Looking for a laptop for CAD

[Chris_Ely]

Originally Posted by Maximillian

what do you guys think of this. Its a gaming laptop so it has pretty good specs and its refurbished.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834231238

This should work well. It is refurbished, so you could be taking your chances--you only get a 90 day warranty.

Originally Posted by BA SW

I would probably go with the first 1 on the list above (lenovo w510) if you intend it just for cad because it has a quadro fx880m graphics card. geforce series is more geared towards gaming and quadro is intended for applications like cad. however, if you intend to do some gaming get a laptop with geforce. if you dont mind paying an extra $200 over your budget i would go with the last asus you listed on the google doc.

While the first laptop you linked to does have a workstation graphics card, the processor is slow, which is not good.

[yash101]

2GB RAM minimal. An i5 at 2.5GHz or higher would also be nice. HD3000 is also good enough as long as you don't start playing computer games. HD4000 is much better, though so if you see that, a few bucks might be worth it. I used to run 2013 on a Netbook, 1GHz, 2GB, dual core amd c-30. It wasn't the best experience I had.

As of minimal processor, an i3-2367 will cut it (That is the slowest i* processor that intel produces so you will most likely get something faster)


DONT GO FOR AN ULTRABOOK. THEY ARE SLOW, OVERPRICED AND DON'T GIVE MUCH BATTERY LIFE!

[aldaeron]

If you want a laptop that can handle a large model without much lag the often overlooked item is the graphics card. For higher performance CAD you want a workstation graphics card, not a gaming card. The link below explains the difference fairly well.

http://www.avadirect.com/forum/forum...&PID=3317#3317

I run SolidWorks and use nVidia cards so I can't comment on Inventor or Intel/ATI cards.

I like the nVidia Quadro series - the current mobile series is the Quadro KXXXX (Where the higher the number signifies a better, but more expensive card). The amount of RAM is also important (larger is better, but more expensive) I use a K1000M with 1 GB dedicated RAM on my current laptop.

The cheapest place to get a Quadro K series mobile card I know of is HP refurbished business notebooks:

https://h41183.www4.hp.com/pps-offer...t=notebook_pcs

I have used the HP EliteBooks at work and home and they can handle very large SW models. They are not cheap ($1000+), but will offer great performance. The Elitebooks come with 2nd or 3rd Gen i7 CPUs and 8+ GB RAM which are more than sufficient for SW.

While this is an expensive machine it will work well and allow you to open and work with huge models (like the full Robonauts 2013 STEP file)

-matto-

[mman1506]

Originally Posted by yash101

DONT GO FOR AN ULTRABOOK. THEY ARE SLOW, OVERPRICED AND DON'T GIVE MUCH BATTERY LIFE!

When I can't use my desktop I use solidworks on a 13" Lenovo Yoga ultrabookwith HD 4000 graphics and 4gb of RAM. It actually runs solidworks surprisingly well. Not something id want to design a whole robot in but usable. It also has about 5 hours of battery life which is not bad. Sure i could get a laptop for 200$ less with the same performance but the premium is worth it for the convenience.

[yash101]

Originally Posted by mman1506

When I can't use my desktop I use solidworks on a 13" Lenovo Yoga ultrabookwith HD 4000 graphics and 4gb of RAM. It actually runs solidworks surprisingly well. Not something id want to design a whole robot in but usable. It also has about 5 hours of battery life which is not bad. Sure i could get a laptop for 200$ less with the same performance but the premium is worth it for the convenience.

It does run it well, but not well enough for the price range . My $600 ultrabook gives me quite low performance. It takes a couple seconds (more than 5) to open a part in Inventor, while the software is already open. However, that could be because of my i3-2367!

[theawesome1730]

I have run Inventor 2014 on a MacBook Pro with an i5 at 2.5Ghz and Intel HD4000 graphics with 8gbs of RAM quite well under bootcamp. While a MacBook is well out of your price range, you could expect laptops with similar specs to run it about the same.

[Answer42]

Originally Posted by mman1506

When I can't use my desktop I use solidworks on a 13" Lenovo Yoga ultrabookwith HD 4000 graphics and 4gb of RAM. It actually runs solidworks surprisingly well. Not something id want to design a whole robot in but usable. It also has about 5 hours of battery life which is not bad. Sure i could get a laptop for 200$ less with the same performance but the premium is worth it for the convenience.

I also use a Lenovo yoga. It runs pretty much everything I need it too. Great machine. If you have the cash I highly recommend it.

[Cash4587]

I have been using an ASUS the past couple of weeks and I love it. It is pretty beefy in power so it runs SolidWorks very smoothly with no problems yet. May not be what you are looking for, as it is pricey, but this is just to give you an idea of what I run and what works for me.

Specs:
i7-4700HQ @ 2.4GHz
16.0GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX 760m with 2GB memory
64Bit Windows 8

[AndreaV]

I really like de-comissioned ibm thinkpads workstation laptops. I have a T61p that has a(albeit outdated) dedicated workstation graphics card. It's a 5-6 year old laptop now. Runs solidworks and inventor like a champ, only really has problems with large assemblies, but that's pretty normal.

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
256MB Nvidia Quadro FX 570M
4gb memory
64gb sata 2 ssd for improved launch times and battery life

I got it 2 years ago for $240, there are a lot of refurbished ibm's like this floating around. the build quality on this one in particular is really good!

[Sabaka]

I have a Toshiba Satellite C855D (AMD A6-4400M @2.7 GHz) with 4 GB RAM. It's comparatively slow at opening files, though it still gets parts open in less than 5 seconds and assemblies in less than 30 (depending on the size). Once the files are open, it has almost no issues past graphics (slow down a lot when I zoom in on objects with a lot of faces).

Wow... I like parentheses.