Looking for a laptop for CAD

[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-