best laptop for cad?

[DCCmad]

Hi all,

 

Im thinking about getting a new laptop for myself for use of college work ect.

 

Im doing mechanical engineering and it involves using autocad for assessments. At the moment my current laptop really struggles to load and let me flow through autocad and sketchup work even when its been made faster in the settings ect, but its a bit out of date now anyways.

 

Has anyone got a suggestion for a great laptop ut to £1000 mabey a couple hundred more that has super fast processor and works with Microsoft office and autocad?

 

Connor

[Rammstein2609]

Hi Connor

 

I don't have a suggestion for a specific laptop but what I will say is whichever one you choose, make sure it has a dedicated graphics card with its own memory and is 64bit as this will dramatically improve Autocad's operation.  If you try and use a laptop with integrated graphics I believe it saps power from the computer CPU and RAM so will make things run quite slow.  This may also make the laptop stay hotter for longer which can seriously damage the internals if not vented properly.  I had a laptop several years ago which was sat on a flat wooden desk with the vents clear of any rubbish, I had a quick video to render in 3DS Max which took several hours.  The result was some of the components on the motherboard got so hot the whole board needed to be replaced.  Luckily this was done under warranty and the manufacturer recognised a genuine fault with the onboard graphics.

 

The good thing about being a student is you get a free student licence of any Autodesk software with free updates so you can always have the latest version installed which will also make a difference to your workflow.

 

Cheers

 

Martin

[Rabs]

I agree with Martin's points and I would add that you should look for a laptop with a 'professional', 'engineering' or similar graphics card, not a consumer (gaming) graphics card.  The Nvidia Quadro range is the one I've seen people turn to for this.  They are generally very similar hardware to consumer graphics cards but they have drivers written to be more efficient and reliable for CAD work.  I once tried equivalent professional and gaming cards (almost identical hardware on the two cards) in the same machine.  The performance of the professional one was a bit better and it had significantly fewer graphical bugs.  They are, however, much more expensive than the equivalent gaming card.