Looking for a laptop for CAD

[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.