I purchased the metro Y pro scanner last year and I’ve been slowly introducing it into my engineering business. I’m trying to expand into motorsports and it would be a major advantage to be able to perform a 3d scan at the clients garage/workshop. Right now I have to use my gaming PC at home and it’s not a great practice as it’s turning my bedroom into a workshop.
Thus, I have decided to buy a laptop specifically for scanning. I’m probably going to use it for CAD design and general business too, while I’m at it, but scanning will be its main purpose.
I’ve spent almost a full week doing research on the subject of which laptop is going to work for me and I can’t make up my mind. I come here with hopes that maybe you guys will be able to help me out. It’s gonna be a big purchase that has to last for years, so I mostly decided against a gaming laptop due to reliability and support concerns, but if it’s the only way to achieve scanning performance then I may have to reconsider.
The two main contenders are:
Dell Pro Max 16
Intel Ultra 7-265H
64GB RAM
RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell GPU
Lenovo Thinkpad T1G (Roughly 20% more expensive than the Dell)
Intel Ultra 9 285H
64GB RAM
RTX 5070
I couldn’t find any reputable information on the performance differences of the two graphics cards for 3d scanning specifically. The pro card is obviously worse in gaming, but I have a PC for that. I work with solidworks so having certified drivers and ECC vram is a bit of a plus, but I’m mainly interested in scanning performance. If those cards were desktop, then the choice would’ve been easy, but both are laptop versions, so weak to begin with, and the 5070 is almost surely not going to run at full power, because of the power supply of said ThinkPad not being too powerful.
If the performance between the two was within 10% of eachother I’d lean towards the Dell, as it’s cheaper, but if the pro card is as bad as some sources say, then I’m either gonna have to get the ThinkPad, or get a gaming laptop like the Lenovo Legion and hope it can last a good few years and not break instantly after the warranty ends.
What are your thoughts? Do you have any experience with laptops using those gpu’s together with the Metro Y Pro or a similar scanner?
To my knowledge avoid the Blackwell GPU. People have had a lot of issues with their drivers and revoscan. Historically Revopoint software favors gaming GPUs. A mobile 5070 will perform well with the Metro Y Pro. I have a Lenovo legion with a 275hx and a 5070 and it performs well.
Revo Metro takes advantage of the gaming card not the computing , get yourself a good gaming card starting with RTX 4060 as you will already reach the maximum frame speed with it using GPU acceleration, avoid any Quadro type of card they are not made for this requirement .
If you need the other card for other purpose then make sure your CPU power is equal at least to i9 14th Gen or better to reach full frame speed without GPU acceleration.
Thank you for the tips.
I was afraid of that being the case.
I really want a pro-grade laptop for the better warranty / support and repairability, but those have been increasingly hard to find with a gaming GPU. I think that ThinkPad T1G might even be the only current one.
That is true , since last year almost everything is vanished for good price , everything got much more expensive , I grab last December one of the cheapest laptop with recommended system and after that the prices jumped up like crazy , so definitely hard to find what you really looking for and if you find, it is so overpriced that is basically not worth it.
I have a similar system and it runs great. My system is a Dell Pro Max 16 with the ultra 9, 64gb of ram and the 4000 blackwell. I get full speed on the 'y pro. I say: go for it!
Explain please. That makes no sense. I can’t think of anything but compute to process _incoming_ data. Also if it is NOT cuda compute what you guys use, then why are we stuck with Nvidia only?
The main difference lies in the target audience: gaming cards (like Nvidia RTX) prioritize high frame rates and speed for video games, while workstation cards (like Nvidia Quadro/RTX Ada) prioritize stability, raw precision, and certifications for software like CAD and 3D rendering.
The Revo Scan software is neither CAD or Rendering software , it takes advance of the frame rate speed and features that the Graming cards offers with their drivers and exclusive features. It is not about the viewport as it can run on any card that support OpenGl , it is about laser mode acceleration where the speed of frames matters in real time just like videogame.
The GPU is not used for processing either as it is CPU based software , it only utilize the GPU acceleration while using laser mode in real time if the system don’t have fast enough CPU for that optimal task .
The team is working on other cards support like AMD for the future so it will be not just limited to CUDA cores .
I understand the confusion here but your CAD software don’t support either multimillion polygons model and would choke on it .
Zero confusion - at least on my side. GPUs do not run on pixie dust.
You mentioned AMD support coming. HIP? Or general APIs like OpenCL or Vulkan compute?
The latter would save you guys implementing another proprietary API and give us customers free reign on choosing a GPU including Intel and also older AMD architectures. Actually it would be an USP in the current market.
Any info? On the compute API you are going to support I mean. Please no bla bla bla…
I am not authorized to share that details , that technical information is usually not shared publicly until the process is finished and in beta stage ( under NDA) Please remember the GPU is used strictly for real time capture of the laser frames and nothing else.
You are more that welcome to share your feedback and suggestions on this matter personally via email as well customer@revopoint3d.com
If I know more and can freely share it I would , but for today it is all I have for you .
I’m fairly new here…this MSI laptop available at Costco seems to fit the needs quite well. The only thing lacking is it comes with 32GB of RAM memory and 64GB is recommended. I plan on upgrading the RAM at some point, but it was able to scan the supplied statue ok.
That is so true , I snatched last December the latest cheaper RAM before the prices went up like crazy , my laptop from last December going on now for over $2500 , $100 more with 64GB , rare elements are priceless at this moment.