Wanted to get a laptop with
320GB Harddrive
3GB Ram
AMD Athlon II M300 (2.0 GHz and 1mb Cache)
ATI Radeon 4100
I know zbrush isn’t GPU extensive, I needed to know if the CPU would run zbrush okay at subdivision 7. It doesn’t have to be extrememly fast, just fast enough that its not iritating and I’d have to wait a minute for it to rotate.
Thanks in advance.
Here are the system requirements for ZBrush:
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/system/
As for subdivision levels, that is a useless figure because a model that started with 6 polygons has a VERY different count at level 7 than a model that started with 6,000 polygons! What matters is the actual polygon count rather than the number of levels. With 3 GB of RAM you can probably hit up to about 12 million polys, but you’ll get the best performance keeping things under 6 million.
i agree with aurick.
i first started using zbrush on my 3 year old dell XPS m1710. it worked great for the longest time considering it was 32 bit and 2 gig or ram. i could get to about 2-3 million polys with the computer bogging down a bit but going to 4-6 million would cause frequent crashes.
the biggest trick i learned for using a laptop or any slower computer is bouncing around and using the subD levels to your advantage. any subtool youre not using keep it at the first or second subD level, along with hiding areas youre not working.
personally i loved the portable factor and if i needed to do some intense stuff, id transfer my .ztl file to my beefy desktop computer.
hope that helps some!