Laptop for architecture student?

[SleepyKat]

Dd is adamant she needs a new laptop for her degree course. Not sure why as she has an expensive PC but she reckons she will need to be able to take her own laptop into uni do to work on it in the studios.

Anyone any idea of what spec she might need, and/or what software she will need to run on it? She’s seen one for £300 and I can’t believe it will be up to the job.....the spec says it can’t run photoshop and I’d have thought that architecture software would be just as complicated.

I graduated a few years ago and everyone had a laptop.

It was so much easier for taking notes in class, working in different rooms and for when I needed to work at the library at busy times.

That'll be perfectly adequate for her needs, but what resolution is the screen? 1920x1080? Also, compare weights if she's carrying it around a lot!

Screen is 1920x1080, is that ok?

Pc specialist don’t appear to say what the weights are.

Yes, perfect screen res.

I'd ask them about the weight, if I were you, as some gaming (or in this case, "mobile workstation") spec laptops can be right heavy beasts.

Direct x is a complete rd herring. All laptops run direct x. It's software and not hardware. It's primary purpose is to translate what the laptop or pc wants to appear on the screen into meaningful pixels. Amy laptop with windows 10 and a dedicated graphics card and costing £700+ will do direct X. Forget that as a comparator. No idea if you can PM me but as the global head of IT for Sky a couple of years ago I can probably help you.

That laptop you were quoted for isn’t as good because the graphics card is significantly worse- 1050’s are far inferior to 1660’s. There’s nearly a 100% performance boost between them, and compares to a 2060 it’s an embarrassingly old card.

That said- it’s coming with an i9, which is a powerful cpu for the raw calculations, but for rendering a better graphics card is worth more.

Thanks, will stick with the AO one then.

DirectX isn't a complete red herring. It points you to presumably requring a windows laptop (although you could boot camp a mac). And suggests at least some level of hardware acceleration is recommended.

I'd be curious if the hardware is mainly for accelerating certain rendering could you get away with a more thin/light laptop for notes/etc and attach an egpu via USB-C for when needing the extra oomph?

I don't disagree re DirectX but for a windows laptop which I understood was a requirement, it's part of the operating system now - although many graphics drivers have it included as well. totally agree that it is not required for Apple laptops as they are architected to much tighter standards and don't need middleware to handle certain / most graphics functions. I always thought OpenGL was better standard but not something you see much now - at least not explicitly. Anyway... I'm going off tangent OP. Either of the specs should do the job but personally I always think of AO for white goods and laptops don't really fit into that category and can need specialist support.

I can buy the AO laptop direct from Asus, on a 48 month interest free thing as well which is appealing. And cuts out the whites good specialist middle man I guess.

In which case go for it. If I'm building a desktop PC from scratch I almost always buy ASUS parts (motherboard, their own version of an NVidia graphics card and similar where they exist). Well respected company in my view. Don't forget the antivirus.

Agree with mssmith- every desktop I’ve built has had an asus or asrock MB- they’re good quality.

DS is taking his PC and some memory sticks. He already has a couple of programmes installed. No way would a lap top do what he has been doing for the last couple of years.