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Laptop for Engineering Student.


jscurlock

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I am not much of a gamer but I need a laptop that will run programs like AutoDesk Inventor, SolidWorks Electrical 2014, Eagle, Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I was leaning toward the Lenovo y510p or Asus X750JB. I'm not worried about BIOS hacking, that can be easily done. I just wanted to see what other people had to say. My budget is $1000 or less. :bananalama:

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For less than $1000, the asus model you posted nets you an LCD screen with a resolution of 1600x900 for a 17 inch laptop AND you get a 740m GPU... I'd go for the Lenovo instead as 1080p screens are practically standard, plus it's 15" so it's more portable due to its smaller size AND you get dual 750m SLIs, and you have the option of ditching the secondary GPU for a dedicated optical drive or HDD caddy.

Hope that helps!

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I'm an engineering student too and i'm working with Catia V5 and Simdesigner. I think the Power of the Asus is enough. Catia worked also on my Acer 5750G with i5 and GT520m very well.

I took the y510p, because of gaming, portability and the fullhd screen. It's the better one and as an engineer you should take the better one ;)

With the to graphic cards you have a bette performance to work on two screens. My second screen is a 24" fullhd samsung screen. So i have same resolution on both screens, it's really comfortable ;)

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Looks like with those programs you want more than performance, you need a quality screen. A poor screen can make the job very unenjoyable and bad for your eyes. Get something with 1080p and IPS screen. In fact, I would get a 17" laptop and IPS screen and sacrifice some performance, If it's still Core i5 and midrange video card, it'll still be good enough. The Lenovo Y510p isn't too horrible, but not great either, it could be helped if you use a colorimeter. I don't like recommending Sony or Apple, but they have nice screens.

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I have lenovo Y500 which is the older version of Y510p.Its a pretty good laptop.However the Wlan card as stated isn't good.It catches dust and fingerprints very quickly.Also the MOST FRUSTRATING THING IS BOOT TIMES. I have the non SSD version and it takes forever to boot up to 5 minutes.A fresh install of windows makes it boot better but after few weeks it returns to its frustrating boot time.Don't know if it is the bios considering mine has an old bios (version 1.05) but I am someone who makes sure there is no crapware on his laptop and even my 5 years old Amd Athlon x2 dual core desktop with 4 Gbs of ram boots faster with a western digital blue HD.Don't know Whats wrong but even laptops with lower specs than mine boot faster.Consider this while buying.

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Get a sager or clevo (sager's parent brand)

They are utilitarian computers that are designed VERY well.

Things to look for in a laptop:

-Stability

-External Construction & Durability

-The number of hard-drive bays (this is important)

- Extent of internal customization and maximum capabilities offered by the specific motherboard.

Both Sager (clevo-rebrand) and clevo are number one in all of these categories. Sagers are available via websites like:

xoticpc.com

A good model on a tight budget would be: NP8268

---------

for clevo..

buying a clevo would be factory direct and therefore are hard to find. if hard up for cash try getting one from ebay. buy NEW only.

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I'm going to add~

Do not get anything with less than a 760. KEY component is not the GENERATION (700's, 800's ,etc)

but the level of card. NOTHING below a lv 60.

why? because anything less will have low video memory, low clocks, and If you tried doing something like a stress test or tried to render multiple complicated components (think: rendering all the parts of a flashlight with the curves etc)

A low level card will result in you running into longer waiting times, more frequent crashes, and inability to utilize certain tools.

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I'm going to add~

Do not get anything with less than a 760. KEY component is not the GENERATION (700's, 800's ,etc)

but the level of card. NOTHING below a lv 60.

why? because anything less will have low video memory, low clocks, and If you tried doing something like a stress test or tried to render multiple complicated components (think: rendering all the parts of a flashlight with the curves etc)

A low level card will result in you running into longer waiting times, more frequent crashes, and inability to utilize certain tools.

Be a little careful saying this. The GT 650M has the same core as the GTX 660M and the GT 750M. Click on the GT 650M in my sig to see my hwbot submission. 1271 MHz @ 1.2V. I could probably push it a little more, but not needed.

---

As a MechE student, I haven't run across anything that requires gobs of processing power.

Lenovo Y-series are pretty solid.

Check with the programs that you use currently / plan to use to see about hardware acceleration for stuff like CAD. Some like AMD over Nvidia and vice versa.

