Laptop Suggestions

[GregGleason]

I am in the market for a new laptop.

I have been happy with my HP Pavilion, but it is over 7 years old and is a bit long in the tooth.

What I am looking for is a CAD-capable (I run AutoCAD) laptop with a minimum 17" screen.

I would prefer a lit keyboard and a touchscreen, but they are not deal breakers.

I would like to keep it under $1,500 if possible. I would like to take advantage of a Black Friday deal, too.

Any thoughts of where to look?

Greg

 

[GlenP]

Is a 17” screen really a lap-top? That was my first desktop monitor! Although that was back in the days of CRT.

 

[mh9162013]

I've had extensive experience using HP laptops and they're decent. Sufficient quality and a warranty that HP honors is a good way to describe HP laptops. Their older models tend to be better in terms of reliability, but I think that applies to many companies, especially Lenovo/IBM.

I haven't owned a Lenovo laptop in a while (my last model was from the 2010s), but when I had one, I was happy with their performance and reliability.

 

[BEC]

My last two field computers and the current desktop are all Lenovo and we've had pretty good luck with them (never mind that his is being typed on a new 14 inch M3 MacBook Pro...).

Lenovo has black Friday type sales (which is where I got my current take-it-to-the-field Thinkpad last year). They may be worth a look.

 

[FredA]

With AutoCad your primary task, I would look to an MSI gaming machine with as much DRam as you can afford.
For $1.5k you should be able to get a pretty nice machine during Black Friday sales.

 

[Sandy H.]

I pretty much only buy HP Zbooks now. We got them at work and they were great. I own 3 for my home business and 2 for personal use as well. The newest (personal) one is from 2016 and it still runs like a champ. I run AutoCAD, Solidworks and Inventor on the work machine (ok, I think that one was from 2018. . . ) and CorelCAD (Autocad clone) and Alibre on my personal machines with no issue.

I have purchased all from B&H Photo and will continue to look there whenever I go to buy a new one.

 

[user 30299]

I am in the market for a new laptop.

I have been happy with my HP Pavilion, but it is over 7 years old and is a bit long in the tooth.

What I am looking for is a CAD-capable (I run AutoCAD) laptop with a minimum 17" screen.

I would prefer a lit keyboard and a touchscreen, but they are not deal breakers.

I would like to keep it under $1,500 if possible. I would like to take advantage of a Black Friday deal, too.

Any thoughts of where to look?

Greg

Which AutoCAD software package are you running?

I run regular AutoCAD and Inventor software for modest equipment and structure designs.

I settled on Dell Latitude laptops ages ago. All around sturdy machine. Have taken them
everywhere, overseas, and in some hard environments. They almost fall in your price range.

If you go to Dell's Outlet site, you can pick up refurbished units below your $1,500 and
typically with lots of extras. My current Latitude is a refurbished unit that I bought back
in 2014. Will be putting it out to pasture at the new year. Its replacement is another
Latitude.

Remember the word "modest" ? If you're working with monster CAD files, in 3D, then
you would probably need to look at Precision laptops - and running a Nvidia card.

 

[Kane]

Dell XPS.
I am an Autodesk Revit user (way more graphics intensive than AutoCAD), Fusion 360, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I've had the same Dell XPS laptop for the last 6 years. It's a solid laptop.

The NVIDIA graphics cards are pretty much the only way to go for modelling/graphics intense work AFAIC. 16 GB RAM and 6GB dedicated graphics memory is more than enough for AutoCAD. The i7 core processors are very dependable.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-17-laptop/spd/xps-17-9730-laptop/usexchcto9730rpl01

 

[user 30299]

Dell XPS.
I am an Autodesk Revit user (way more graphics intensive than AutoCAD), Fusion 360, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. I've had the same Dell XPS laptop for the last 6 years. It's a solid laptop.

The NVIDIA graphics cards are pretty much the only way to go for modelling/graphics intense work AFAIC. 16 GB RAM and 6GB dedicated graphics memory is more than enough for AutoCAD. The i7 core processors are very dependable.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-17-laptop/spd/xps-17-9730-laptop/usexchcto9730rpl01

The Dell laptop I'm about to retire goes back to an i5 core and the Nvidia GeForce GT720. It had Windows 7 when it arrived,
survived the Windows 10 transition, and can't update to Windows 11.

 

[cls]

I'm partial to Asus machines, because they are built in Taiwan, not mainland. Every brand of machine built in mainland China has had factory installed backdoors, BIOS hacks, etc.

