T420 - Intel HD 3000 vs. NVS 4200M for Engineering

I will be attending college in the fall to major in Electrical Engineering. I have decided that I want a Thinkpad and the 14" seems just the right size for me as it is portable and I can plug it into an external monitor as needed.

With that being said, I am now not sure which setup to choose. I don't know exactly how powerful the Intel HD 3000 is and I don't want to pay more for the NVS 4200M if it is not necessary. Any other engineers get by with the Intel HD 3000?

Any input is greatly appreciated as I am planning on pulling the trigger on this fairly soon due to the B&N Exclusive offers.

 

What will you be doing with your computer? I'll be a Computer Engineering student soon, and I don't see a scenario where you really need a powerful GPU (let alone the fact that the NVS 4200M is only like 20% faster than the iGPU).

 

Well I doubt I'll even have time to do any gaming on it and if I need to game I can always bring my gaming desktop down to my apartment sometime. The main things I will be doing is running electrical engineering software and I thought even in electrical engineering there would be a light amout of AutoCAD involved. I just didn't want the Intel HD 3000 to hinder my productivity. However, I will be hooking the thinkpad up to my 24" external monitor occassionaly to increase screen real estate while at my apartment. I guess if worst comes to worst, I can always attempt to make an eGPU.

 

the Intel 3000 GPU is fine for AutoCAD you would be using in Electrical engineering.

 

The NVS 4200M is faster, but not much, but if the HD 3000 can't handle the 3D work that you need to do, chances are the NVS 4200M can't either.

And if you are talking about GPU programming, it's not worth it on a laptop. I tried the other day on my desktop to see if I could speed up some simulation that I was programming. The GPU does calculate a lot faster in certain tasks, but there is a big overhead to transfter data back and forth between GPU memory and main memory. So to take advantage of the GPU, you would have to minimize the number of times you need to go between the GPU and CPU, but then that also means that you need to have a lot of memory on the GPU and laptop GPUs just usually don't come with that.

Since you have a gaming desktop, you may want to just do all the heavy-duty work on it. I do most of my stuff on laptop, but when some heavy simulations have to be run, I run them on my home desktop from my office with remote desktop.

 

Hey, I'll be going back to school for a PhD in Electrical Engineering this fall, and I just got the T420.

Get the hi-res screen, 1600x900 is going to be so helpful for having more than one application open, e.g. having a pdf open while X11 over ssh for the various EE programs that you'll use - assuming your department uses Linux.

Don't worry about graphics - the Intel 3000 HD will be good enough. A GPU will only be marginally helpful if you go into computational electromagnetics, because of the very basic CAD involved with setting up the simulations, which are CPU intensive. The EE department will have separate computers more suited to this type of work.

Overall, it's a good balance of price, performance, battery life. If you think that you would prefer a lighter & thinner but pricier model, consider the T420s. Otherwise, I think you'll be really happy with the purchase.

 

As a practising engineer I concur with the advice already given. Just make sure that you get the 1600 x 900 display. It's not excellent but is a lot more usable that 1366 x 768. A 9 cell battery should get you through the working day with light usage but another advantage of keeping to the Intel graphics is that you can then make do with the 65W PSU which is a little smaller than the 90W.

John