I am going to be attending college next year and I will need a good laptop for running engineering programs and probably some light gaming if I ever get any free time. I want it to be powerful enough to last, but I also want it to be affordable that I wont have to sell a kidney to buy it. I'm on a old desktop atm and desperately need an upgrade.anything at this point would be better.
Will both of these be powerful enough to run 3D modeling programs?
Is it worth the extra $100 for the i7? Will I see any noticeable performance increase in productivity?
If you know of something better for the money I'm all ears, Would like to keep it around (and a little below) $1000 USD. In any case, I need to factor in the cost of Windows 8, as I see most newer laptops are shipping with Windows 10, which my school does not recommend for compatibility.
Budget. How much are you willing to spend? Around $1000 USD Where do you live (what country, don't post specific details), and what currency do you use? Good ol' USA Is there a retailer you prefer? Amazon Do you need or already have peripherals? (this can add to costs) Nope What will you be using your Glorious computer for? Gaming? Rendering? Mix of both? Or is this a home media PC or Steam Box? Engineering software: CAD etc. Probably some light gaming
Absolutely! Both of these are going to be great. I have an older gen Dell with an i3 3110m and I can run Inventor (another Autodesk program) with relatively no issues. I'm sure you prefer to have a laptop so you can be more mobile, but if your interested we can provide you with some smaller (ITX) desktop options
You may want to consider getting an older PC that comes with Windows 8. You'll probably be able to get slightly better specs and won't have to drop $100 to downgrade Windows. Here's an example
I thought about a desktop and a cheaper laptop, but something that was brought up to me was that in that scenario, I would only really be able to do work in my room, not anywhere else on campus. This would be an issue in groups.
I think this laptop is perfect for your work, but I do recommend i7 version if you are doing some modeling and rendering, by the way, 960M is also perfect for light gaming, and it can also run some triple A title, but definitely not in Ultra setting. And don't buy the touchscreen version, I personally have a touchscreen laptop, but I never find it useful.
Just to give you a little back ground, im currently attending college for electrical engineering, we do alot of 3d modeling for different things usually mapping out circuitry and things along those lines. I use programs like creo and a whole sweet of autodesk programs as well as some custom software for the program. My system i ended up getting was an MSI dominator (broadwell i7 5700hq with a gtx 970m). I worked with several people for some projects that used the lenovo y70 (seems to be the system of choice where im as as 5 of the the 7 members of our group had them in different builds) and in our work my system pulled ahead greatly. Most of the software we work with relied heavily on the GPU and supported some form of CUDA acceleration so having a couple hundred cuda cores made a good difference (to a point but in laptops you wouldn't be hitting that any time soon), in comparison to the gtx 960m, the gtx 970m was doing the same work in about 40% less time and with some what greater accuracy ( we are allowed a set margin of error and have to redo calculations if they are outside of it). when it comes to CPU in programs that need it yes an I7 would be greatly helpful over the I5 if its a quad core edition vs a dual core (usually the only i7 dual cores are U series if i remember correctly so look for that when comparing) though you will need to looking the programs you are using.
My recommendation right now for laptops are Sager ans MSI. Sager you can configure your builds and you can either buy them through a vender like xotic PC or directly from them. Or you can go with MSI. They offer a few systems around your budget, if you are ok with open box and buy from newegg then one of these would be a good option.
this one is 17 inch systems but is only about a pound more then the dell you were looking at, and if size is a big deal MSI offers a phantom system that is a 14 inch with a skylake I7 and a 970m but im not sure how good the cooling is.
Any way that is just my thoughts on it as someone who is currently in a similar place to where you are going to be in a little bit.
Don't think anyone else has mentioned this so I will chime in: Shouldn't your school offer you the OS? For all the schools I know of they usually have deals so that way you have access to a plethora of software for free or heavily discounted. My school gave us access to the Microsoft Dreamspark program, so we had windows keys out the wazoo.
That Dell looks good. I'd maybe swap out the HDD/SSD for a dedicated SSD in the future. The 1080p screen will be very nice and a 960m will give you some power for gaming. I'd say go for it.
One thing I would watch out for after going through college is buying a laptop that is built well. It may be worth looking at older Thinkpads and Latitudes. They are usually built like tanks and very versatile. Although I have a friend with an Inspiron 15 and it seems to be built very well.
After thinking about it, I'm going to go with the i7 Dell I mentioned above. It gives me everything I need at the cheapest price, that includes the cost of installing an m.2 as well. Thanks for the input.
@ceres After looking for an older model, I came to find that many of them were missing something I wanted, be it the 4gb of vram or an ssd, and, in my findings at least, many would be more expensive than the Dell after all was said and done.
Thanks for all the help guys! TS really does have the best community
There is no SSD cache on the asus, so day to day usage should feel a little slower on the asus. 16GB of RAM though can be sometimes beneficial on some hungrier programs. 2GB for a 960M should be fine.
There are a decent amount of negative reviews regarding blue screening though on that laptop though, so be a bit wary.
Here's a review of the Dell. I really like this guy's videos.
For CAD an i7 will help. I use an i5 and twin gtx660's to run Creo. It works fine, except when rendering. That is the only time I wish I had something better. I ran across this review for your consideration. It may be over your budget but dreams are free.