Recommended laptops?

[ryanmamikel]

Hey fellow spoolers. I am looking at purchasing a new laptop. I will be using it for work mostly, creating spreadsheets, power point presentations, as well as running a program my wife uses which is based off of a CAD software for interior design build solutions. My needs are not much, but this program demands a lot of RAM (8gb) to run smoothly (current setup cannot handle it at 4gb).

My question's are what is recommended in a laptop of this caliber? Has anyone had good/bad experiences with specific manufacturers? And what would be a good recommended memory/ram/processor combo that would mean I could keep it for a while and not require an upgrade again 1-2 yrs down the road.

Thanks folks, I greatly appreciate your opinions/insight.

 

[doublespaces]

Hey fellow spoolers. I am looking at purchasing a new laptop. I will be using it for work mostly, creating spreadsheets, power point presentations, as well as running a program my wife uses which is based off of a CAD software for interior design build solutions. My needs are not much, but this program demands a lot of RAM (8gb) to run smoothly (current setup cannot handle it at 4gb).

My question's are what is recommended in a laptop of this caliber? Has anyone had good/bad experiences with specific manufacturers? And what would be a good recommended memory/ram/processor combo that would mean I could keep it for a while and not require an upgrade again 1-2 yrs down the road.

Thanks folks, I greatly appreciate your opinions/insight.

If its cad, then you'll need a laptop with dedicated graphics. If you shop for something that has nvidia/radeon that was made in the last year or two then you'll probably turn out okay. They do have newer architectures which have recently came out, I'm not sure if that has trickled down to their mobile graphic solutions yet, but they are a pretty big bump in performance(per watt and dollar)

A lot of this just comes down to your budget honestly. You can get really cheap computers that do a darn good job at web surfing and basic things for next to nothing. Then you can spend 3,000 on a laptop that does all of it better and thinner. So really you have a multitude of options where dollars are your primary constraint.

 

[ryanmamikel]

Awesome, Thank you very much for the insight. We are currently running an nvidia graphics card in our PC, and we have not had any issues performance wise with it. The need for a laptop comes from requiring to do presentations and fly-through's for sustomers and potantial clients. I will see what i can find.

Thanks @doublespaces

 

[arsenalmse]

Nvidia is always a great choice! I assisted some people in purchasing a laptop for engineering (solidworks, CAD, etc.) and always suggest at least 16 Gbs of RAM (due to today's inexpensive cost of RAM) and a graphics card with at least 1-2 Gbs of VRAM and plenty of CUDA cores. So in todays terms anything with at least a nvidia 1060 in it with an intel i7 should do the trick. If you're really serious, go with the nvidia quadro family and then you'll be set, but it comes down to your budget.

Also it helps to have a SSD as the primary boot disk for obvious reasons, but especially from experience, it is nice when live time rendering and loading various libraries for your design software. Hope this helps!

 

[ryanmamikel]

Nvidia is always a great choice! I assisted some people in purchasing a laptop for engineering (solidworks, CAD, etc.) and always suggest at least 16 Gbs of RAM (due to today's inexpensive cost of RAM) and a graphics card with at least 1-2 Gbs of VRAM and plenty of CUDA cores. So in todays terms anything with at least a nvidia 1060 in it with an intel i7 should do the trick. If you're really serious, go with the nvidia quadro family and then you'll be set, but it comes down to your budget.

Also it helps to have a SSD as the primary boot disk for obvious reasons, but especially from experience, it is nice when live time rendering and loading various libraries for your design software. Hope this helps!

It absolutely does help, Thank you. Yeah right now anytime she makes a change it takes anywhere up to a minute for the change to save and update her parts list. And she gets MAD. Happy wife, Happy life. MY life is not happy right now. Thanks for the tips!!

 

[adair]

Lenovo Y700
15.6-Inch 1920×1080
i7-6700HQ 2.60GHz
1TB 5400 RPM
8GB DDR4
GeForce GTX960M 4GB DDR5

I bought this one, works great