About 750-1000 budget engineering computer and laptop

Question, you said computer and laptop. Does that mean you are getting both, each for around a $1,000 (for a total spent cost of $2,000)?

Will you be doing anything that deals with rendering, that would need a powerful graphics card?

Edit: Stay away from Acer laptops. Several friends have purchased them over the years, and they all break within one year. Acer can make a decent desktop, but they fail at laptops. It could just be luck I suppose, but just from my own dealings with them in repair, I say screw it. Never had laptops ever give me such a hard time to fix the dang things. Asus is good, not exactly premium builds, but they are fast and I haven't had any issues with needing to repair one.

I'll be getting both for $1000 each. $2000 total.

I'll probably use the desktop more for solidworks and pcb design. I'll use the laptop more for writing and firmware and taking data in the lab. However, I could see myself using solidworks on the laptop too, but that's not my primary intent right now.

Okay. Out of the desktops you put down, this is probably your best bet. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/ite...

However, I actually recommend this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... . It doesn't even have to be that brand, but the hardware is where its at for your needs. I did a quick search on solidworks, and it seems it would benefit greatly from the cuda cores of an nvidia GPU. The quad-core is overclockable as well, and so long as solidworks and pcb design is a good at utilizing multiple cores, then that is the way to go.

As for laptop, either of these three are good. Question boils down to whether or not you want a huge laptop to lug around, or a somewhat okay portable one.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/ite...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Hope this helps. The quad-cores will help as will the significant amount of ram. As I am not familiar with your kinds of programs, they may be ram intensive. If so, then RAM is cheap enough to upgrade. I know some of the newer laptops can handle up to 16 GB of RAM, but whether these three can handle more than 8 GB is beyond me.