I'm off to college as an engineering student and I'm wondering if you guys could specify the types of things that would be most useful to me. I know laptops are often frowned upon, but I'm moving 2,000 miles away from my home to go to school, and this computer will also need to be mobile so I can take it to class. What qualities should I look for in a computer that will be doing some 3D modeling with CAD and similar programs and will also be used for gaming? Should I focus on a good mobile graphics card, a fast processor, integrated graphics, a fast hard drive, or what? Though I've been a PC gamer for a few years, I still don't fully understand which components of a computer do what types of work, so this dual-necessity purchase seems kind of daunting. My budget will likely be around $1000, and I'm more than willing to do any modifications to a rig if need be. Thanks for any help!
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np7352-clevo-w350st-p-5842.html
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152393
Some thing like these would do the job when looking for a laptop for gaming the gpu is the most important some thing like a 660m, 670m, 760m, 765m 675m, 770m would be great.
The two laptops mentioned above should be fine, but I just wanted to share my experience as an engineering student. You probably won't do as much 3D Modeling as you might think, that's not what engineering is. I also found that I was never taking my computer to class or anything since it's not really practical to take notes on differential equations or thermal-hydraulics on a computer. What you will need strictly in my experience is not mobility (though that is a plus) or graphics power (also a plus for games!), but a fair amount of CPU power and a decent amount of ram. In my major (nuclear engineering) I worked a lot with writing computer codes in matlab, some of which took quite a while to run. The series of codes my team and I wrote for my senior design project took several hours to run since we were parsing a very large amount of data. Think 5 GB ASCII and Excel files. You don't have to be a computer engineer to work with computer codes. Most engineering majors require you take programming classes and with good reason. Most of the problems in todays world can't be solved by hand in a reasonable time frame, so we write computer programs to solve them for us. This is especially true when working with a large amount of data.
Lastly, this isn't a must, but I will ALWAYS recommend an SSD whenever possible. This is something that can easily be upgraded down the road, but these things are the bees knees!