Best "Inventing" Laptop

iamdarkbowser · August 9, 2018

School is starting for me and I need a new laptop. I often need to design things in Autodesk Inventor for projects and whatnot. Much of this I have to do at home, where I can use my computer, and the rest at school on the aforementioned laptop.

What I require in the laptop:

1: It must be light and portable, physical size is less important than weight (it's going in my backpack, so it needs to be somewhat robust as well).

2: It must be capable of running Autodesk Inventor and the ram hungry monster known as Chrome at the same time.

3: It must have more than 3 hours of battery life (not sure what the average laptop battery life is).

4: The keyboard must have function keys and other keys such as delete (my old laptop has neither). The trackpad doesn't have to be impressive as I will often use a mouse.

5: It must cost less than $800 USD.

Ikarus · August 22, 2018

At home i have a MSI GP60 that came out 2014 and for simpler things and modeling 3D Parts with Inventor for printing it is still good. It costs back then about 850€ had 8 GB RAM and a GT 940M with an i5. I think if you will buy an MSI or similar software with an good graphics card in you price span it will be enough. depends on what you have to model with Inventor.
The battery holds like 2,5h

At my workplace I have a 1600€ Desktop PC from 2012 with 32 GB RAM and an old Quadro 1800 FX
That's enough to handle models with about 5000-6000 parts in it. Maybe it would be enough for you to buy a used Workstation Laptop like Lenovo Thinkpad or a good 3 year old gaming laptop if you want to save money.
I recommend a Space Navigator from 3dconnexion.