I am soon going to buy a new laptop for my engineering education here in Denmark, which is primarily needed for CAD and Finite Element applications and Matlab programing but not for gaming. At the moment I have the following laptops as favorites:
HP Workstation 8510w: - T9500 (2,6 GHz - 6 MB cache - 800 MHz FSB) on Intel PM965 Express chipset
- 4 GB DDR2 ram
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M
- Blue Ray drive
- Price: approx. 1730 USD
I would go for the Thinkpad W500 out of all of those. Firstly because fo the DDR3 RAM and the 6MB cache cpu with the 1066FSB. Secondly becauuse of the fact it has a very nice workstation class gpu. yes I know the HP does as well but it's running a slower cpu and DDR2 RAM. W500 all the way on this one