 

[FredA]

Do like the ASUS machines - especially the ones with OLED displays. That's my daily [personal] driver.
Autocad was our "Muscle Book" poster child app at Intel - 192GB DRam was considered low for big designs.

 

[Sandy H.]

Do like the ASUS machines - especially the ones with OLED displays. That's my daily [personal] driver.
Autocad was our "Muscle Book" poster child app at Intel - 192GB DRam was considered low for big designs.

Not disparaging at all, but I'm curious what day-to-day AutoCAD activities would involve that much memory. The equipment I was involved in designing back in the AutoCAD days had probably 1000-1500 pieces. Moving to the Inventor/Solidworks world, a similar number of components, but some were derivatives of others, so not entirely unique. Resulting installations were in the 20 million plus dollar range, so nothing gigantic, but non-trivial.

The projects I'm doing at a home user level are probably 20-30 parts and regretfully way less than 20 million dollars, but I've never had a machine with more than 64GB of ram and that was our dedicated FEA machine. Our regular machines were 16-32GB for general use with CAD and minor FEA. After about 1995, I never felt the computer was the slow part of the process with 2D/3D CAD. FEA, absolutely a different story.

Mostly just curious to hear your use case vs my experience. Again, not calling BS etc., but just interested in the turnover point for projects that are 'pretty big' in my mind vs. what people are buying for home use vs. 192GB of ram!

 

[FredA]

The muscle-book use case for Autocad involved the ability to bring an entire aircraft design to a conference room.
Something mobile so you can't use your workstation.
Something HUGE to tax the system.

I myself thought it was a stupidly small user base that wanted this, but it was and still is the Autocad poster usage....

 

[bjphoenix]

Not disparaging at all, but I'm curious what day-to-day AutoCAD activities would involve that much memory.

My company runs Revit mostly, I do a little Autocad still since I have access to it. (I draw rocket designs/parts and woodworking projects.) We run Dell Latitude workstations with 64GB or RAM. We load some fairly large Revit models of buildings, the architectural models have a lot more pieces than our models do and we run them just fine.

I was using a Dell Latitude at home that I bought many years ago from Dell's refurb page, I think I ran it 14 years. I replace it a couple of years ago with an HP Omen 15" gaming laptop. My gaming laptop has an 8 core AMD processor and discrete graphics. I bought it partly because a good gaming laptop has a much better cooling system than the average laptop. My second choice was a Lenovo Legion. If you can find sales at some place like BestBuy you could buy either brand within your budget.

 

[nevadagold]

I use this laptop for Autodesk Fusion 360 and just about any other rocket related software that I use.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/MSI-Kata...-Home-Black-11UD-001US/702329458?athbdg=L1800
It has been one of the best laptops I have had.

 

[Greg Furtman]

I've been using Lenovo ThinkPads for many years. My first one was a IBM ThinkPad 486. ThinkPads are Lenovo's business laptops and very durable. Performance is good but the amount of performance depends upon how much you want to spend. Their "P" series is their mobile work stations. Last year at this time I bought a ThinkPad E15 with an upper end i5, 16 Gb RAM, and a 500 Gb M.2 PCIe SSD. I paid $750 for it on sale. I've been very pleased with it.

And when you call the ThinkPad helpline you end up talking to an IBM rep here in the US, so for the ThinkPad & ThinkCentre line there is still a connect with IBM.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptop...inkPad;857:15%22%20-%2016.9%22&sortBy=priceUp

 

[Kallahan11]

I'm a big fan of Framework laptops due to their modularity,repairability and upgradability. However only a 13in is available now with a 16in in preorder and getting that with discrete graphics will break your budget. Check them out, I think what they do is worth the extra dough. Also you can save money with the DIY versions and buying your own ram and SSD. https://frame.work/

 

[Voyhager3]

If you buy a newer laptop I’d advise getting one of the commercial grade ones like the precision, on the other side the xps (consumer grade) is cool, expensive, light but really meh quality. Everyone at university has one, and they are just ok. My friend has the new precision and it seems to be holding up better than any xps. But they are expensive.
Maybe look into a used/ refurbished one, or an old thinkpad from Lenovo.
And just make sure not to get a Mac, they don’t like cad. My ME roommate bought one for cad, then he realized that he couldn’t do his work so he had to use mine…

 

[NTP2]

All I have to say is that my school laptop is one of the Chromebooks made by Lenovo and it’s horrible i am not hard on computers but the plastic is super brittle and my backpack was smacked by someone else’s and the plastic broke it wasn’t a hard smack either. Ok my rant is over now.

