So really, how bad are gaming laptops for CAD / Mech. Engineering undergrad?

So I've been in the market for a decent laptop for my senior year since this summer, but as my courses weren't exactly "heavy" work for my computer, I've gotten by the first half of my last year just fine with a late 2010 11" Macbook Air.

However, in the next couple of weeks, I know that I will be doing some degree of Solidworks (enough to need to do work outside of the CAD labs in school) and I know that my courses will be more computer-heavy as we will be doing a graduation project.

With that, I know that the Macbook Air doesn't stand a chance against this and have been in the market for a laptop again, but am again at crossroads between a GeForce and a Quadro.

I've been looking at the M3800 and a W540.

However, I am unsure how much of a performance boost that would be compared to say a Macbook Pro Retina, a Gigabyte P34G, or the 13.3" Clevo/Sager with GeForce cards and are considerably cheaper (bar the MBPr).

Would a Quadro K1100M be an overkill for a undergrad? Because, if the GeForce's are enough to not have me pulling my hair out, I'd much rather go the GeForce route than a Quadro. However, I have also heard that Solidworks doesn't support many GeForce cards, which makes me think that maybe then, my laptop would need to fall back on the Intel Graphics...

Any expert opinion would be much appreciated!

 

you WILL rip your hair out in Solidworks with any of the Gforce cards since Kepler is so gimped in GPGPU functions. a good example is my 15" retina is about 10-12% as fast rendering as my Elitebook 8770W

in house NBR benchmarks
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...5-call-benchmarks-cad-opencl.html#post9207007

Solidworks specific
http://forum.notebookreview.com/att...all-benchmarks-cad-opencl-specviewperf_sw.png

the K1100m would not be overkill and if you want a longer lifespan try to get into the K2000m or K3000M of you cant go Quadro/Fire Pro then go high end Radeon if necessary.

 

pretty much a descriptive way of saying: out of the 4 families of GPUs (quadro/firepro/radeon/geforce) the last thing you'd consider is a geforce for what you're doing, followed closely by the radeons -> exploring a new family of GPUs n.b. the firepro/quadro is not something you should fear of, its just another piece of hardware that needs exactly 1 driver to download, another 1 when update is available, a no brainer just like the geforce/radeon

 

Oh, I am sure that the Quadros and FirePros burn GeForce and Radeon, but I guess my big question is whether Quadros and FirePros might be an overkill, when GeForce and Radeon's are just as capable of dealing with a college undergraduate level of CAD?

I'm sure that it would make a big difference for the professional CAD engineers out there, but for designing simple stuff like bikes or a simple robotic arm and that sort, would Quadros and FirePros really make a difference in the amount of time you have to wait for the renders to finish?

 

As an undergrad and now a TA I learned that:
a) You can "get by" with pretty much anything that is current gen when buying a laptop, the amount of hair pulling varies
b) most of the work you'll do during your first two years or so will run on most recent notebooks
c) when you get near the end of your bachelor in engineering, you'll do more intensive stuff where you'll either have to use the university's computers or be glad that you bought a laptop capable of performing a decent amount of work

If you want an example:
Most students in chemical engineering did fine with their dual core, 4 GB RAM notebooks during their first two years, then they went through classes where they were asked to perform more intensive finite elements simulations (among other things) during their third year. Obviously, every student who has a laptop wants to do that on their on time, on their laptops, the ones with the dual core 4 GB RAM notebooks were pulling their hair out (simulations running out of memory & long crunch times) and the ones with the quad cores and 16 GB of RAM were quietly laughing. The 4th year in chem engi at my uni is pretty much a few projects and you don't know what you'll get, but some of the students again had to perform some pretty intensive stuff.

In the end, choose a budget, stick to it and then, if you can get a CAD GPU if you're going to use solidworks, etc. If you can't or anticipate you'll only do assemblies without too many parts, a Radeon would probably get you through without too much hair pulling. You'd be surprised how little it can take to bring a GPU to its knees sometimes.

Also don't forget to get a decent CPU and a decent amount of RAM as well or in other words, balance what you get.

The best advice I can give you though is to ask around, previous students if you know some in order to have an idea of what you'll face and buy the laptop accordingly. Pulling all nighters in the computer labs isn't exactly fun and from personal experience, there will be a few of those. OK, pulling an all nighter is never fun, but if you can do it at a teammate's place (where you can crash if you to catch some zzz) or your place can make the experience more tolerable.

 

For basic solidworks, my old Radeon mobility card was fine for everything I did in college and a year or two after. I now have an M4800 with a quad to card, but all of our office desktops do fine without quadro cards.

You will probably notice a difference on HUGE assemblies, but I would say you'll be alright with any card that has 1GB or more of RAM.


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