Computer Recommendation

@Rivet2000, you’ll get the OP’s specific answer soon, but the general answer is that they can use anything they want within reason. We tend to want to know what “the” computer is for MEs (engineers in general for that matter) because we want to give them every advantage possible. There simply isn’t one. My son is just finishing his MS in ME and his friends use all sorts of different laptops. All get the jobs done that you’d want to do on a laptop. None are appropriate for SOME things.

You CAN get a portable workstation with a fast proc, enough memory, large SSD and proper graphics card, but they are saddled with terrible weight, poor battery life, which means bringing a transformer, and a small screen. That’s what I got for my son. It was probably a mistake. He now uses it as a glorified desktop, a powerful one, and one he still gets use out of for Solidworks, Abaqus, Eagle and MATLAB to name a few. hose types of laptops are typically for military personnel and engineers working transiently in very remote locations and gross overkill, not without side effects, for students.

Had we waited and sent him with his HS laptop (a decent i5 Lenovo getting a little long in the tooth, but still very capable), he could have had a beast of a desktop AND a very capable laptop for the same price once he knew exactly what he needed.

Was just wondering if there are any features that opened more doors to applications that ME students commonly use (if there are such apps). Our nephew is considering ME and I’m looking at getting him something for HS graduation.

What a generous graduation gift idea! But … if he already has a decent laptop from his high school work, it might make sense to get a Best Buy gift card (or check) with strong recommendation to save it for future, deferring workstation decisions til he knows more about what works best for his campus / program.

@Rivet2000 In addition to what a typical college student would need, a ME major can benefit from a laptop (or desktop) with much more RAM (16GB and up), a fast NVMe M.2 SSD, and a higher resolution screen (perhaps a 4K display). This configuration will help run CAD programs and the like more quickly and smoothly.

His HS laptop is on it’s last legs, so we want to send him off with something he can depend on. I think we’re OK with the memory, CPU, and storage but was wondering about display and if a discrete GPU would be of any real benefit. Right now we’re leaning towards HD with integrated graphics, but if having an NVIDIA GPU would help I could do that too. The only software that’s been mentioned here that I am familiar with is MATLAB. I know that a GPU can help quite a bit with MATLAB, so maybe I can assume that it would help with others. Every time I ask my S about what I should consider he goes down a road that I think may be over kill.

If you go with vey high resolution display, you’d definitely need a dedicated GPU.

The two bolded statements are at odds with one another. If your goal is to squeeze more CAD performance out of a laptop, adding pixels is not a wonderful way to achieve that. You’ll end up with the opposite effect.

Not necessarily. You can run a 2K display easily off of modern integrated graphics and still do a lot of tasks. Even a 4K display on integrated graphics isn’t too big of a deal as long as you aren’t asking your GPU to render frames rapidly such as in a video game.

honestly, screen resolution would be WAY down my list for what is important for engineering computers. They look slightly prettier, but are more money and offer no better final performance than a basic screen (which is still quite nice).

NVMe storage is nice, but offer an incremental improvement in what they will be doing with a laptop over a standard SSD and are much more expensive. a regular SSD is much better than a spinning drive.

16 G is overkill since the rare heavy lifting will be done on a desktop (because the big monitor). It doesn’t hurt. It’s just wasted money.

As for “having an NVIDIA GPU,” that’s like saying I need a Ford. You want a Mustang if you want to go fast, but an F series truck if you want to pull a boat. The purposed NVIDIA cards for CAD are the Quadro family. They don’t come in off the shelf laptops. If you get a laptop built with one it will be heavy, REALLY heavy. It will suck for 90% of what they need it for in order to make it better for something that’s better suited to a desktop anyway.

I would do i5, 256 or 500 SSD, 8 gigs and stick to a name brand like Lenovo, Dell, etc. That will easily last them 4 years.

If I were building a desktop, I would follow @1NJParent’s guidelines, probably i7 and a 1T SSD, NVMe if i could afford it, because the speed would be realized for complex stuff, plus a better quadro 2000 or better (the top quadros can cost over $10k for the card alone!)

Personal taste. It’s pretty high on my list. I won’t buy a screen with less than 2K resolution for a laptop (though I think 4K is too many pixels for the screen size). For me, it’s all about screen real estate. If the pixels are smaller, then I can realistically make text smaller and fit more information on my window, e.g. a Matlab window on one half and a paper on the other and realistically use both without loss of functionality.

