<p>I'm starting as a Freshman in the fall. Mac vs. PC? Also, there are certain requirements that the laptop must have. </p>
<p>The requirements: <a href="http://sco.gatech.edu/req_hw">http://sco.gatech.edu/req_hw</a></p>
<p>these threads are seriously getting old, you are going to be in college…learn how to start looking up information, researching, and thinking yourself. </p>
<p>It’d be a discussion if you came in here with actual specs to discuss instead of just posting a link with the minimal requirements</p>
<p>for real people, its called the SEARCH FUNCTION</p>
<p>not only that, this isn’t a tech website, tomshardware would be better suited for these types of questions</p>
<p>go look up laptops with those minimal requirements, if you don’t know what something means PROTIP: highlight the word and right click, select search “google/yahoo/bing” “for highlighted term.” </p>
<p>I think PC is better since you tend to get more bang for the buck. Try building one on IBuyPower, for example.</p>
<p>This question is largely dependent on whether you will be doing CAD or not. I don’t know what CS majors do, but my suspicion is that CAD is not going to be one of your tools. If not, then MANY computers will meet their requirements. You just need to decide if you’re a Mac or a PC and dive in. The Tech bookstore carries three great brands and will be a good resource. </p>
<p>If you are willing to consider a well established boutique builder, @Xi is great. Their web page is seriously cheesy, but they make BEAST computers that are rigorously tested, here in the US at very good prices. They are very respected in the Solidworks world.</p>
<p>It is not in any way dependent on whether you want to do CAD because doing CAD on a laptop is ridiculous and shouldn’t be done anyway.</p>
<p>I’ve heard that with Macs you can get the best of both(or three) worlds with OS X, Linux, and Windows using bootcamp. Are there any drawbacks if you do this? .NET, C# etc. are best with Windows, but does it matter if it’s on a PC or a Mac? </p>
<p>Boneh3ad is pretty dogmatic about this, but the reality is that you can an MANY people do CAD on laptops. I would agree that it isn’t optimal, because the screen space and power is more limited. IF you want the luxury of having the option to do Solidworks on your laptop or your schedule is pulling you away from traditional workstation space, you absolutely can. I got that straight from the woman who created the benchmark for testing Solidworks systems and configured a computer per her recommendations. Coincidentally, it’ll be a bad*ss gaming computer to! something Boneh3ad also eschews, but MANY people still do.</p>
<p>BTW, I trust and value his opinion.</p>
<p>The main downsides for Mac are expense and graphics limitations. Their top model can’t compete with the Nvidia Quadros.</p>
<p>We configured a 15.6" computer with an i7 4800, 16G of ram, a 1T Samsung EVO SSD, HD screen and no bloat ware for about the price of a high end Mac.</p>
<p>It will be a bit heavier (7lbs) and have crappy battery life, but the idea isn’t to use it on a plane, it’s to use it in the shop or at Starbucks or in your hotel room when you want to/have to.</p>
<p>It is not the best way to do CAD, but it is a very solid option to be able to take your work with you when you choose to do so.</p>
<p>I’d way recommend this over a BA desktop in your dorm room. First, you won’t work efficiently in your room. Second, you hall mates will always want to game on it.</p>
<p>No one doing serious CAD uses a laptop. For one, you need a discrete graphics card that just builds up heat and size/weight and destroys battery performance, destroying your mobility, which is the point of a laptop. Second, doing it on a trackpad or trackpoint is nigh on impossible, so you have to use a mouse, which most people have anyway but still makes you less mobile. Third, CAD greatly benefits from added monitor size and overall screen real estate. Shoot, last time I undertook a major CAD project I tracked down a third monitor and used the heck out of it. A laptop is the opposite of added screen real estate, especially the more portable ones. Last, why would anyone ever need to do CAD on the go?</p>
<p>People do CAD on laptops from time to time. Those people are not likely very serious CAD users and are severely limited. Build a laptop for mobile work and, if you feel like spending more, then add in extra computing power for doing computations (e.g. large Matlab problems). Build a desktop or use the provided labs for CAD. Don’t make the mistake of overpaying for hardware you’ll never seriously use in a laptop except maybe once or twice as a curiosity. It’s not dogma; it’s smart economics.</p>
<p>Further, CS students won’t touch CAD with a ten foot pole anyway. Shoot, even a $35 Raspberry Pi can do basic code compiling. You don’t need a whole lot of raw power for many CS tasks unless you are doing something like data mining or scientific computing.</p>
<p>Last, regarding Boot Camp, you cannon stall Mac OS, Windows and Linux all on the same machine you build yourself, too, with a little care in selecting the right hardware. Building a custom Mac is lovingly referred to as a Hackintosh. You just use a different boot manager than Boot Camp; something like GNU GRUB. Of course that’s more work, and unless you need the functionality of both (or all 3+) OSes, dual booting is silly.</p>
<p>EDIT: I don’t eschew gaming as a practice, just on a laptop. It is so much more cost effective to do that on a desktop. You can build the same power for half the price. Also, a true CAD machine is actually not very good at gaming because workstation class cards like the Quadro or the FirePro are just horrendous at the kinds of workloads that gaming puts on a GPU. I think that is mostly an artificial limitation to sell more cards, but it is generally true.</p>
<p>Battery performance does not destroy portability. It destroys remote use off the power grid.
