Need a laptop for school!

mariocalled · July 2013

I'm heading down to Miami for school in a few weeks, and I'm looking to get a new laptop, considering my current laptop is nearly four years old now.

I'm looking for something which is obviously ideal for the basic school work (papers), but also something that can handle AutoCAD. I'm going to FIU for theatre design, and I would like to be able to have my own version of CAD to myself rather than using the school computers in case I want to work somewhere that's not the computer lab. I probably won't be doing many 3D renderings on my laptop or anything, so it's not like I need something completely graphic intensive, but I need it to be able to run 2D CAD smoothly. The one I've got now always got really choppy when I was just trying to measure the length of a wall.

I also want to be able to run League of Legends and DOTA at a decent graphics setting (not max of course, but maybe around medium settings) along with a few programs in the background, like Spotify or something.

I would like to remain in the $300-$500 range. I've found a few on newegg that have interested me:

Acer Aspire V3-551G-8454 AMD A-Series A8-4500M(1.90GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD AMD Radeon HD 7670M Notebook

ASUS F502CA-EB31 Intel Core i3 2367M(1.40GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD Intel HD Graphics 3000 Notebook

Acer Aspire V3-731-B964G50Maii 17.3" LED Notebook - Intel Pentium 2.20 GHz

Any suggestions would be great and very much appreciated.

miguksaram · July 2013

CAD can be a very CPU intensive program. You will need to state whether or not you place emphasis on speed. By that I mean do you expect your laptop to give you results quickly or are you willing to wait? This is important because currently your stated budget is far lower than what most DESKTOP systems are build at for the purpose of CAD. You might ask why I capitalized desktop, well simply put a desktop system of the same specs costs less and thus if you expect reasonable results you will need to either change your mind a laptop (a given really) and increase your budget or most likely both.

Slightly intoxicated but the overall information is still accurate. What is your Max budget and what do you expect this system to do and in some cases, more importantly, for how long?

Laptops are in fact fine but the majority of college students as long as their don't expect much. However that is definitely NOT true of those who demand performance.

mariocalled · July 2013

Originally posted by miguksaram
CAD can be a very CPU intensive program. You will need to state whether or not you place emphasis on speed. By that I mean do you expect your laptop to give you results quickly or are you willing to wait? This is important because currently your stated budget is far lower than what most DESKTOP systems are build at for the purpose of CAD. You might ask why I capitalized desktop, well simply put a desktop system of the same specs costs less and thus if you expect reasonable results you will need to either change your mind a laptop (a given really) and increase your budget or most likely both.

I mean if it comes down to it, CAD isn't completely necessary. It will be available on the school computers, and I'd only be editing two dimensional drawings for the most part. Maybe not even edit them, as much as I am just looking at it in order to build a set model.