General

[Jebus]

I have a toshiba qosmio, I'll look at what's in there and let you know, might work for you, I paid $2400 a few years back, and its been on a shelf for 1.5years, pretty sure it has an i7

[towerofcards.19]

While the portability of a laptop is really appealing, for simulation work I highly suggest a desktop (with a workstation graphics card), as the cost would be less than that of your laptop, and you're able to pick a workstation card (you can reconfigure a gaming card into a workstation card but it's a complicated process).

Student versions are available for free download, but if your professor has access to versions with addons, jump on that train.

[Falcon16]

If you're needing a laptop for Solidworks the W series is where it's at. I was actually looking at picking up a W series at some point maybe in a few years when my M14x is getting long in the tooth. With that said as towerofcards.19 pointed out you could easily build a desktop for CAD for probably less than 1/2 the cost of your laptop. Just looked at Canada Computers, I realize you're in the US so your price will probably be even less than this, but a PNY Quadro 2000 with 1GB of GDDR5 is $450 add in your other components and you could easily build a dedicated CAD box for $1000 or so. With that said when you're looking to build a desktop CAD box a great way to save money and I did this personally myself is to buy a $250-300 gaming graphics card and do a BIOS mod. That's all most CAD cards are anyways they are the gaming cards with a different BIOS and special drivers that are focused on accuracy of rendering and image quality rather than sheer all out speed. Just food for thought

With that said I know you said it NEEDS to be a laptop so the W series go for it. Only things I'd change are with CAD being intensive bump your ram to 8GB (even if you buy it later yourself) I'd also suggest if you have the option getting a second hard drive added for mass storage. keep your working models and Solidworks on the SSD and then everything you've finished or aren't working on transfer to the mass storage drive. My last laptop (Dell E6510) had a 128GB SSD and it gets eaten up fast with Windows and a few applications a secondary drive really is almost a necessity really

Hope that helped a bit in your decision making process

[O'Lane]

Originally Posted by Falcon16

With that said I know you said it NEEDS to be a laptop so the W series go for it. Only things I'd change are with CAD being intensive bump your ram to 8GB (even if you buy it later yourself) I'd also suggest if you have the option getting a second hard drive added for mass storage. keep your working models and Solidworks on the SSD and then everything you've finished or aren't working on transfer to the mass storage drive. My last laptop (Dell E6510) had a 128GB SSD and it gets eaten up fast with Windows and a few applications a secondary drive really is almost a necessity really

That's the nice thing about the W series is the ability to increase your ram, just remove the back panel and there's 2 slows for extra ram. I got my W530 with 4GB and I'll likely upgrade it when I find a need for more ram.

[dukie]

Im running an asus N73J. It has been stable for all of the assemblies that I have worked on. No crashes yet . THe assemblies I work with are probably an order of magnitude larger than anything you are likely to have in your racer.

I can't remember if I have even moved up to 2012 yet lol. Large companies always lag a ways behind the currect rev.

3 words that will give you the biggest bang for your buck : dedicated video ram.

Shared video ram pretty much gets ignored and will cause crashes.

gaming cards are cheaper and will get the job done but be prepared for the crashes.

Solidworks requires goofy video cards because all of the major grunting is done on the GPU not the CPU like it should be. A carryover from when vram was so much faster than ram.

[ApoC_101]

Hey Dukie I'm on an N75S here, the Asus laptops are solid. I only use this one for Gibbs 2012 currently but Inventor 2013 is going on it next week

my Avratech laptop is an Acer Timeline X... best compact laptop ever for the price. Both these laptops have dedicated graphics and video memory, which is basically must-have for CAD/CAM.