looking for good CAD laptop

[Seppe]

One of my friends is going to study architecture next year so she's gonna need a laptop that can run autocad (or just cad software in general) easily.

I'm mainly looking for a bang-for-your-buck type of laptop that's not too hard to bring along to class.

The specified system requirements by her school are at least 1 gig of ram on the graphics card, preferably a 6th gen I7 and preferably 16gigs of ram.

 

What i'd like to know is what types of specs are most realistic to run autocad smoothly:

i was guessing a GTX 1050 (ti) would be a good baseline?

Does anyone have experience with buying a laptop for cad software?

I'm just afraid to be suggesting something completely overkill

[NelizMastr]

It greatly depends on which CAD software is used. I know that SolidWorks runs like ass on Radeon/Geforce cards and demands a workstation GPU. AutoCAD seems less picky. It really wouldn't hurt going the workstation route for this. Yes they cost more, but you can be sure your applications will properly take advantage of your hardware.

 

HP offers the ZBook and ZBook Studio line, of which the latter is more ultrabook like, so easier to carry around. 

Dell has the Precision line, no real ultraportables but very decent.

Lenovo has the ThinkPad P-series. Also beefy, but also powerful.

[Seppe]

would this HP laptop with a FirePro W4190M (or  this one, kinda unsure about the 8gig ram tho ) do the job? never mind those don't have wireless connectivity apparently

otherwise I think this thinkpad with a nvidia quadro M1000M should definitely do the job, right?

 

anyways thank you so much for your help!

[NelizMastr]

1 hour ago, Seppe said:

would this HP laptop with a FirePro W4190M (or  this one, kinda unsure about the 8gig ram tho ) do the job? never mind those don't have wireless connectivity apparently

otherwise I think this thinkpad with a nvidia quadro M1000M should definitely do the job, right?

 

anyways thank you so much for your help!

Why would the ZBook not have wireless? Of course it does.  All laptops do since like 2004  

 

That Thinkpad would do nicely, yes. Up the RAM to 16GB, though.

[TLCH723]

I would suggest wait until she is at the college and see if they have computer labs for them to work and also see what software. Usually the first couple of semester is basic thing anyway so any decent laptop with dGPU will be fine