Laptop for AutoCAD 2013 Suggestions?

I've used this to CAD, and it was surprisingly fast and affordable:
Newegg.com - TOSHIBA Satellite L875-S7245 Notebook Intel Core i5 2450M(2.50GHz) 17.3" 4GB Memory DDR3 1333 640GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi AMD Radeon HD 7670M

this looks OK, too:
Newegg.com - Acer Aspire V3-571G-9686 Notebook Intel Core i7 3632QM(2.20GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M

I've played around with FireGL, Quadro, and some other cards now. I can speak from solid experience that both of my uncles, who own military aircraft machining shops, don't use Quadro or FirePro. They've been doing this for ~20 years, and never had a hiccup with a regular GFX card, even though their precision has to be in the 0.00001 range to qualify. My dad's a contractor and he uses integrated GFX to cad 7,000 sq ft homes to the millimeter. Rendering takes about 5 minutes on his new i7 laptop with integrated graphics.
 
So I am looking at the np7330 for running CAD mainly because it has a solid video card lots of ram and processor power so if anyone thinks this video card won't work to do whatever I could possibly want to do on AutoCAD or 3dsmax or inventor please say so and why.

Thank you much appreciated hopefully thus will clear up any questions the original poster had as to video cards as well I know I'm getting something real small ( for school) but I would be looking pretty hard at MSIs if I wanted something just a little bigger .


other 14 inch or smaller laptop suggestions with strong video cards would be greatly appreciated
 
AutoDesk AutoCAD 2013 GPU Acceleration - Puget Custom Computers

I completely forgot about ECC memory and how it is important in workstations. It's a type of RAM that is used and it corrects errors that happen every once in awhile in normal RAM. Tthe workstation graphics cards have this, and so does the RAM in the computer.

If your father is going to do major work then I would stick to a workstation. You dont want your dad to be running load simulations and it works fine in the test, but when he makes it its not up to par, when say it was the comps fault for messing up a little bit. I am sure that is rare, but its better to go with workstation stuff.
 
AutoDesk AutoCAD 2013 GPU Acceleration - Puget Custom Computers

I completely forgot about ECC memory and how it is important in workstations. It's a type of RAM that is used and it corrects errors that happen every once in awhile in normal RAM. Tthe workstation graphics cards have this, and so does the RAM in the computer.

If your father is going to do major work then I would stick to a workstation. You dont want your dad to be running load simulations and it works fine in the test, but when he makes it its not up to par, when say it was the comps fault for messing up a little bit. I am sure that is rare, but its better to go with workstation stuff.

I know lots of people that use CAD professionally on a laptop. I work at a company where most people that use CAD have laptops. If errors were such a problem as you say, then I doubt we would still be using them for such tasks.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using TechForums
 
I know lots of people that use CAD professionally on a laptop. I work at a company where most people that use CAD have laptops. If errors were such a problem as you say, then I doubt we would still be using them for such tasks.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using TechForums

sorry, errors are very rare, and when there is an error its not like the whole thing screws up, its more like an error you wont notice, like instead of the ram saying 10101010 it may say 1010110 . It wont have an effect on anything really, maybe just change something so slightly. When i type it it sounds like some big thing but its actually nothing
 
sorry, errors are very rare, and when there is an error its not like the whole thing screws up, its more like an error you wont notice, like instead of the ram saying 10101010 it may say 1010110 . It wont have an effect on anything really, maybe just change something so slightly. When i type it it sounds like some big thing but its actually nothing

I know what ECC RAM does ;). Its usually only used in servers, however.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using TechForums
 
I know what ECC RAM does ;). Its usually only used in servers, however.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using TechForums

the VRAM for workstation cards use ECC memory. If he had a workstation laptop it would more likely have ECC RAM in it also, so thats a double whammy.

Say his dad was designing 10+ story buildings, then I would say ECC VRAM would be very important as well as ECC RAM.
If hes not doing anything too crazy then a normal high performance laptop would be fine.

PS: I know nvidia quadro uses ECC VRAM, I am not too sure about AMD firepro, but it most likely also uses ECC VRAM
 
the VRAM for workstation cards use ECC memory. If he had a workstation laptop it would more likely have ECC RAM in it also, so thats a double whammy.

Say his dad was designing 10+ story buildings, then I would say ECC VRAM would be very important as well as ECC RAM.
If hes not doing anything too crazy then a normal high performance laptop would be fine.

PS: I know nvidia quadro uses ECC VRAM, I am not too sure about AMD firepro, but it most likely also uses ECC VRAM

I'm not talking about VRAM. I'm talking about system RAM.

Workstation GPU's (Quadros and Firepros) are exactly just for that: number crunching and data calculation for CAD stuff like that. That's because the calculations are done on those; RAM is just temporary storage for rendering the display and communication between CPU/GPU.
 
Back
Top Bottom