Best Portable System For Design?

Nemsys · January 19, 2017

Hi!

I am studying Industrial Design all the way down here in New Zealand! As part of my degree, we do a lot of digital creation for 3D printing. Mainly using Autodesks Fusion 360 and Solidworks, with plenty of Adobe CC to display our work. We do have computer labs on campus, but the software is never up to date so I kinda need a new system to do all of my course work on.

With that out of the way, here is my question to you lovely viewers of Linus and Friends: What kind of system should I buy/build? A few options have already come to mind, such as simply buying a laptop with the performance I need, but down here in the Land of the Long White Cloud (and hobbits) the entry level Kaby Lake Alienware 13 costs NZD $2400 , not really justifiable to a broke ass student. The US store has it at USD $999.99, or NZD $ 1392.55, which is insane. I don't need a dGPU, this is just an example of what we have to pay down here.

A creative solution I thought of would be to purchase a Skullcanyon Nuc, portable monitor and peripherals, for a portable, but pretty fiddly desktop experience.

If any of you have any laptops, or other solutions that come to mind, please let me know!

Thank you for your time,

Nemsys

P.S. If this is the wrong forum, please advise where to go.

Droidbot · January 19, 2017

Amazon ship all their products to NZ (mostly) but you do need to pay tax over 1k

joshfrog · January 19, 2017

as your neighbour in australia i no how you feel prices here suck to

now all the software you have said is software that runs best when it has more power behind it, if you want a system that is powerful i would say get a laptop you can always get a 2nd screen if you need to.

so when looking at computers keep this in mind if you can get an i7 do and a dgpu you will notice the in processing stay away from U series cpu from intel

an i5 will do but dont go with an i3, if you end up buying a desktop all this will still apply but also having a higher clock speed on your cpu will help as well.

in terms of software i deal with adobe all the time and some adobe programs have problems dealing with an older version of the same program and may not open if you open it on your uni computers when you have worked on a newer version of adobe on you computer.

laptops to look at may be the dell xps 15 or the dell inspiron. the inspiron laptops they are cheaper and still pack good performance.

hp also have some good laptops with i7 cpus and dgpus in them i would just work out a budget your happy with.

the skull nuc is a good little system but doesnt have a dgpu but you could look at getting a razer core and putting in a gpu.

p.s hope this helps and im sorry for the long message

Nemsys · January 20, 2017

22 hours ago, joshfrog said:

as your neighbour in australia i no how you feel prices here suck to

now all the software you have said is software that runs best when it has more power behind it, if you want a system that is powerful i would say get a laptop you can always get a 2nd screen if you need to.

so when looking at computers keep this in mind if you can get an i7 do and a dgpu you will notice the in processing stay away from U series cpu from intel

an i5 will do but dont go with an i3, if you end up buying a desktop all this will still apply but also having a higher clock speed on your cpu will help as well.

in terms of software i deal with adobe all the time and some adobe programs have problems dealing with an older version of the same program and may not open if you open it on your uni computers when you have worked on a newer version of adobe on you computer.

laptops to look at may be the dell xps 15 or the dell inspiron. the inspiron laptops they are cheaper and still pack good performance.

hp also have some good laptops with i7 cpus and dgpus in them i would just work out a budget your happy with.

the skull nuc is a good little system but doesnt have a dgpu but you could look at getting a razer core and putting in a gpu.

p.s hope this helps and im sorry for the long message

Hey man, thanks! Yeah I pretty much need a qua core, or at least a new i5/7 with hyperthreading to deal with real time and post rendering. My Acer Aspire 5750G from 2011 is getting a bit old and slow, even with a new SSD and increased RAM. The appealing nature of the Nuc is that, like you said I can add on an external GPU later on. To be honest though, Intels onboard Iris graphics will probably handle most of the workload. I really want something like the new LG gram, Razerblade or and XPS, but the base XPS 13 is NZD $2000 here.

joshfrog · January 20, 2017

yeah the xps isnt cheap im getting the 15 soon. have a look at this link it might be more then you want to pay though

http://www.dell.com/nz/p/inspiron-15-7567-laptop/pd?ref=PD_OC

dont forget that the xps and alot of other laptops have thunderbolt 3 and support external gpu aswell so you could consider spending more to get a laptop now then a nuc because you could take the laptop with you then add the external gpu but if you do that option then intel graphics could be fine untill you get the external graphics just will be slower.

and yeah an i5 as long as its got 4 cores it will be good but if you can spend the extra money on an i7 quad core with hyperthreading now will pay off. one problem with really thin laptops is they dont always have cooling and if your doing work thats just eating your cpu you will want cooling.

the razer blades are good and do support external gpu and have nice screens and a good color space range for work when you need it

Droidbot · January 20, 2017

24 minutes ago, joshfrog said:

the razer blades are good and do support external gpu and have nice screens and a good color space range for work when you need it

except they have bad cooling, bad battery life. they're like dyson - crap backed up by a good marketing team