Looking for a laptop for CAD

[Woolly]

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

Well, I've had a G55VW for a year now and it works quite well for CAD and certainly helps with compiling LabView code as well.

The only difference between the G45VW and the G55VW (as far as specs go) is the G55VW has a slower-clocked quad core processor in it, and hyper-threading.
Oh, and that G45VW has a larger HDD in it than my laptop.

Also, the cooling on this thing seems ridiculous until you are running Inventor in you lap and realize you aren't being burnt by it like most laptops.
The only complaint I have with it is that it IS a bit heavy. (which wasn't a problem until our bus broke down in OKC last year)

[dcarr]

A quick observation - Autodesk 2014 products are not optimized for the high-dpi 2560x1440 and similar displays that are becoming standard on higher end ultrabooks.

To be readable, Windows runs at about 125-150% DPI scaling by default on displays with this density. Most applications can handle this scaling fine. Autodesk products are a disaster, however - text overflows regions, icons are way off, etc. Basically makes it unusable. So you have to scale down to 100% which makes everything tiny.

With this in mind, if you do end up with an ultrabook or something in the 13" neighborhood, I'd go for 1920x1080 which is the ideal resolution to run at 100% scaling at that screen size.

Give it a few years once all laptops are shipping with hidpi displays when Autodesk will get around to making their apps scale nicely.

[Greg Needel]

I am really partial to the Dell Precision Line of laptops. They really hold up to the the rough use I put them through and can handle any CAD you can throw at them as they are designed to be mobile workstations. In my opinion if you can spend a bit more on something quality designed for CAD work it will be worth it. Even if you can get a lesser machine to work, you won't get nearly the performance with lots of parts open and assemblies with a bunch of parts.

Also spending a bit more now will mean it will most likely last longer and be compatible with future version of CAD software.