<p>I'm going to be a freshman at the University of Florida in the fall, and I know that some of the courses for engineers require higher-end computers. My only concern is the courses that require 3D rendering. On the school website, they advise at least 4GB RAM with a 1GB dedicated graphics card. My laptop has 8GB RAM with an integrated graphics card. Even though the graphics card is integrated, shouldn't this work fine? Even if it uses 1GB of the RAM i still should have plenty of RAM for the rest of the program, right?</p>
<p>Unfortunately that’s not how main memory and GPUs work. You will likely struggle to run 3D rendering programs like CAD. Don’t fret, though. Your school should have computer labs available for when you need to run those types of applications. Meanwhile, you will have much better battery life than your peers with a discrete GPU.</p>
<p>So, @boneh3ad most laptops are going to struggle running programs like CAD, not just mine? I just can’t imagine there will be desktops for everyone in the class</p>
<p>If there is a class that requires a computer lab, there will be sufficient school computers for everyone. Most computers, not just laptops, will struggle with CAD and other computationally-intensive programs.</p>
<p>Depending on the implementation, the integrated GPU (iGPU) should use the main memory for storing results (I suppose there could be some implementation of an iGPU with nontrivial on-die memory). However, the main memory is significantly slower than GPU-specific memory, and so you will not realize the gains possible for a discrete GPU. On the flip side, an iGPU is likely so slow that it would not benefit from specialized memory and so there will be no particular problems, besides all GPU-intensive operations being slow.</p>
<p>@vanimelde So I should be able to use the programs they may just be slower?</p>
<p>It would be slow to the point of being unusable. Seriously, for this programs the computer labs will be fine. I didn’t even own a laptop when I took a CAD class and got all my work done in computer labs just fine.</p>
<p>Im agreeing with the above posters, BUT the Alienware high performance gaming laptops over 2000$ SHOULD be able to run just about any program without a hitch.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.alienware.com/Landings/laptops.aspx”>http://www.alienware.com/Landings/laptops.aspx</a></p>
<p>UF Engineering Department doesn’t use remote desktops with their applications? If they do, that solves your problem right there. </p>
<p>But if they do not, just use the computer labs. Any course that requires power intensive programs will provide access to functioning computers. </p>
<p>@Ultimablade, there are quite a few laptops that can run CAD with 3D rendering. They are expensive, heavy, have poor battery life and small screens, but if pressed, you can do it. It will in general be a less satisfying experience than a desktop with one exception, if you’re in BFE and have to do CAD and don’t have a desktop. As for Alienware, I don’t know the specs of that one, but gaming GPUs and workstation GPUs have different characteristics. If you’re going to go all out, you’d want a Solidworks certified machine and that means Quadra for the most part.</p>
<p>Maybe you can buy Asus N550JK for $1089 if you’re worried about rendering (not poor battery life, ~5 hours and you’re not likely to render for 3 hours in a class, are you?). Nvidia GTX850M card. you’ll be able to do ANYTHING with it. and it’s not that heavy. ~2.6kg (.14 more than macbook pro retina)</p>
<p>however, if all you want is to render, you might want to checkout laptops with Nvidia quadro graphics card (however it’s way costly.)</p>
<p>Personally I prefer asus 
because well, only their products didn’t fail in my hands 
</p>
<p>I agree with boneh3ad and niquii77 here. If your school has decent computer labs (especially labs dedicated to science/engineering majors), use those computers for any graphical applications and save your personal laptop for the light-duty stuff (word processing/internet/movies). The lab computers will also have full, licensed versions of all of the programs you need to use, and the hardware will be able to handle all of those programs well. </p>
<p>You will also get the chance to meet new people, socialize, and spend some time away from your roommates, lol. FWIW, I made it through college with nothing but a mainstream Dell laptop and it worked out well.</p>
<p>In a way, it’s a bit of a moot point - a lot of the important CAD software is not available to students. Not that it’s worth the effort to go out of your way to buy a computer that can run those anyways.</p>
<p>Worry more about being able to run software such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, Mathematica, and Matlab. You will probably have to use at least one of those, and they have substantial but not unreasonable processing requirements.</p>
<p>^ Depends on the school, but you may be right. Our school had a few labs dedicated to engineering and science majors, with full versions of programs like CATIA, ANSYS, Matlab/Simulink, Maple, and a few others installed on all of the computers. I figured this was common, but as you said, it likely varies from school to school. </p>
<p>I imagine UF has some decent labs though, no?</p>
<p>Not so much that you won’t find a lab for those as that it’s more convenient to be able to use those outside of a lab.
Those programs actually do have student licenses, generally paid for by the school.</p>
<p>In the 9 years I’ve known how to operate CAD programs, I can count the number of times on two or three hands that I’ve wanted to run one of them away from a school-provided computer and zero of them where doing it on a laptop would have offered any benefit over just a desktop somewhere and zero where it wouldn’t have been worth it to wait until I had access to a desktop.</p>
<p>I think you guys are worrying about nothing.</p>
<p>I am still for using the computer lab and getting a laptop that can handle tasks other than CAD software. </p>
<p>The computer lab isn’t a bad place. Sure, you would really like to be able to do your work in your room at 3 AM, but you might just have to work with the computer lab hours, which is not that bad. My university remote desktops (I’m not even sure if that’s what it’s called…) and our CAD class just had us all bring in our laptops. No problems whatsoever. We were in the computer lab many times after class until another class came in. It was very social and you got your work done. It was overall a fun experience. </p>
<p>Don’t make this harder than it is. </p>
<p>I would not worry CAD. Quite honestly, the computer requirements <a href=“https://www.eng.ufl.edu/students/resources/computer-requirements/”>https://www.eng.ufl.edu/students/resources/computer-requirements/</a> are very basic, and almost any laptop will meet them. </p>
<p>By their recommendations, they certainly aren’t expecting your laptop to do much heavy lifting.</p>
<p>I would advise using the computer labs for heavy 3D design. In fact, as an engineering freshman at University of Iowa, I didn’t touch any of the 3D design software such as Autodesk Inventor.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, I would recommend that you get a laptop with at least 6 hours of battery life. Not 6 hours of idling, 6 hours of WiFi usage.</p>
<p>A SSD helps with the battery life (30 minutes of battery life improvement on my laptop), and the almost-instant boot time is nice. Along with not having to worry about the HDD having a head crash from jerking the laptop while it’s still on.</p>
<p>Also, the display size of 15.6" is pushing it. You’re going to be using lots of little desks, especially for the lecture halls, so a laptop with a display size of 11.6" to 14" would be preferred.</p>
<p>EDIT: I should mention that I used to use Autodesk Inventor (using my high school’s licenses) on a 5 year old laptop before going to college. Most of the work were simply 3D projects, such as creating a 3D model of a hard drive and its components with as much accuracy as possible.</p>
<p>The laptop had a dedicated GPU, a Radeon mobility 5730, though looking at notebookcheck.com (a nice review website), the GPU is slower than many of AMD’s APUs’ IGPs (Trinity, Richland, Kaveri), and even some of Intel’s IGPs are starting to approach the old dedicated GPU. </p>
<p>Memory bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue for light 3D modeling unless if you try to enable the “realistic” rendering. But why would you do that outside of an engineering computer labs anyways?</p>