engineering student laptop rec.

[rebith75]

Hi, I am an engineering student that does no gaming and I am in the market for a new laptop and have some options im sort of confused about the differences. one has 1 gig dual channel and core duo 2300 1.66 ghz 2mb cache the other is just a pentium m 1.73 with 1gb shared ram the runs at slow fsb (??). I was wondering if the first would be overkill for what I am doing (no gaming, general applications, some big engr applications), the difference is about 400 dollars in the two, what would you guys suggest, thanks

 

[Knavish]

I'm not sure what branch of engineering you're in, but even as an EE (grad student) I've had to use a CAD program to make drawings for a machine shop / rapid prototyping. I'm a big fan of getting ANY kind of non-integrated video chip in a laptop. Nvidia or ATI -- just don't get the Intel integrated "extreme" graphics or whatever they call it now. You don't need to get the really high end moble graphics chip -- I've got a 32MB Geforce2Go in an old P3-1Ghz and it runs Solidworks better than my friend's P4-3.2Ghz laptop with interated graphics.

It's not just for gamers -- if you're planning on upgrading in the future, intel integrated graphics is not compatable with the new Vista user interface.

Also, I'd be tempted by the core duo if you have the money to spare. It's not necessary, but if you're running some big engineering app (like Matlab) and it's crunching on some numbers for a while, the 2nd core will let you surf the web / check email / IM without slowing down your work. If you just have a single processor, you have to share it between all your programs.

-Knavish

 

[ProviaFan]

Only to echo what Knavish said already... Discrete (aka non-integrated) graphics are an absolute must. Dual core is a very good idea if your budget supports it. I don't know about MATLAB, but Mathematica now supports multi processor systems, so you could actually see quite a performance increase in some software on a dual core CPU, as well as vastly improved multitasking.

 

[alimoalem]

u say the first is $400 more but how much are they to begin with? cause going from $400 to $800 is a much bigger jump than from $1000 to $1400. if you have the money, i think the 1st laptop is much better.