More Laptop Dithering
 

Need some laptop advice from the brain trust.

My son is starting in the undergrad architecture program at University Of Oregon this fall. The department requires each student to have a laptop meeting certain minimum specs. They need to run AutoCAD, Rhino, Photoshop, etc.

I've spec'd out a Thinkpad P52 workstation that looks like it should handle anything he could need for the whole five year program. i8 quad-core, Nvidia Quadro 2000 graphics, 64 GB RAM with room for 128 GB, 512 GB SSD with more two drive slots free, 4K 15" screen, etc. It'll cost about $3,600 and is a tank.

Hmm. It really will be a tank. Like big and heavy. Like the bad old days of laptop bulk and weight.

The Thinkpad P1 thin and light workstation can be spec'd for a similar price to about 70% as much oomph. It maxes at 64 GB RAM, only has two drive slots, doesn't have near as much heat dissipation ability, etc. But it'd be a much more portable machine. Like, if you're not actually an architecture student it'd be all the laptop you need. And if you are an architecture student it'd be adequate but maybe not perfect.

Here's the thing. I'm not confident he'll actually stick with the architecture program. He's not a kid who has been dreaming about designing buildings his whole life. He's also interested in product design and marine biology, and who knows what else he might get into.

Should I buy the P52? Or buy the P1 and potentially have to spring for a better laptop or maybe a desktop later?

Both?

A strong GPU helps presentations immensely.

Portability is great for students.

A portable unit can always VPN to the power house.

I would go for portability all day long. If he finds it lacking in HP spring for a desktop to do the hard stuff, though I would bet 99% of the time the lower spec unit will be just fine.

That 1st box you spec'd will probably chew through a freshly charged battery before it finishes booting.

Any of those apps you listed will hum along fine on 16GB of ram, 32'd be better, you don't need 64 or more.

The only things you should be focusing on are CPU, GPU and usability.

How much of his work will be split between classroom and his dorm room?

Get him a kitted out Surface Pro for class and a desktop for the dorm.

You'll spend the same coin and he'll be happier and more productive.

Get the workstation. And budget for an extra screen for his dorm

The heat dissapation is a good thing. And he can carry the laptop, it will not kill him. My first laptop was over 8 pounds (Toshiba 1200 80C86 with harddrive).

My heaviest was 12 pounds (work supplied 286 clamshell). What a piece of junk! We were given an external CD drive and you had to play games with the RAM loading to run Windows 1.0 to make it work...

I mis-read the title and thought this thread was about lap-dancing .
Sorry , but I have no advice to offer on your computer problems .

RAM is cheap. But I agree with S-M. A powerful desktop and a decent laptop might be the better idea.

A really good Thinkpad Carbon X1 is about $1500. For $2000 you can do a killer desktop. My last build is still strong after 5 years.

Used? I bought eBay thinkpads for 4/5 of my family. Cheap. Warranty. Work great.

Can you meet the spec with second hand?

Yep, if you have SSD you don't need that much RAM. Doing architecture maybe a 17" screen would be more suitable.

Uh ??

Hmm. There is a P72 workstation with 17" screen. But I'll just give him an external monitor for big screen work.

Lots to mull over. In the old days there weren't these questions. Just abacus or fingers.

I know what you mean!!! The laptop I'm sitting in front of right now is a Toshiba with 17" and it seems so much bigger than a 15". You might say whats another couple of inches :blush: but it makes a lot of difference in a graphical environment. Not everything will be on the big screen such as when in class. I got my art school kid niece a 17" laptop when I bought mine and she got a lot of use out it at art school.

I'm looking at buying as big as I can laptop (desktop replacement they called them at one time) but I wouldn't have a clue in hell what to buy. Lenovo thinkpad you say.

Once upon a time....long ago...

Ask Sid :)

This is OT....what about lap dancing :)?

I used to carry 17in laptops.

No more.

