So I’ve had a Dell M2800 (basic spec at the bottom) and it’s been good for the last few years, allowing me to use CAD on-site. For the first year or so, the battery would last 8-10 hours, ideal for building sites without power (well, safe power).
I’ve been a bit frustrated with it over the last 6 months and finally had enough. Worked well with Win7 but Dell don’t care about it being compat’ with Win10. The graphics doesn’t work and it falls back on the iGPU…which isn’t nice with CAD/3D stuff. I’ve wasted hours trying various drivers, from various places and nothing has worked. I found this thread which I had hoped would work for me, but it didn’t
So within the next 2-6 months, funds permitting I’m going to buy a replacement. I’d like to get Dell again as generally I was happy, but I wonder if there’s another company that’ll give as good business support. The screen went brown in places twice, and within 2 days I had an engineer sitting next to me fitting a new one - no charge. I asked them about the graphics issue and they didn’t care as my cover was only for hardware only.
So does anyone know if HP or Lenovo or others make a good CAD mobile workstation? It doesn’t have to be crazy powerful, just good enough to work on. CAD/3D seems to like core speed than quantity and my work machine is a 7700K which does a fine job with a slight OC up to 4.9GHz. Sounds pedantic but a keypad on right hand side is really important…be nice if it was on the left, but hey ho, that ain’t happening any time soon.
Budget is probably between £1000-1500 ($1240-1860 inc taxes).
Thanks!!!
Here’s the spec of the current machine:
i7-4810MQ (2.8GHz, 3.8 turbo)
AMD FirePro W4170M
2 x 4GB 1600MHz DDR3L