Which laptop is best fro CAD

Shuriken

I've 4 laptops Im interested in and for college I need the best possible laptop for running CAD, I generally have such big files I crash a lot of the college computers, I'll also be doing photoshop and renders, so which is the best deal?

DELL €480
15.6" Widescreen WXGA WLED (1366 x 768) TFT Display with TrueLife™
4096MB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x2048]
250GB (5,400rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive
Intel Integrated GMA 4500MHD
4-cell 24WHr Li-Ion primary battery
Dell Wireless 1397 Mini Card (802.11 b/g)


Samsung R519 €499
Intel Pentium dual core T4300 processor.
2.1GHz processor speed.
4GB DDR2 RAM.
15.6in screen size.
Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.
250GB SATA hard drive.
Multi format dual layer drive.
Intel GMA X4500M graphics.
802.11 b/g/n wireless enabled.
Windows 7 Premium operating system installed.


Acer Aspire 5810T €479
Intel Core UVL SU3500 processor.
1.4GHz processor speed.
4GB DDR3 RAM.
15.6in screen size.
HD resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.
320GB SATA hard drive.
Multi format dual layer drive.
Intel GMA 4500M HD graphics.
Multi card reader.
802.11 b/g/n wireless enabled.
Windows Vista Premium operating system installed.
Up to 8 hours battery life.


Acer Aspire 5732Z €499
Intel Pentium dual core T4300 processor.
2.20GHz processor speed.
4GB DDR2 RAM.
15.6in screen size.
Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.
320GB hard drive.
Multi-format dual layer drive.
Intel GMA 4500M HD graphics.
1 Ethernet ports.
802.11 b/g/n wireless enabled.
Windows 7 Home Premium operating system installed.
2.5 hours battery life.

Kavkid

I'm not an expert at CAD or anything but I'm pretty sure none of those integrated gfx cards could handle CAD very well.

Shuriken

Oh really? Hmm, yeh graphics card was mentioned as an important thing to me before with the CAD files I normally work on.
Well what gfx card should I be looking for then?

Kavkid

A dedicated graphics card, such as on in a gaming laptop or dedicated CAD gfx card like the nvidia Quadro.

Mellor

Kavkid wrote: »

I'm not an expert at CAD or anything but I'm pretty sure none of those integrated gfx cards could handle CAD very well.

Despite what people constant tell others, Standard AutoCAD isn't as intensive as people make out. I'm always hearing people going on about how you need loads of RAM to run autocad and its nonsense. Any laptop for the last 5 or 6 years had more than enough ram to run CAD.
Again graphics cards aren't that big an issue for CAD (or photoshop, another one people harp on about)

What will be demanding is rendering programs. You shouldn't really be doing these on a laptop anyway, but if its your only option, refer to software specs. 4 gb is enough ram imo, and theres no harm in upping the graphics card for rendering.


There are all similar, I'd go with the dell as they are the best when it comes to customizing in my expierence.

3dsteel

http://www.cadtutor.net/forum/showthread.php?t=44534

smashey

I have a Compaq Presario CQ60 and it runs AutoCAD no problem.

Sisu200

I have a laptop running Pro E and Solidworks, it ia a HP Elitebook with a NVidia Quadro and 4 Gig of Ram, Anything less will struggle to render some basic designs, I had a Dell Desktop before this, got this uprated to a high standard graphics card and was fine also, it all boils down to the size of the files and the complexity of your assemblies

For AutoCad depending on what you want to do a middle of the road machine will do fine

gman2k

I had a pentium 3 (600hz speed processor) and it had no problem whatsoever with AutoCAD.
Any of the laptops on sale these days will be able to handle it.
A better way of looking at the laptops is looking at the screen - size and viewing angles etc.