So what is the best website for engineering? For all the programs used in engineering?
Um, is it laptops or websites?
Wait until you decide where to attend school and check their department for recommendations and requirements.
This topic has been discussed a bazillion times, once even started by me. :))
The bottom line is, they’re pretty much all the same. You’ll do everyday stuff on your laptop and the heavy lifting in the labs.
The issue is, in order to do the heavy lifting (Solidworks 3D rendering for example) on a laptop, you’ll have to spend between $3000 and $4500, or more. You’ll still be constrained by a system with a single small monitor and less speed than what you’d get in the lab or on a less expensive desktop.
Guys, guys, guys.
Obviously, the MSI GT80 Titan is the best engineering laptop.
@hungryteenager, I think you were being tongue in cheek, but if you really want to go beast mode, that’s a good chassis, but a quadro is the better option for a graphics card. 
The advice to find out the school requirement is the right choice here. You do not want to get caught if the school has some unique requirement - for example Virginia Tech requires a touch screen laptop that is compatible with an active stylus. The school requirements can also end up letting you buy a fairly budget machine - I bought a $500 laptop for S1 two years ago after finding out the school suggestion was to buy a laptop with an intel “i” processor, nothing more. To this day, it does everything that his classes require.
@eyemgh Dual GTX 980M’s! I’m drooling. And that full mechanical keyboard! 
If we’re talking in terms of raw horsepower, it’s got to be the Sager NP9772-S. I’ll attach the link below. It costs an arm and a leg, weighs quite a bit, and the battery is just a formality, but it’s probably the fastest laptop on the market.
You can configure it with a Core i7-4790k and a Quattro k5100m (or, for $1500 less, a 3100m or gtx 980m). No, I did not make a typo for the CPU. That’s a desktop part. It’s absolutely INSANE 
http://www.xoticpc.com/custom-gaming-laptops-notebooks-clevo-sager-notebooks-ct-95_51_162.html
@hungryteenager, you should check out @Xi. They start with a MSI chassis, build it robustly and then test it like crazy before sending it out. They sell primarily to field engineers and the military. Bad web page, great machine. Been doing it for a long time. They build smokin’ desk tops too.
@eyemgh Sager also uses off the shelf chassis, bought from Clevo. Looking at the configuration, they look like they’re almost exactly the same. Actually, from this sight, it looks like Xi buys from Clevo. So they probably use the same chassis.
http://www.caddigest.com/exclusive/CAD_hardware/120312_xi_powergo_xt.htm
@hungryteenager, I think they likely both buy from both. My son’s is definitely an MSI. Sager is now offering LOTS more configurations than they did just a couple of years ago. Cool stuff.
The MSI GS30 Shadow is also pretty neat.
It’s a thin and light laptop, but has the ports necessary to hook up to an external graphics card (or multiple, I believe). It’s a first-generation product that’s overpriced and really needs better battery life, but I think that future iterations or offerings from other manufacturers could result in some killer machines.
My son’s is based on a WT60 i7 quad core, quadro, 16G, 1T SSD…BEAST!
It’s really drastic overkill for an everyday engineering laptop, but he does Solidworks on it with no problem and will be able to set it up with multiple monitors if he wants.
Quadro? I could hook a GS30 up to a Tesla!
Quadro is the NVIDIA graphics card family preferred for workstation use, mainly CAD, as opposed to gaming.
GTX is for gaming.
Quadro is for workstations.
Tesla is for parallel computing and heavy-duty GPU offloading.
The GeForce cards are also quite adept at parallel computing. The newer lines are probably more capable in that department than the Teslas, if only because Tesla hasn’t been updated in a while.
So, what do you guys think of this scenario: getting a macbook because it’s so light, and running any Windows-only stuff in the labs. Recipe for disaster?
That’s not a recipe for disaster at all other than the fact that you will overpay for the MacBook. Generally, as long as you meet your school’s requirements, I always advocate just buying what makes you happy and not worrying about running the bigger engineering programs, as any big computing-intensive tasks areich better handled on a workstation in the lab or on your desktop anyway.
@scholarme You mean the 12 inch macbook? Or the macbook air? The 12 incher is woefully underpowered, and doesn’t have enough grunt to drive the display. If you need a light mac, stick with the air, not the 12 inch one.
@boneh3ad Yeah, but the Tesla costs 6 times as much, or something like that. It has to be 6 times better! Also, Tesla just sounds cooler 
But seriously, Maxwell definitely smacks Kepler. More like an uppercut. Much lower power consumption, higher performance, and actual asynchronous compute capabilities, but those are probably lacking behind GCN.