V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.
Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.
Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.
Major new features:
- Slate: A node based material editor.
- Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
- Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
- 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
- Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
- Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
- Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
- Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
- Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
- FBX file linking
- Save to Previous Release (2010)
We render a customised Kitguru scene at 3000×2500 and record the time taken, lower is better.
A high end desktop processor can complete this render in around 3 minutes however we can see the huge gains between the Core i5 and the Atom processor with 7 minutes being saved.
I love it. I am actually comtemplating it for college. I dont need massive battery life, but it seems somewhat of an oversight from Dell to only get 2 hours or so out of it. businessmen on the move might need at least double this a day.
I am glad you didnt score it down too badly though, it does a lot of things right.
My colleague in work has this and his overheats a lot, as our office is very warm. I might fire in an SSD for him next week and see if it helps.
I agree completely with the review. the internals are great and the design is beautiful, but the battery technology just doesnt cut it. for a business orenited machine this is a huge problem. there are a lot of complaints about it on dells forums.
I bought this last month and agree with most of the review. the design is brilliant, but my battery barely lasts 1.45 when watching youtube videos 🙁 I find this unacceptable and I wish I had read reviews before buying. apart from this is great. I hope Version 2 is better.
good review Zardon. seems like a decent all round machine unless you need a lot of battery support during the day. I suppose some business professionals might just need it for a presentation over lunch or something, then its ideal as the size is great.
Typical of Dell really.
Make an adamo style pc for the masses, keep the sexy looks, put a nice keyboard in, good screen, great design, then copy Apple and put the battery inside to keep the shape lovely.
Then cock up the battery life completely ruling it out for the target market. this is the third review on this machine ive read, this is the most detailed and unfortunately id have scored it much lower as the primary function for businessmen is a battery that lasts at least 4 hours. not 2.
I like it a lot, and the entry level one is cheap. shame about the battery, and you cant even buy another for replacement during the day. as you need to take the whole machine apart. what a stupid idea 🙁
ID buy it if I had the money, but a netbook is my limit, ordered a dell 10 inch last week, still hasnt arrived
That is a gorgeous laptop for the price, just a shame they didnt manage to get battery life to 4 hours or so 🙁 2 hours is terrible.
I just ordered one for college work, I dont need long battery life, just 1 hour at lunch, then it will be in mains at night. thanks for detailed review. I got an SSD in mine.