My son brings his power pack and mouse everywhere on his current computer.</p>
<p>I’m not disagreeing with anything you said, other than to push back on the concept that no one uses a laptop for CAD. </p>
<p>The head of IT for ME at Cal Poly said many students use Solidworks on their laptops. They have very particular requirements for laptops. They aren’t required, but, because of access to labs, they are a nice second option. The ME department has 5 computer labs that are open 24h, but the teach in them too, so they aren’t always “open.”</p>
<p>I figured if you need a quad core with 16G of RAM, as recommended by the department, why not get a chassis that breaths well, a better Quadro, and an SSD? As configured, his system is fully certified by Solidworks.</p>
<p>Will it me the BEST option? Obviously not. But it will work. It won’t be slow and it will support 4 total monitors.</p>
<p>The primary reason not to do that is that, for all practical purposes, you could pay for that laptop or else take the same amount of money and get a laptop with less raw power and no discrete GPU and a desktop, and that laptop will have better battery life and be smaller and more portable and the desktop will run any CAD program substantially better than the laptop would have.</p>
<p>I know that some students use CAD on their laptops. I was, at one point, one of them. It didn’t take me very long to regret the decision and wish I had re-allocated some of the money to beef up the other stats or buy more RAM for my desktop instead since it was quickly obvious that laptops are a terrible CAD platform. I used it maybe a handful of times before giving up on that and I have basically had the GPU in this laptop disabled in the BIOS ever since since I don’t do a single thing that requires it. This is even more notable because I have done a lot more CAD and other computationally intensive computing things after giving up on laptop CAD and yet I haven’t once missed the GPU being enabled.</p>
<p>You don’t need it. Save the money or allocate it elsewhere.</p>
<p>Also, Cal Poly’s ME department doesn’t have any labs that are dedicated to general student usage instead of being allocated for instruction? That seems odd at a school like that.</p>
<p>That’s a good question. I’m certain there are quite a few open computer labs where no classes are taught on campus. It looks like they have one in ME labeled as “open.” <a href=“http://me.calpoly.edu/students/labs/”>http://me.calpoly.edu/students/labs/</a></p>
<p>Again, no argument that a desktop is better, but my son won’t (wisely if you ask me) do homework in his dorm room. The ME IT guy, for what ever reason, strongly advised a laptop that was up to the task of running Solidworks.</p>
<p>I also agree that you don’t need it. BUT, if you want it, it is very doable, shortcomings noted. </p>
<p>If it can run the OS and programs similar to that which the CS department has on shared computers for student use in CS courses, then you can do much of your work on your own computer without being connected to the shared computers, other than for copying it there to turn it in.</p>
<p>Looking at the SolidWorks system requirements page it appears Mac is not supported. Not even running Boot Camp. eDrawings are supported on Mac. <a href=“https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html”>https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html</a></p>
<p>Maybe I’m not reading something correctly.</p>
<p>SolidWorks should work fine running in Windows through boot camp, after all, it’s just a full Windows copy running alongside but separately from Mac OS. Alternatively, just use a different bootloader like GNU GRUB.</p>
<p>Also I don’t know why I said GIMP earlier. I meant rEFIt.</p>
<p>I don’t believe they certify anything that doesn’t have a Quadro (or AMD equivalent). I’ve seen pictures of it running on machines with GeForce GPUs, but according to Nvidia, the performance really suffers.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nvidia.com/attach/1006974.html?type=support&primitive=0”>http://www.nvidia.com/attach/1006974.html?type=support&primitive=0</a></p>
<p>CS Major? My youngest (a HS freshman but taking a college CS class) codes on a $300 netbook. The oldest, a freshman in EE/CS, uses a 13.3" ultrabook, i3 and 2GB RAM, with an 8 hour battery life. True portability trumps any real need for processing power since 300 lines of code would be a big assignment.</p>