<p>@sevmom she recommended it and has degrees in computer sciences so she does know a lot about computers (but earned them long enough ago that she isn’t familiar with engineering laptop recommendations/requirements) I tried to talk her down to a PC due to the price and the ability to get more bang for your buck but she refused. Money isn’t at all an issue for her but I still obviously felt bad. I insisted but to no avail. So no I don’t “have to have this” it’s essentially what I’m forced into getting though I’m not complaining. I just didn’t know enough about laptops for engineering so I came here to confirm that the one she is getting me would suffice. </p>
<p>It’s BAD **S! Take it and run. Don’t do SolidWorks on it.</p>
<p>Thank you for the explanation, joecorn! Good luck in college.</p>
<p>A couple of musings - the Lenovo W530 was awesome, and they changed a few too many things in it for the 540 so… keyboard and battery were the main causes I think. For anyone but an architecture major it’s an overkill.</p>
<p>Regarding Solidworks, if you’ll be running this pretty regularly I would think about getting a decent system (not a Mac running VMware) and then maybe even a desktop. Laptops were not intended to run such software. If it’s only one or two classes that need it, do it at the lab.</p>
<p>Several of my daughter’s architecture buddies are moving away from laptops and into desktops, and gaming desktops especially. Next year I’m planning a custom build water cooled $2k machine for her (I used to build such machines for myself for video editing in the past). </p>
<p>I use a fairly weak (but long battery life) laptop for the basics like emails, Office, etc. For stuff like CAD or programming, I have a desktop with me on campus. </p>
<p>@turbo93, the 530 was VERY well regarded. The 540 is pretty widely hated by previous 530 users.</p>
<p>As for gaming desktops, the GPUs are generally different than workstation GPUs, each being better for its specific purpose.</p>
<p>Below is a post from the Solidworks form regarding a cheap desktop that is very CAD worthy. That forum in general is quite helpful. It is a bit over a year old.</p>
<p><a href=“SOLIDWORKS Forums”>SOLIDWORKS Forums;
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>My work laptop is a very serious Dell M4600 I think - over summer we’ll load Rhino and etc for my daughter and see how well it runs. </p>
<p>See, there’s two issues here. One is CAD. Any laptop with decent discrete graphics will do CAD. My daughter’s NVIDIA Optimus something-or-another does a very good job there as long as you’re talking undergrad architecture, not the new Dubai skyline. </p>
<p>Where everyone falls flat is rendering, where you have to take the 3D CAD stuff and add texture, lighting, and the like. All the GPU’s in the world won’t help because a lot of rendering software is running single thread on the CPU, and does not take into account the Kepler or similar GPU’s that are used to watch YouTube in the background. This is changing. So to hedge your bets you want a very fast CPU, probably quad 3.6 or 3.8 ghz, and uber-graphics just in case. This depends a lot on what software we’re talking about too.</p>
<p>The form factor depends on where you go to school too. At her school 1st and 2nd year studio the kids work in the actual studio as they build sketch models and so on. 3rd and 4th is nearly all digital and nobody ever steps foot in there except for class time. I suspect she’ll keep the laptop for studio work and have an uber desktop for serious rendering.</p>