Want suggestions please!

[PLATER31]

Hello,

I know this might be a common, repeated question for all you guys. But I really need your help & suggestions for a new laptop I'm planning to buy for my universty.

 

Requirements include,

• ANSYS - for sure (so mac is out in the 1st round itself )
• Photoshop
• Atleast 16gb ram & 1Tb storage
• Windows OS
• A decent number of ports & a backlit keyboard 

I don't have a great amount of knowledge on the graphics cards, so idk how much GB is needed for that.

 

So, this should be fairly enough to let anyone know my requirements & also give an idea on how much I know about these stuff. I hope someone will respond to this.

Thanking you in advance....

[SignatureSigner]

budget?

[FrowningHippo]

In addition. Ansys has many different products and depending on the workload you might have different requirements. In general 1GB of VRAM does the trick for 'minimum' if it's a relatively recent GPU with DX11 support. But that is minimum. And any medium sized workload is going to give you a bad time...... 

[PLATER31]

19 minutes ago, SignatureSigner said:

budget?

Somewhere between 1200-1500 USD ..

[PLATER31]

10 minutes ago, FrowningHippo said:

In addition. Ansys has many different products and depending on the workload you might have different requirements. In general 1GB of VRAM does the trick for 'minimum' if it's a relatively recent GPU with DX11 support. But that is minimum. And any medium sized workload is going to give you a bad time...... 

Yeahh, my work includes running a lottt of iterations & also using CFDPost for animating my work.

[FrowningHippo]

21 minutes ago, PLATER31 said:

Yeahh, my work includes running a lottt of iterations & also using CFDPost for animating my work.

Ah, well in that case. (And keeping your budget in mind). 4GB of VRAM should be a nice start. Anything higher is nice. There is also the question if you really need/want the Quadro line of cards. Because they are really expensive. And as far as I am aware not mandatory. At your budget I think something like a RTX3060/3070 should really keep you afloat even allows for some sweet games inbetween all the hard work. :). 

 

Do keep in mind Ansys themselves only test and validate certain cards for support. Their current supportcard can be found here: Graphics Cards Tested (ansys.com) These are almost exclusively Quadro or bussiness cards. So if you want to be safe; you might lose out on performace in exchange for that kind of card. 

 

Edit: Coaxial makes some valid points. If you don't need all that power you might want to take that into consideration.

[Coaxialgamer]

Am not up to date on current offerings in that price range, but here are a few suggestions/tips I learned from my own "work"/uni laptop.

 

Portability should be at the top of your priorities. I (and many others I know) have made the mistake of opting for a "gaming" laptop with a lot of CPU and GPU power (a 6 core i7 and a 2060) under the pretense of needing the performance for work.. While the work i do (mechanical engineering student) does benefit from computing grunt, I don't need it 99% of the time (and I could easily just wait a bit longer in the cases where it is useful),but I'm otherwise left with a fairly heavy machine with mediocre-ish battery life and a massive power brick (because Lenovo doesn't offer a small one for my device, grrr). Tldr: don't fall into the performance trap.

Your day-to-day experience will benefit much more from a light machine with a large battery than it will from having a gaming-class GPU, especially if you already have a desktop rig. For your work you probably want a dedicated GPU with CUDA support, but you probably don't want anything too powerful either.