<p>Im planning on buying a laptop for school and want one that could do some CAD work for classes. Im looking at the sony SZ series which has the NVIDIA 7400 128 MB card. Is this good enough for the CAD work required in classes?</p>
<p>I can run solid works fine with a 128 shared vedio card. Cad pograms are not that graphics intensive.</p>
<p>3-D CAD rendering might start to get a bit expensive in terms of video stuff, but if you're talking about the sort of thing that you'd be doing in terms of 2-D design in classes, then you'd be fine with pretty much anything.</p>
<p>If you're VERY serious about CAD, check into a Dell Precision Laptop with an nVidia Quadro card. Integrated graphics will choke for anything 3-D intensive. </p>
<p>Here's the Dell Precision Mobile Workstation lineup, relatively cheap compared to a comparable Sony SZ:</p>
<p>Im going to be an mech engineering major at Berkeley. Are there any classes that will require very 3d intensive graphics. Or will I be able to all my work on my laptop with the 128 mb card or even an integrated one. Mainly I just want to be free from having to rely on the computer labs all the time.</p>
<p>Nvidia 7900 GTX 512 MB or whatever it's called.</p>
<p>You'd be more than able to do any required CAD work on your laptop. Chances are pretty darned good that you won't be doing advanced 3-D models of submarines as an undergrad. Those sorts of models take months to crank out, and in classes, you don't really have months to tinker with 3-D CAD modeling... they want you to spend that time on actual engineering. You'll find that in industry, you'll likely get a CAD technician to do most of that stuff for you, anyhow... They'll be the real CAD gurus, you just have to know how to not look like an idiot in front of a CAD workstation.</p>
<p>So what would you do on CAD as an undergrad mech engineering major. Simple 2-d designs.</p>
<p>Yup... Just basic shapes... Metal punch templates, stuff like that... maybe some 3-D extrusion, but nothing crazy-complex.</p>
<p>In fact, even in civ, most people are never actually <em>taught</em> to use AutoCAD. You just kind of figure it out on your own, if you choose to learn it at all. Over the course of four years of half-arsed tinkering, I doubt you'd pick up, let alone be required to utilize, any components of a CAD program that would seriously tax your system.</p>
<p>Then could I even get by with an intel integrated card. I was interested in buying the sharp M4000, but it only comes with an integrated graphics card.</p>
<p>For sure. Photoshop puts more of a dent in my system than AutoCAD ever has.</p>
<p>In our class we made parts, drawings, and assembleys. Learned to do exploded views and basic stuff along these lines. In this class we did this for ProE and SolidWorks.</p>
<p>We used standard optiplex computers at school for CAD design in high school. And, those are pretty low-end, yet CAD works fine on them. So, you don't really need anything too big to do 2-D design.</p>
<p>I used SolidWorks, which ran fine on my laptop with an integrated card.</p>