Hello all. I have been saving up money for a while now to buy a nice laptop for school and CAD (mostly CAD) seeing as my home computer, the one I am using right now, frequently bluescreens . I won't likely buy anything soon, but it is nice to have goals. I do not have a set budget yet. What do you all use?

A great bang-for-the-buck high-power system is the g-series from Asus in the "Republic of Gamers" line. They are solid competitors to alienware systems costing 1-1.5k more. I love mine for sure.

CAD tends to be memory intensive. In the cost balance between RAM and various other features, favor RAM.

In reply to bmenrigh: That is the #1 reason I am looking to get a new computer; there is less than 1 Gb left on this dinosaur.

Couldn't agree more. I saved up and got the g53s and I couldn't be more pleased

I just bought an HP 17 inch (1920x1080) with an i7-3720QM (2.6GHz-3.6Ghz boost) processor, 16 GB RAM, and ATI HD7850M video card running Windows 7 Professional. It would run most CAD applications just fine.

I always push these, but if you have the extra money, splurge for an SSD. They are sooooo much quicker than regular hard drives and if you run out of RAM, the virtual memory will be much quicker too. On a laptop, it will extend your battery time too.

-d

For the level of complexity and part size for puzzles, any computer with a decent video card and quantity of RAM will work reasonally well. If you are looking for something more high end, XI computers makes really nice CAD systems for a pretty good price.

While having a lot of RAM is great, I don't think it's as much of a key feature as bmenrigh implies. Any reasonable laptop will have 4GB of RAM which is enough to work comfortably, and most higher end laptops will have 6-8GB. While having more RAM than 8GB is not a bad thing, you will rarely use that much RAM so beyond 8GB you should favor other features over more RAM.

Something I find very important is the screen resolution, especially since you're looking to replace your desktop. The higher the resolution the more stuff you can fit on the screen. I really dislike working on a cramped screen so try to go for full HD (1920x1080) if you can. 1366x768 is generally the most common resolution but that's really quite small. Marketers like to refer to this as (standard) HD so watch out for that and don't confuse it with full HD.

I use just a standard Samsung Series 7 15" and it handles SolidWorks very smoothly. i7, GT 640M, 8GB express cache, and 8GB DDR3 ram. Buying a CAD laptop is pointless unless it's for a job, just stick with upper end general consumer ones.