacturing plant with 85,000 feet of pipe modeled out to full fabrication level of detail (nuts, bolts, fittings, gaskets, welds, fully detailed supports and hangers). 175,000 model elements. 10,000 spool drawings. 1000+ D-size drawings. That model is 1.5GB with 7-10 people working in it.

 

I am really surprised at the number of Dell haters. I have been using Dell not by choice but required by my company and have been using them for 19 years now at my current employment site but everyone I have had was the top end machine at the time. Never had a crash or anything due to the Dell but many crashes by the Cadence software we use. I have had shit luck with HP which is one I would never ever by again

 

It’s harder to find statistics than opinions for laptops. Everyone swears by one and swears another is trash. Always polar opposites ha.

 

I have noticed the same

 

I was going to say something similar but you have much more info than me .

I just got "upgraded" to a laptop for work and I finally have modern hardware. The desktop that just got sidelined has a Quadro K2200 (yes a 2014 graphics card!) and that machine was absolutely rock solid for 2 years in Revit and CAD for basic production modeling with only 1 crash the entire time I was working which was actually from bluebeam nuking my graphics driver for an unexplained reason. I think the largest model that I have worked on was in the neighborhood of 500MB and it was a bitch only because I am in a satellite office and I am stuck accessing models from the server in the main office.

A couple of our Architectural guys have high dollar/power GPUs but they are doing 100-acre photo-realistic industrial park renders for clients. Nobody else in the company has the use case for even the hardware that I have in this new laptop.

 

Lots of it comes down to personal experience.
I've tested the latest Dell offering every time we've prepped for the next upgrade cycle, and every time the machines provided for testing have given us issues during the 3 week burn-in/torture test. In 13 years with the HP machines, I've had two fail out that required factory service of the ~150 machines I've personally purchased (we buy 25-30 each refresh cycle in our department).
Our IT has gone to all HP machines for standard deployments as well (currently ~900 active deployed machines), though all of those are lower spec'd compared to what our Virtual Construction group runs.

 

I have done absolutely no work with AutoCAD...but I've done warranty work on shitloads of computers over the last 20 years or so - most of it within the last 13. I pretty much echo the above sentiments - have seen FAR more issues with Dells than I have HPs, at all points (e.g., fresh out of the box, near the end of the cycle, etc.), except we had >10K deployed machines (probably half laptops and half workstations).

 

I have worked in the architecture field for 16 years now. My first firm i worked at, for 15 years, we used Dell XPS desktops - i9 procesors, Nvidia graphics, 32gb ram, 1tb nvme drives.
I am now at a nationwide firm with 900+ employees and we use ThinkPad laptops - 16" screen, 1tb nvme, i7 processor, dedicated graphics card. The laptops run revit and bluebeam surprisingly well. I have a dock hooked up to 3 24" monitors at the office.
Both firms I had the ability to WFH and remoted in to the computer, the Dell desktop ran a hair better when remoted in, but it would freeze up sometimes.
I experience a small 1/4 sec delay sometimes with the laptop.
The laptops are slower at upconverting large revit models, so i ask one of our rendering team members with awesome desktops do it in 1/3 the time.

I did the ordering at my first firm and would spend $2500 or so on the Dell tower w/o monitors.
The Lenovo ThinkPad laptops and dock are about $3000. And our rendering team computers are $7-9k

 

MSI or Lenovo have always worked well for myself and others who needs powerful laptops for work

 

Well, I was just the lucky guy with the first Laptop issue in my company . It is a Lenovo thinkpad p1 gen 6 for those curious. Lenovo pushed a bios update and my machine decided that was the perfect time to fry something (I suspect RAM after my quick google searching as it was doing a memory re-training when it died). We currently have about 15-16 of these identical machines deployed but I have had mine for the least amount of time, coming up on 3 months now, so take that how you will. I will give credit to Lenovo support, about 26 hours after we put in a ticket they had a tech on-site and had the machine back up in under an hour. I also had access to a backup desktop machine that I maintain in my satellite office so I was only down about 20 mins swapping the box back into my workstation. If I was in a different position 26 hours may not have seemed as reasonable, but from everything I have heard this absolutely embarrasses Microsoft's support on Surface machines which our company is currently still in the process of switching away from. I still miss my desktop, it was much quieter, way more stable (I have had a few minor software glitches, and usb dock connectivity headaches) and it felt more snappy in my day-to-day tasks, although objectively this laptop should absolutely throttle it in any workload I give it. I was also somewhat surprised by the Lenovo's apparent philosophy on the warranty work, the tech had no idea what went wrong they just automatically replace the entire motherboard as the first diagnostic step . Maybe they take the parts they gutted from my machine and test them to see if they are still good but I am not quite sure.

There is my quick update on the great Laptop debate...

 

A bios update can't really fry anything as in hardware but rather get corrupted or corrupt the bios configuration. If you can boot back into the bios you can do a number of things, retry to flash it to the newest bios, downgrade to the previous one or even restore your bios config if saved or restore the bios defaults. Get a computer geek to help you

 

If I could have got to the bios I would have had a chance. I am fairly fluent in computers, I only had to look up what the code this machine was flashing while it was updating meant. I had exactly one light on the entire machine, it would recognize the power cable being plugged in and that was it. Black screen, no fans, no status lights, no response to the power button or the reset button on the bottom, nothing.