Need help Choosing a laptop for collage

[drorsabi1]

I need a laptop for For architectural studies that include the use of software 

AutoCAD Civil 3D

Sketchup 

This is the first laptop I'm buying

I will be grateful for any help 

 

 

 

[KeyringHardhat]

I've suggested this before to another user, given no budget or other info I've quoted my message on that thread and I'll share the link the thread, was some good chatter on there  

Quote

I'm for sure in the Cult of ThinkPad, get yourself an ex-enterprise, at least 8th gen i5, upgradeable ThinkPad and kit it out with all the RAM and SSD your heart desires. You'll never look back, and this thing will never die. 

 

In the unlikely event it does die, they are one of the easiest laptops to both source parts for and repair. 

 

[Burnedice25]

Hey,

I was literally in your exact position, same programs and use case, a few moths ago

Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 was my choice

it is one of the best laptops on the market right now, with plenty of options and configurations. I personally got the AMD variant but it also has Intel offerings (I wanted the multi threaded power more, but you may want more single threaded speed)
 

 here is a short circuit review

it's a light, sleek and mid sized laptop, with plenty of power behind it, but also a fantastic battery.

[Brooksie359]

Autocad civil 3d? Who in the world uses that for architecture anymore lol. I mean learning Autocad probably isn't bad but the amount of people who use Autocad 3d are very slim. Most people use revit which is also owned by Autocad but it is 100x better. Surprised they wouldn't teach that instead. 

[Qyygle]

I would not recommend a surface laptop. There is no model that is current with the latest processors, and if you're going to pay a premium for a surface, just go for the full tablet model, at least it's got the tablet usage to justify some of it's cost.

 

The used thinkpad suggestion above can be a good call, if you're ok with doing a little background work and research. Otherwise a new model isn't bad either. Might want to take a look at the full list of programs you'll actually need to run to see if anything benefits from gpu acceleration, otherwise any CPU from the past few generations is totally fine for things like sketchup.

 

As for Brookie's note on nobody using X-Y-Z anymore... welcome to college. Turns out 90% of what you'll learn won't be applied in any career you go on-to, and 90% of what you'll actually do won't be taught.

[drorsabi1]

Is Asus VivoBook 15 K513EQ-L1546W  with 

NVIDIA® GeForce® MX350, 2GB GDDR5.  Is ok