Wow!
$2600 would be highway robbery for a laptop with such inferior specs. If the laptop was a "ruggedized" laptop, that price would be almost within the realm of reason.
That laptop has Nvidia Quadro graphics on it. While that chipset is supposed to be "optimized" for industrial use, it's simply just expensive crap. I have a 10 year old Intel P4 desktop with better performing graphics than a 5 year old Dell Latitude I have with Nvidia Quadro graphics.
You shouldn't ever be fooled into paying $2600 for a computer unless it's got ground-breakingly overkill specs. That HP 8770 is not anywhere close to being a $2600 laptop. I have a $1400 laptop that's better than that.
I haven't ever used AutoCad but I've used 3dsmax which is a 3d editing program and made by the same company. I can run 3dsmax perfectly on my outdated Pentium D pc with 4gb ram and a dated Radeon HD 5700 1gb card.
I would get a gaming laptop or something like that. Those don't ever cost as much as that HP laptop unless you buy the best Alienware laptop available and even then it's overkill and there are much cheaper options with really good performance.
MSI and Alienware make good gaming laptops. I would get an Alienware M14X or an MSI laptop in the $1000-$1500 range. Make sure it's got a lot of ram (more than 6gb should be more than plenty), an i7 cpu and a gpu other than some kind of Intel integrated graphics.
So the bottom line, that laptop is bad unless he's getting it for free or for a highly discounted price. It will run AutoCad as good as all medium priced laptops but you can buy way better laptops for half the price.
However, if your uncle really wants to spend $2600 on a laptop to get the best performance possible, I don't know what laptop you'd need but that HP isn't worth $2600. Someone else will suggest something better.
