I understand that OP budget is low that’s why I recommend holding off on purchasing a low end system. I agree that a nice lab is where it’s at (and was where you had to be at way back when) but students will want to work on their own terms (res hall). Demand for labs is only going down as more students bring their own. At my college, the CS students connect to our virtual servers to do all their work. Autodesk products are now free for students but it won’t run virtually anyway. I had thought the OP mentioned the possibility of engineering. My son’s Inspiron within $700-800 runs all the CAD products just fine.
I was in Microcenter yesterday. There were multiple computers that would fit the bill in sale. Remember students usually get some sort of discount now.
Flat drafting sure, but that computer will struggle mightily with complex 3D renderings in a program like Solidworks.
It would be good to get a recommendation from a upperclassman engineering student at that college.
Or look for your college/engineering computer specs online … EXAMPLE - https://www.colorado.edu/engineering-advising/get-your-degree/first-year-freshmen/faqs
However, how many CS majors have to use Solidworks or some similarly resource intensive program?
Many engineering programs have their recommendations on the dept site or somewhere. That’ll tell you what the program thinks is sufficient.
Many colleges are going to hook you up with the central server anyway.
“However, how many CS majors have to use Solidworks or some similarly resource intensive program?”
Yea, we were drifting. I was responding to the response, and not the OP.
@eyemgh I guess we’ll see this year but S19 is still in high school and will be using 3DS MAX. I’m certain it won’t be high-end stuff yet. You are right and in my experience, anything that cannot be virtualized will not run pretty on any low end machine, and that’s true for graphic-intensive development programs and certainly game development in the spirit of getting back to CS-related software.