I've got 35in super wide displays on my desk at home and in the office to plug into and when I'm traveling for a few days and need to work I carry a 17in AOC portable display.

Video is fed via USB.

They are cheap and light.

Combined weight of that and 15 in laptop is less than a 17 and dual displays gives you a ton more real estate.

I hate working on laptops for any kind of serious work.
Give me a desktop any time, faster, less noise, bigger disks, more screens for my money

Wait, there are i8 processors?

I bought a nice refurbished HP with an i7 8th gen, 32gb of ram, 2tb HD, and a nice Nvidia video card for around $800 a few months ago.

We have a Ailenware "laptop" that is a monster. It has two video cards, 4 hard drives, and only Andre the Giant cuold fit on his lap with an way to shield the heat.

Go for all the memory you can stuff in there, and lots of hard drive space. We generate huge 3dml files and point cloud files, as in gigabytes. If he is trying to edit or work with large files, he will want all the memory he can get. We have one 128 GB ram computer that pegs out the ram on occasion. Memory is cheap and no one ever said "I have too much RAM or hard drive space".

Files will only get bigger and more complex in the future.

And I totally agree with the desktop advice. Laptops suck to work with as a workstation. At least get a separate monitor and keyboard for the laptop, but a desktop for real work and a the laptop for transportability is the way to go. And lock it down with strong passwords to use it.

i8's bleh , i9's !!

oh and check out the chipsets , and make sure the mother board has 4 channels

You want motherboard 2x 4 memory banks
Not 2x2 or 2x3..

2x4 means you slap in 4x32GB for 128 on 4 channels
MORE cpu to memory bandwith.

Especially problematic on laptops.. they may have the chip, they may have the Iwhatever core
IF the memory channels aren't there, it will run slower then the desktop.


To give you an idea, my main pc is from 2008, a dell studio xps with a core i7
Then it was a super deal, because it had 2x3 slots, 3 channels

most core i7's sold from 2008 till 2014 only had 2 channels.. they were all pigs.
This 11 year old machine still works fine for most games and what not.
Sure i upgraded it's videocard, and raid 0'ed 3 SSD's for hdd throughput

JYL, I had the same sorts of questions when my son Zack studied engineering. From my experience the incoming freshman won't be working with hard hitting programs/files from the start. Half or more of their workload will be G.E. courses required for a 4 year. I would send him to school with what he currently has, or something pretty basic but functional, and let him absorb the program and ask the Junior/Senior folks in the program what they use. Zack studied aeronautical engineering at ISU and frankly most of the computer intensive work was done in labs that were all kitted out with needed hardware. I'm fairly skeptical that college undergrad students are going to be messing around with file sizes that challenge a typical mid range performance computer. YMMV.

My son went with a 3 year old MacBook pro 13", easy to carry around the campus and enough to run programs he used. Reality is that for lots of current college work students use Google Drive or similar drop box setup to share files and/or submit coursework for grading to professors.

A 17" screen is overkill. Go with the 15".

Justification: I recently was in the market for a laptop and thought I NEEDED a 17". Largely because I wanted the 10 key with the keyboard. I'm taking some graduate classes and bringing the 15" I went with (Dell XPS9575) is nearly too bulky. We sit at work tables of 5-6 students and laptop plus notebook plus textbook gets really crowded.

Get the 15" and a docking station for the dorm.

Other specs, SSD is the way to go. For more storage USB-C or thunderbolt external drive.
Also, shop for something where the RAM is either upgradeable or maxed.

You don't need a workstation for Autocad or Rhino or PS, That being said Used ebay workstation DELL's are an amazing deal for a very durable computer.

SSD is a must, a 2nd large HD is nice, most any good video card, even gaming cards will eat most 3d/2d graphic software.

I like 15" for portability and a large monitor for when I need to get to work.

