Laptop for engineering education?

[mwaau]

Hi,

I am soon going to buy a new laptop for my engineering education here in Denmark, which is primarily needed for CAD and Finite Element applications and Matlab programing but not for gaming. At the moment I have the following laptops as favorites:

HP Workstation 8510w:
- T9500 (2,6 GHz - 6 MB cache - 800 MHz FSB) on Intel PM965 Express chipset
- 4 GB DDR2 ram
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M
- Blue Ray drive
- Price: approx. 1730 USD

Lenovo ThinkPad W500:
- T9400 (2,53 GHz - 6 MB cache - 1066 MHz FSB) on Intel GM45 Express chipset
- 4 GB DDR3 ram
- ATI Mobility FireGL V5700
- Price: approw. 2450 USD

Lenovo ThinkPad T500:
- P8700 (2,53 GHz - 3 MB cache - 1066 MHz FSB) on Intel GM45 Express chipset
- 4 GB DDR3 ram
- ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650
- Price: approx. 1920 USD

So my question is, which one should I prefer (and why) for the applications mentioned above?

And by which criteria should I choose my laptop, ex. better graphics card, more cache, faster FSB, higher clockspeed, DDR2 vs. DDR3 ram, chipset etc?

If you have any other laptops in mind within the same pricerange the just let me know

Thanks in advance

Morten from Denmark.

 

[overclockingrocks]

I would go for the Thinkpad W500 out of all of those. Firstly because fo the DDR3 RAM and the 6MB cache cpu with the 1066FSB. Secondly becauuse of the fact it has a very nice workstation class gpu. yes I know the HP does as well but it's running a slower cpu and DDR2 RAM. W500 all the way on this one