Laptop for Engineering Major

Nafixd

Honorable
Dec 30, 2012
17
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10,510
So I realized today that when I am taking my engineering classes, I will be using other software. I don't know all of them, but I know I will be using AutoCAD. There are probably other software I might use for engineering, please let me know if you know. Other than that, I don't do much other than school work and light gaming (Dota2, League, etc...).

I was wondering what type of laptop I'll need, like what should I look into. If possible, I wanted to go apu since I have a budget around $600. The apu I had in mind was either the a8 or a10. Will that be enough to run the engineering software?
 
No laptop will be happy running autoCAD, or at least not smoothly. What engineering discipline are you?

You will notice that MechE lab machines are always beasts of workstations, stuff like Solidworks/ProE/CFD sims are not light, they can take significant amounts of time on a strong computer. If you are EE, matlab is going to beat a laptop once you start getting into more elaborate projects. In my last couple years i had homework projects that i would start, go to dinner, then check back in an hour to see if it finished on my desktop(Image/video processing is time intensive....)

Don't be under the illusion that you can get a laptop that will do quite well with engineering apps for that budget. I suggest getting a laptop that can do your school work/light gaming on, and either using the lab machines for the projects, or i always just remoted into my desktop and had it do the heavy lifting.
 

Nafixd

Honorable
Dec 30, 2012
17
0
10,510
Oh, then I'm assuming I will be able to use the schools workstations to do these tasks? I am in MechE starting in August. So would it be fine for me to just have a laptop for my personal use and other school work and use the schools workstations for harder tasks? (Sorry, still didn't enter college, so I don't know)
 
Yeah, thats what i would recommend, especially since you are a mechE. Solidworks and the like generally require a workstation graphics card to get decent performance. If you are going to a good school they will have labs for you to use, you can do the project on those, get the plots and pictures you need, then use your own laptop for writing up the report once all the complicated stuff has been completed.