Keep or replace when replacement PC is £10K?

[MysteryCar]

My laptop is 5 years old today, and I love it. It does everything I want. Cost 6.5K 5 years ago. However, I cannot extend the warranty. A new one is between 7K for same speed and 10.5K inc VAT for much faster spec. What would you do? Keep? Buy a new one? Lease/HP? Try and find someone who can repair it on the hurry up if required? Is running a 5 year old machine a big failure risk, or do they tend to soldier on?

Lenovo ThinkPad 128 GB ram etc.

[PovertyPrince]

What the actual fk are you doing on a Laptop to justify £6k+?

[MysteryCar]

Car design, renders, CAD, 3D scanning and point cloud manipulation.

[ChocolateFrog]

That's over £8k in today's money.

Is 128Gb of Ram supposed to be good for 8x the price a regular (but still very good) laptop?

I'm out of touch.

[MysteryCar]

For CAD it does not really matter. For other aspects without the RAM you press a button and… wait… Repeated hundreds of times a day and productivity is blown up.

As an annoying side aspect, because a client can’t see the price of the speed advantage, they think all computers were created equal. Sometimes I think going back to Windows 98 might be a better business decision.

[gotoPzero]

Surely the answer is a simple cost calculation on the basis of the new machine being faster? If its fast enough to pay for itself then new.

As for reliability - its a lottery IMO.

[MysteryCar]

Thanks for the answers. Will check the link. Am also going to look into having the existing machine’s major parts bought and in ‘stock’ in case there is a failure.

Full spec here.

[Panamax]

MysteryCar said:

Car design, renders, CAD, 3D scanning and point cloud manipulation.

If you're making a good living doing that stuff then a tax-deductible £10k for tools of the trade is a drop in the bucket. Don't bother wasting your time asking about it on here.

[MysteryCar]

You are probably right. Thanks for the tip.

[Captain_Morgan]

Another option is to buy a desktop that fits your purpose and then use remote access to it when working remotely.

Does that bring ether cost saving, better performance, greater sized screen when in the office etc.

[P675]

Captain_Morgan said:

Another option is to buy a desktop that fits your purpose and then use remote access to it when working remotely.

Does that bring ether cost saving, better performance, greater sized screen when in the office etc.

Or perhaps rent a cloud server which you can allocate more resource too when you need it, and remotely access. I wouldn't want to carry around a £10k device that's got more chance of breaking when it's on the move with you. Get a cheaper one for the tasks that don't require the power and RAM, unless there's some reason you have to do that on the laptop in front of you.

[MysteryCar]

P675 said:

Or perhaps rent a cloud server which you can allocate more resource too when you need it, and remotely access. I wouldn't want to carry around a £10k device that's got more chance of breaking when it's on the move with you. Get a cheaper one for the tasks that don't require the power and RAM, unless there's some reason you have to do that on the laptop in front of you.

Because of the tasks I do, the power of the PC is needed when out most. Waiting around for processing is not on the agenda. I have quite a few options now, thank you, so looking into it all over the next few days.

[Steve_H80]

It's business so you need a contingency plan, any computer can fail.
In your position I would buy another at the same or better spec, I'm sure your accountant will do something to ease the pain, and keep them synchronised so if one fails you're not stuck.

[MysteryCar]

Griffith4ever said:

I'm a little suprised Xeons are still a thing! Back when I worked as an IT manager they were the reserve of servers , and... high power workstations, along with Quadra GPUs. I'd assumed regular processors would have overtaken, along with gaming GPUs. Obviously not!

It might be different now, but for Solidworks a common mistake used to be using a Gaming GPU as opposed to a Quadro (as an example). Can't remember the details, but they render differently causing screen issues. Having said that, Solidworks users only got 4K monitor support reasonably recently so it could just be a SW issue.

[mmm-five]

Equivalent to the Xeon now, would be an AMD Threadripper...but they don't seem to be many laptop options (quite power hungry)...so the next step would be one of the AMD HX processors, like a 9955HX3D (16C/32T).

[blackscooby]

Only a comment, but would you not be better with something like a HP / Dell server that stops at home and you RDP to it.
Something like a HP DL380 G11 ? Dual PSUs, RAID, massive memory capacity. Inbuilt redundancy ?

Then a more normal laptop to access the server remotely ?

[noyb1966]

Just realised how easy it is to spec a Dell Pro Max up to that price :O

[gotoPzero]

blackscooby said:

Only a comment, but would you not be better with something like a HP / Dell server that stops at home and you RDP to it.
Something like a HP DL380 G11 ? Dual PSUs, RAID, massive memory capacity. Inbuilt redundancy ?

Then a more normal laptop to access the server remotely ?

Thats what I would do. Limited chances of failure due to vibrations and nil chance of it being stolen / lost.

Would be a big performance jump too. The only thing you would need is a solid connection - but I guess most of your customers have wifi and worst comes to worst 4/5g hot spot.

[BlueMR2]

Does your software run on mac?

A studio is small and powerful at a cost, just need to take a monitor too. Shouldn’t be too big to carry around.

[MysteryCar]

BlueMR2 said:

Does your software run on mac?

A studio is small and powerful at a cost, just need to take a monitor too. Shouldn t be too big to carry around.

Sadly no.

Update: Have printed all the suggestions off and seeing a friend who builds computers and websites Monday and will then make a decision.