Solved! Best laptop for arcitecture students

[holzzloh]

Hi im a first year architecture student and need to replace my laptop!

looking for a windows 7 32/64bit within £600-£800 able to run full adobe cs5.5 as well as autoCAD ect,



what would be the best graphics, processor / RAM possible with this budget?




also has anyone got any good brand / model suggestions?

 

[ukee1593]

Adobe software and autoCAD, while offering the beginnings of GPU compute acceleration, are still mainly CPU based. For this reason I would rule out any AMD Llano fusion based notebooks (in fact any Llano notebook at all).

You'll be wanting at least a High end Intel Core i5 dual core, preferably the quad core i7. Going for the quad core laptops can be a little tricky as a lot of these overheat causing damage to the components inside. I only recently saw a HP Pavilion DV6 running the quad core i7 2630QM @ 2.0GHz that was IDLING at 70°C. It was sounding like a jet engine under any kind of load and beginning to have BSOD issues.

If the budget can stretch a bit I'd recommend aiming for this GIGABYTE unit: http/www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-P2532N-Notebook-i7-2670QM-GT550M/dp/B00568LD5M/ref=sr_1_7?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1324814487&sr=1-7 GIGABYTE are well known for their Motherboards and Graphics cards and produce this unit in Taiwan. I have seen a number of reviews of the unit which claimed that the unit had a very strong build quality and low operating temperatures.

Either that or take a look at one of the Lenovo T series. These units are pretty reliable.

 

[holzzloh]

Adobe software and autoCAD, while offering the beginnings of GPU compute acceleration, are still mainly CPU based. For this reason I would rule out any AMD Llano fusion based notebooks (in fact any Llano notebook at all).

You'll be wanting at least a High end Intel Core i5 dual core, preferably the quad core i7. Going for the quad core laptops can be a little tricky as a lot of these overheat causing damage to the components inside. I only recently saw a HP Pavilion DV6 running the quad core i7 2630QM @ 2.0GHz that was IDLING at 70°C. It was sounding like a jet engine under any kind of load and beginning to have BSOD issues.

If the budget can stretch a bit I'd recommend aiming for this GIGABYTE unit: http/www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-P2532N-Notebook-i7-2670QM-GT550M/dp/B00568LD5M/ref=sr_1_7?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1324814487&sr=1-7 GIGABYTE are well known for their Motherboards and Graphics cards and produce this unit in Taiwan. I have seen a number of reviews of the unit which claimed that the unit had a very strong build quality and low operating temperatures.

Either that or take a look at one of the Lenovo T series. These units are pretty reliable.

Thanks

the Gigabyte P2532N is a little out of my price range though,
I've been looking at some custom sony VAIO's and came up with this spec:


Processor: Intel® CoreTM i5-2430M 2.4 GHz
Operating system: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium
Display: 43,8cm LCD 1600 x 900 + webcam
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® 410M GPU 1GB
Hard drive: 640 GB Serial ATA (5400 rpm)
Memory: 6 GB 1333MHz DDR3-SDRAM
Optical Drive: DVD disc drive


slightly worried about the graphics card though, is it any good?