What s the best laptop for designers?

For SolidWorks, a Quadro or FireGL (now called Radeon Pro) graphics processor is a must.

I would argue that doesn’t apply to designers using solidworks. Overkill.

What’s the point of diminishing returns as far as design laptops go? For instance some of the BOXX laptops get into the $3-$4K range.

we use Dell Precision laptops across the board at Design-engine

Ban this a**hole.

as everyone here, it depends on your budget.

for the best experience you should be looking for:

Fast Rendering -4 core (or more) processor like an i7
Large file handling -16gb of ram (or more, you could buy one with 8gb and upgrade it to 16 often it’s cheaper then upgrade by manufacture directly)
Fast model navigation and procedural rendering -Dedicated graphics card like an Nvida or AMD (Nvidia has better compatibility)
UI and Accurate color Visualization -A good quality monitor screen with at least 1080px resolution (best use of the UI and accurate visualization of the model and colors)

The brands i recommend because of it’s price and quality are Toshiba, Dell (look for the XPS line) and Lenovo (look for the Y series)

Generally any Gaming laptops would work, you could also look for the workstations line of laptops but those are much more expensive, also the HDD can be upgraded to an SSD to noticeably improve the computer response to open the OS, files and applications, some laptops already come with an SSD. Stay away for the very cheap ones (like HP and Gateway) those won’t offer a good quality.

I’ve had the Microsoft Surface Book for over a month now, and I have to say I’m very happy with it.

Absolute laptop perfection, and becomes a tablet if you want it to. The key to its success is the brilliantly engineered hinge, and perfect weight distribution.
Typing on the keyboard is a dream and really responsive.
Overall, great product from Microsoft. Definitely worth the money!

Do you run CAD (SolidWorks, Rhino, or Alias) software on it?

I believe for selecting Laptop for designing Purpose should consider

  1. High speed Graphic Card Compatibiity
  2. High RAM atleast 6 GB to 8GB
  3. High Speed CPU 7th generation these days
  4. Last but most important Bugdet

WE use Apple MacBook Air MMGG2HN/A13" Laptop(Core i5/8GB/256GB/OS X El Capitan/Graphics for PCB designing

Other choices can be

Dell Inspiron 15 N5559 HD Touch Core i7-6th gen 8GB 1 TB Window 10 4Gb Graphics
Asus ZenBook UX305UA-FC013T Laptop (6th Gen Intel Ci5/ 8GB/ 256GB SSD/ Win10)

Rhino flies on my SurfaceBook. No issues.

Thanks, Scott.

Side note, what’s up with the crazy first posts these days? Are these slightly more educated spam?

Usually spam farms. People who get paid to sign up, post things for people that include links (like the PCB link they posted that doesn’t even work).

Turns out it’s cheaper to pay people fractions of a cent than it is to write the software to automate your spam.

You may choose any! Each of them is great for your purposes!

I have been using a Lenovo E540 for the past two years now and I have been running, Auto CAD, Solidworks 2017, Fusion 360, Inventor, Photoshop, and Illustrator on it and have never had a problem. All I’ve done to it was upgrade the ram to 16GB.

Apple computers for rendering and I.D. modeling are pretty expensive and they don´t deliver the performance of a pc of the same price. Value/Price ratio here.

I will go for a computer with the higher ghz speed of the CPU I could buy with an SSD as hard disk. Rhino and Vray use a lot of the hard disk in certain situations.

16 Gb of RAM for the most of the projects are ok but if you can buy 32 would be nice.

Laptops get outdated very fast in these days, so I will not spend more than 2k on it. Just my thoughts.

I agree that for Solidworks, the graphics processor is very important.
Rendering is often CPU based so you have to look at the CPU benchmark rating.
An SSD is highly recommended and make sure to have an external backup drive as well.
You don’t need extremely high specs to run Rhino so you can go for a modest budget laptop with lower RAM, CPU and small SSD, as well and invest in a desktop PC as your rendering powerstation and backup drive.

I am also looking at getting a new laptop and although I know I can get a better deal with a windows machine, I don’t think I could give up the aesthetics and feel of a mac product. Microsoft products are looking good but the price is comparable to Mac. Something has to be said for the fact that I am still using my 2009 MPB and it runs Solidworks on my windows side fine and Adobe CC programs on my mac side. Switching to an SSD a few years back made a huge improvement but still. Note, this is my personal machine and I am not working full time on it.

I’m a big fan of my 2017 15" Samsung Notebook 9 Pro. Decent aesthetics, solid quality, Yoga hinge, Samsung Note tech, 16 gigs of RAM, Dedicated Graphics. Check it out!

I feel the same way, the price of a windows machine sounds really exciting to me but my MPB has been SUPER reliable and is 4 years old and runs like new and I run Keyshot and Rhino on it among adobe products all of the time.

Though it’s an old thread I want to put my input in. For me its Acer Aspire V17 Nitro