For what it’s worth, my laptop I use for work (and have for just under 3 years) as a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering has the following specs:

  • 14" Display, 2560x1440
  • Intel Core i7 6600U
  • Integrated graphics
  • 16 GB RAM
  • 512 GB SSD (not NVMe)
  • 2.7 lbs
    This is honestly more horsepower than most people will need, but I frequently do Matlab processing on the go (on airplanes, usually) and have absolutely maxed the CPU and RAM with those specs. But like I said, my use case is heavier than 99% of undergrads. I also paid a premium for this, as it’s pretty powerful for a lightweight laptop like that.

Lenovo Carbon if I recall. Cool machine.

Looking at Lenovo, it’s almost impossible to buy a laptop without 2k or better. They offer more than 100 laptops. Well under 20 are sup 2k. That’s what I was referring to as a “regular” screen.

Our S has volunteered to bring his two laptops home for a few days in June before summer internship. That way nephew can test fly two options outside a store environment. Laptop #1 was provided to our S by his part time employer: Lenovo Carbon, and I agree it’s a nice laptop - light, powerful, good display (Intel HD integreted graphics) and build quality seems great. Laptop #2 is S’s personal machine: Razer Blade Stealth also a really nice option. Price wise they are similar. Razer is smaller screen (13" vs 14") but is slightly heavier (by about 1/3 lb). Razer does have an Nvidia GPU which was plus for many of the frameworks he (CS major) uses vs Intel integrated.

Actually, 1920x1080 is generally standard on laptops these days. 2K is growing but usually still an upgrade.

My bad, yes, Full HD. That’s still pretty darn good all things considered, especially for what students will be doing. Better resolution taxes the battery more too. I guess it’s all a balance.

“my laptop I use for work (and have for just under 3 years) as a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering has the following specs”

Pretty much what I bought my daughter 2 years ago - she’ll be an ME Junior this fall. It may have been HD (1980), not 2560x1440, but it’s fully sufficed for what she’s needed. Yes, it’s more than your average laptop, but $1350, including 4 years of premium support, isn’t that much in the context of 4 years of college. And similar spec’ed machines are probably cheaper now.

btw - I highly recommend the full support. I think 4 years, on-site, next day was about $400. She dropped hers a few weeks ago and we had a new back cover, palm rest (everything but the keyboard on the bottom half of the machine), motherboard and daughter board (USB, SD, Bluetooth) replaced at home within 3 days, including 2 service tech trips to our house, at no charge.

The Razor is a nice machine. Yes a gaming laptop but they work well for college needs.

The Razer is a nice enough machine, but you pay extra money for a gaming GPU that isn’t applicable to engineers and it’s 4.5 pounds without the transformer. If I were buying a computer for an engineering student, I’d either spend less or use the money to buy light weight. The Lenovo Carbon is a perfect example of the latter.

Two things. I compared two comparably outfitted versions of Lenovo Carbon and Razer Stealth: Intel i7 85xxU, 16Gb memory, 256 Gb storage, and FHD 1920x1080. Interestingly they are very close in price with the Razer actually lower in cost (Lenovo is ~$1.6k and Razer is ~$1.5k). As far as portability is concerned Leno has 14" screen at 2.49 lbs and Razer has 13" screen at 2.89 lbs - so you can make a weight/size trade off.

One option available with some of the Razer laptops is more powerful GPUs and this is where SOME engineering students may want to look closer. Depending on your field of study and the type of software you’ll be using, GPUs can accelerate your processing time for computationally intensive analytics. This ability transforms your “gaming GPU” into a processing resource. This is very dependent on field and applications however. Our S (CS major) started using GPUs in training machine learning networks in this freshman year - what would take days to run on an i7 took hours to run on the GPU allowing him to get results sooner and to make refinements and improvements on his laptop before making the final runs of larger GPU clusters provided by the class (each student gets X amount of time per class).

I don’t know CS at all, but I’m assuming that most students can remotely access machines with far faster GPUs, Tesla V100s for example. If you can carry a machine that does it OK (albeit better than an integrated GPU) or access a world class machine remotely with a much cheaper computer, what are you paying for? @boneh3ad would know far more than I.

My D’s school is recommending the Dell Latitude E7490 ($1,700) with 8th gen i7, 512 go ssd, 16 go memory. Or MacBook Pro , 13-inch MacBook Pro 2.7GHz Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz, 8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM, 512GB PCIe-based. It’s says “If you decide to acquire a MAC you may need to purchase and install VMWare or Parallels and a Windows OS to run some of the ECS software they may need.” but we really don’t know what that means. I think she’d want a Mac but not sure if that’s the best route.

Sounds like they are telling you that some of the ECS software may only run on Microsoft OS. VMWare and Parallels is software that allows you to setup a “virtual machine” on your Mac where you can run Microsoft Windows and applications.