Looking for a laptop for CAD

[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.