Best budget laptop for Architects, where are you?

aCubanGuy · June 6, 2019

I need help choosing a laptop to buy given that I'm a civil engineer but don't know what resources I should boost if mainly working with AutoCAD or REVIT. I need a laptop that gets the job done but won't carve a hole in my pocket, anyways: HELP!

Daniel644 · June 6, 2019

Autocad will run fine on damn near ANYTHING, we are using a FX6300 from 5+ years ago and previously used a Q6600 quad core (at work), the biggest things where a faster CPU will help is in Rendering and more VRAM helps in the smoothness of rotating around in 3D, generally they recommend Quadro cards for Autocad so if you can find a "workstation" laptop decent price thats good, but don't think you MUST get something super fancy, I also suggest a 17.3" screen, anything smaller and you WILL be doing far more scrolling in and out to zoom then you normally do, I used my old Asus Gaming Laptop (i7 4700HQ CPU and 860m GPU) for CAD for a while before it died, now I built a desktop and just remote into it when I need to do things away from the house, also DEFINITELY budget for a mouse, CAD on a trackpad is HORRIBLE.

I would think an entry level gaming laptop around about a grand that has like a 1050ti or something like that would do a pretty decent job at Autocad and save you money over some Workstation laptop with the fancy Quadro cards. Unless you are running the latest generation of CAD (we stopped updating at 2010) you won't see any advances from the RTX cards, not even sure the rendering engine in Autocad today can use the RTX features but I haven't gotten deep into that as I don't want to pay a monthly subscription for CAD nor do I want to be forced to use the HORRIBLE RIBBON INTERFACE.