3D - 2

If you had $3500 to spend on a laptop for use with 3D CAD, what would you buy? I need speed and lots of RAM.?

I use Pro/Engineer Wildfire with large models. Unfortunately, Pro/E is not compatible with a Mac, so I need to know what PC type laptop you would buy.

Public Comments

1. i would recommend the macbook pro you can get tons of ram and it is really fast
2. I would buy a $1000 laptop and use the remainder to buy a kick-ass desktop. You get twice the performance for your money with a desktop.
3. buy a lenovo. In terms of speed, I am not sure of the requirements of 3d CAD. simply look into the recommended specifications and buy something a lot betther. With 3500 you will be able to buy a top performance computer.
4. $3500's a large budget for a single computer for this task, I would recommend a very high resolution, 17" or higher monitor - CAD's not a task to done with the laptop on your knee. Also remember to pack a good graphics card - your budget might well be able to afford a professional Quadro or FireGL model which are specifically certified for this sort of task. Although the initial work is all done in 2D the models are generally eventually going to come out and be rendered by your video card and you'll appreciate the rendering speed. A 64-bit OS (so Vista or XP or Linux or Windows) will let you go into shockingly high memory capacities - for example, the MacBook Pro can take 6GB just now. If you go Mac, never buy their RAM upgrades- it's about $100 a gig and that's just not the market rate anymore- from their shop. But you are allowed to add huge capacity aftermarket chips which can be bought relatively cheaply. It depends on what you mean by "large model", really, if you're genuinely modeling majorly complicated models then you'll never regret any money spent on memory or processor speed. If your models are less ambitious you'll find CAD's a lot more efficient than the monolithic beast it's usually claimed to be but the requirements go up rapidly with complexity and you want it to be responsive. Finally - do yourself a massive favour and buy a couple of good digitisiers, try and get a 3D mouse, it's a device that'll let you spin a model in 3D much more easily than if you used a mouse. And also pick up a graphic tablet, it's possible to make great work when you use a mouse and CAD, no question, but it's often very quick to use a pen and a tablet. Since you'll usually be sitting down and working with both hands - it's an incredibly effective way of managing your working time.