I have a P52 as my work laptop. It is a tank, you feel it when you are carrying it around. Battery life is pretty good, three hours if I am not beating on it too hard. But, and it is a huge but, the power supply is 170w, weighs over a pound and is almost the size of an actual brick.

https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/accessories-and-monitors/chargers-and-batteries/chargers/PWR-ADP-BO-TP-170W-AC-Adapter-slim-tip/p/4X20E50574

However, the screen is good, and the 10 key is really nice. The thunderbolt docking solution is terrible, I would avoid it if you can.

Our son went to school with his used MacBook Pro for the first two years. Then built a monster PC for the heavy lifting in his dorm room the last two years.

Hmm, 3 hours battery life would be pretty inconvenient for him on campus. I'm reading the 4K screen hurts battery life, do you have that or the standard screen. That charger is ridiculous!

Have you found an alternative to the Thunderbolt docking station? Seems a docking station of some sort is needed to conveniently use external monitors?

I have the standard screen. I just finished charging it, and if I drop it to best battery savings, it goes up to six hours. I can't run sql server and few other things I usually do, but I can do the basics.

The laptop does have a hdmi port and a mini display port, not sure if you can use them at the same time, but that would give some output. There are two thunderbolt ports also, so there might be a passive aftermarket dock, I haven't looked. The lenovo thunderbolt dock not only uses the 170w brick, it also needs another 85 or 95w supply plugged in also.

Overall, this is a nice laptop, a great desktop replacement if you only need to move occasionally. I can tell you I am tired of dragging this thing through airports. You are not sneaking this through customs. I wouldn't want to daily lug this thing.

How about getting him a lightweight laptop and then a more powerful desktop/laptop that stays in his room? When he is in class, he just remotes into the machine in his room, does whatever he needs to do, and if something happens to the lightweight laptop, he doesn't lose anything because it is all on the machine in his room.

Ok, the lighter laptop now + later a desktop makes sense. Ordered the P1 with the highest CPU and GPU choices (i7 6-core 2.60GHz and Quadro P2000 4GB), 32GB RAM/other slot empty, 512GB SSD/other slot empty, standard screen. I figure if he stays in architecture this plus a large external monitor can serve him for awhile, there's still upgrade headroom for RAM (to 32GB + 32GB) and SSD (to 512GB + 1TB), and we can add a desktop workstation in 2 years if needed. If he changes fields then who knows. Just a bit over $2K, before I added on-site repair and spill/fall insurance (because, college kid). Thanks everyone for the help!

Edit: well, I tried to. My online purchase didn't go through. Trying again today

Edit: Not sure why it takes 5 online attempts, 3 chats, and a phone call w/ Lenovo to buy a laptop through their online site. There is a reason why Amazon is taking over retail, and its called being competent.

Sounds great! Lots of processing power.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3430678/you-can-finally-buy-a-10th-gen-laptop-dells-xps-13-2-in-1-hits-the-shelves.html


-that is a brutal major too... does he know that?

He's been told many times, including by the fifth year UO architecture student currently living with us. Not sure he's hearing it.

But - I've also told him repeatedly the realities of modern development are that the architect often has little control over the major features of the project, and is stuck putting cheap lipstick on a pig. I've told him to do a business minor and intern a couple summers in a real estate development firm, so that he can at least learn the developers' language and mindset, and potentially be more of a design-build type. Didn't think he was hearing that either. To my surprise, for his elective in his first term, he chose Introduction to Business.

Get a MacBook Air for reports and carrying around and a desktop with a real monitor for the heavy lifting.

He's got an old Air - the 11" - for other classes!

it's good that he took some of your advice instead of relying entirely on his peer group

maybe he can find some 3rd, 4th, 5th yr. Arch. students to talk to about the laptop and the career

- there are tons of busted Arch. majors around town, also unemployed grads. AND there are 2 employed ones on my block, plus an employed one who had a 911 in town

I may be able to get an Emeritus Professor to talk to him - LMK - I usually see him on Friday afternoons while drinking truth serum