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Thats very true. I typically use solidworks 2012 and I have had to do a lot of computational analysis ( like thermal integrity, stress tests, etc) I had an msi laptop with 4gb of ram and only 1gb vRAM. To run the tests without crashing I had to stop all unnecessary processes and close most background programs.

albeit I have learned a lot and what I knew back about computers doesn't hold a candle to today.

You are right tho.

-Driver stability,

-hardware acceleration optimization, (or complete lack thereof)

-the program in question

The rig's stability of its components matters a lot too. But even if they are the same cores, overclocking is known to shorten the life of any gpu, especially overvolting. Why not just get one a level up? buying a sager/clevo will get you the better equipment for the same price.

cross compare a lenovo from tigerDirect or newegg to an equivalent sager from xoticpc.com

They are great to deal with too, I've bought 3 laptops from them now.

I don't mean to put down the Lenovo-Y series, but if on a budget I'd go for the for utilitarian sager models that have more bang for the buck.

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I bought the IdeaPad Y510P some month ago.

This model does come with two NVIDIA 750M video cards in SLI configuration. The SLI was included making this laptop an extremely good deal at this price.

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In add to the previous post, I recommend the LENOVO Ideapad laptop, have a Y400 SLI model, this has been my best buy ever, high performance at a very competitive price, mechanical enginering machine virtual desinger. 14" Laptop with high 15" + performance.

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Thats very true. I typically use solidworks 2012 and I have had to do a lot of computational analysis ( like thermal integrity, stress tests, etc) I had an msi laptop with 4gb of ram and only 1gb vRAM. To run the tests without crashing I had to stop all unnecessary processes and close most background programs.

albeit I have learned a lot and what I knew back about computers doesn't hold a candle to today.

You are right tho.

-Driver stability,

-hardware acceleration optimization, (or complete lack thereof)

-the program in question

The rig's stability of its components matters a lot too. But even if they are the same cores, overclocking is known to shorten the life of any gpu, especially overvolting. Why not just get one a level up? buying a sager/clevo will get you the better equipment for the same price.

cross compare a lenovo from tigerDirect or newegg to an equivalent sager from xoticpc.com

They are great to deal with too, I've bought 3 laptops from them now.

I don't mean to put down the Lenovo-Y series, but if on a budget I'd go for the for utilitarian sager models that have more bang for the buck.

Well if the price gap is big enough I'd say get the one with slower gpu and overclock it given that lifespan does not shorten as dramatically as in older generations.I'd still check for what resources will the prospective applications consume the most.i'd agree with clevo suggestion though it would probably be out of his budget if he had to import one and the risk of loss and the usual hiccups with customs.

P.S it looks like your running out of ram not vram if killing processes helps you run solidworks

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Personally, I'd go with the Asus ROG g550JK or the Lenovo Ideapad y50, both are great values for price and not too fat, definitely not the slimmest machines on the market, but trusted brands, good value, and decent looks, can't go wrong! :)

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Hi,

I would suggest you to please go for Think Pad Workstation . The latest model is around 1100 dollars which is I'm telling you worth every penny.

I myself own a lenovo y400 and have a very bad experience replaced once and now facing graphic card issues .

Regret not taking the robust durable performing Thinkpad.

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Suggest looking at a Ivy Bridge system with a decent dGPU, expresscard/TB eGPU expandability and a high res LCD. Eg: 14" Asus G46VW or 15" Dell M4700/M6700 http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/4109-egpu-candidate-system-list.html#3rd . The latest Haswell systems commanding a premium but in i7-quad form not delivering anything more than it's Ivy Bridge predecessors.

Maybe a good time to ride it out and see if the 22nm->14nm Broadwell die shrink will correct Haswell's shortcomings? In which case suggest look at 12.5" HP 2570P or 14" Dell E6440 off ebay with a user i7-quad upgrade. Both can have an inexpensive expresscard eGPUs attached for CUDA/OpenCL processing. Both are covered extensively in my sig.

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I can only fully agree. I would even say that ASUS has pretty decent NB that are able to run those programs. I would also go for a 17" screen to see more and everything bigger on screen..very usefull for designing electrical stuff. Half of those programs don't even need something special and any mid class NB would do very nicely. 1000$ is very much enough ;-)

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I use my y510p writing projects in college, and I had only one problem: when raising the windows version to 8.1 Pro, using code from Dreamspark. Laptop enter restarts loop, it was necessary to restore the backup. It must have something with Lenovo branding. It's great price/quality notebook.

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