 

[Bravo52]

I found the Dell G series laptops to work really well with CAD software. But... the things you need are available in just about most laptops out there. A few things you need as a minimum: First, I agree with everyone here on the Nvidia card. It is a must (at least 8GB mem onboard at 100+GBps). Second, and overlooked a lot is a large hard drive (2TB would be nice) 3D files are really big when you save them to the drive. Third, the most recent generation of processor that run at a minimum of 3GHz. Lots of ram (32GB min).

Personal preference for me is the Dell G series gaming laptop. I have one and the only issue I've had was a squirly SD card reader (fixed...my fault, no issues now). I don't like the HP computers. My wife swears by her Lenovo. I'm not sure the brand matters.

 

[Rocketjunkie]

Tried an Acer laptop, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD. Would not run my camera downloading and editing software that my old laptop would run. About the same specs except 4th generation I7 instead of 12th gen I7 in the new one. Sent it back and splurged on an Acer Zenbook 16 OLED ($2300). It has no trouble running the software on the I9 12th gen, 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD. Beautiful machine but a lot more than I wanted for a secondary (after desktop) machine.

 

[GregGleason]

Thank you for all of the comments. There are lots of choices. I wanted to go with HP, but a lot of them use the Iris Xe graphics co-processor, which has a noted problem with AutoCAD.

This is what I went with. It was a lot more than I wanted to spend, but should be good for a few years (at least I hope).

https://www.amazon.com/MSI-Stealth-Studio-Gaming-Laptop/dp/B0BT3DFR8W/

 

[JoePfeiffer]

I've been happily using a Dell Inspiron 7000 series since 2017. It needs a new keyboard, which I've already bought and need to install.

When it comes time for my next laptop, I'm pretty sure I'll be switching to Framework. The configurability and focus on repairability and upgradeability are very appealing to me.

 

[Greg Furtman]

All I have to say is that my school laptop is one of the Chromebooks made by Lenovo and it’s horrible i am not hard on computers but the plastic is super brittle and my backpack was smacked by someone else’s and the plastic broke it wasn’t a hard smack either. Ok my rant is over now.

Chrome is horrible no matter who makes the Chrome book.

 

[Voyhager3]

Thank you for all of the comments. There are lots of choices. I wanted to go with HP, but a lot of them use the Iris Xe graphics co-processor, which has a noted problem with AutoCAD.

This is what I went with. It was a lot more than I wanted to spend, but should be good for a few years (at least I hope).

https://www.amazon.com/MSI-Stealth-Studio-Gaming-Laptop/dp/B0BT3DFR8W/

Very nice! And you got one heck of a deal on it!
My laptop (Alienware m16) has fairly similar specs, with 64gb ram being the only notable difference. Its been able to handle almost everything i've been able to throw at it for the most part. Just be careful and watch temps. But the MSI you bought will be able to run basically and CAD or game you throw at it fairly well.
But if it behaves like mine, don't plan on taking it too far for too long without the charging brick.

 

[bjphoenix]

Thank you for all of the comments. There are lots of choices. I wanted to go with HP, but a lot of them use the Iris Xe graphics co-processor, which has a noted problem with AutoCAD.

This is what I went with. It was a lot more than I wanted to spend, but should be good for a few years (at least I hope).

https://www.amazon.com/MSI-Stealth-Studio-Gaming-Laptop/dp/B0BT3DFR8W/

I used my Dell Latitude for 13 years so it's possible for the machine to work for a long time, the battery though not so long.

 

[NTP2]

Chrome is horrible no matter who makes the Chrome book.

Idk I liked the IBM ones.

 

[Voyhager3]

Idk I liked the IBM ones.

A better way to put it is that they are pretty terrible at anything than basic middle/highschool work.
I know as that’s all I had computer wise for the last 6+ years. But I will admit, that they are not bad at what they were intended to do, and are decently unkillable.
But the second you run anything different than google docs, they either suck at it (even OnShape struggled) or straight up can’t run the program because of ChromeOS

 

[NTP2]

A better way to put it is that they are pretty terrible at anything than basic middle/highschool work.
I know as that’s all I had computer wise for the last 6+ years. But I will admit, that they are not bad at what they were intended to do, and are decently unkillable.
But the second you run anything different than google docs, they either suck at it (even OnShape struggled) or straight up can’t run the program because of ChromeOS

I didn’t have issues with OnShape but I never used it much, I say that they are computers that know what they are and aren’t more or less.

 

[loujoe]

Mac