mobile workstation or ......

[whburling]

I may be looking for an impossible product.

If you have any suggestions, I welcome them.

I am an inventor who sketches a great deal and then analyzes the damn things to death.

I primarily use excel, word, and scrivener. I am increasingly using photoshop and autocad. I program in many languages to assess performance. I sketch (on paper) ideas a great deal which, unfortunately leads to considerable time spent in managing paper.

I thought a mobile workstation with pressure sensitive screen would be the answer, but there is no such beast other than surface book with performance base..I suspect I can not use touch sensitive screens as they tend to not be palm rejectable.

I was looking for a high end cpu and gpu. cpu like i7-7000HQ or xeon m1505 was going to buy cheap internal drive and replace with a quality ssd pcie3 X4 nvme with appropriate technology(right NAND technology). i wanted to also chose my ram and be able to put in 32 gb of at least 2400hz .ddr4? do they make ddr5 yet?
gpu would prefer a quadro m2200 or equivalent.

if i want to sketch then i need to be able to fold the screen flat.

as i type this out i am beginning to realize i need two machines. maybe one powerfhouse laptop and one sketching tool.

does a dell precision 7720 sound right (with me buying the ssd and ram) or do you guys recommend something else which offers power and reliability. i dn't need "name" but i do need pwr and reliabkility.

ms surfacebook with performance base sounded good but when i heard they could put in a lesser quality ssd technology, it makes me wonder what other poor tradeoffs they might have made. i am also worried about reliability.

i welcome all ideas. i am not married to any. Your insights will be valued.

bil

 

[XavierMace]

If you're looking at laptops for portability reasons, I'd ask if you've tried carrying around a 7720 or similar. Personally I've never found a 17" laptop I'd actually want to carry around. Certainly not one I'd want to hold in a way to sketch on while standing.

From a purely sketching point of view I've heard (no actual experience though) that the iPad Pro + Apple Pencil actually make a good drawing/sketching machine. It would certainly be cheaper and far more portable than a mobile workstation. My thinking would be do quick sketches/rough ideas/etc on the tablet, then move to a desktop when it comes time to actually design it in CAD and what not.

 

[whburling]

If you're looking at laptops for portability reasons, I'd ask if you've tried carrying around a 7720 or similar. Personally I've never found a 17" laptop I'd actually want to carry around. Certainly not one I'd want to hold in a way to sketch on while standing.

From a purely sketching point of view I've heard (no actual experience though) that the iPad Pro + Apple Pencil actually make a good drawing/sketching machine. It would certainly be cheaper and far more portable than a mobile workstation. My thinking would be do quick sketches/rough ideas/etc on the tablet, then move to a desktop when it comes time to actually design it in CAD and what not.

Ok....you are helping me to see something. sketching must be done on a different machine. period. ipad pro + apple pencil sounds just fine.

I am sold on a smaller machine. i like 15" could go to 13+" the lower number makes excel spreadsheets difficult to read.

i know i can get more performance for the buck with a desktop which I can build and hence get exactly what I want.

But i find that tend to go out with my current old laptop and within my home I like to switch from a straight back chair to a lazy boy like thingie.

mmmm. maybe a new desktop and use the old laptop for the occasional outside ventures and use a hospital desk for my desktop so that i can use it in either chair.

does that sound more realistic to you?

I am 72, if that means anything to this conversation.

 

[XavierMace]

You can get Office on iOS. Might be worth going to a local Apple Store (if there's one in your area) and try playing around with the 12.9" iPad Pro. See if there's any scaling/accessibility options that could make everything larger if needed. If you could work with the screensize, an iPad Pro with a keyboard case might eliminate the need for the laptop at all. Unless you were needing Autocad on the portable. For all I know, there could be an iPad version of that these days.

I've got both a laptop and a tablet in my work bag and it drives me crazy. If I could reduce it to 1 device, I would.

 

[Valantar]

If you have the money for it (which it sounds like from what you're asking for), look into Wacom's Cintiq pen displays. They have portable versions allowing you to give any laptop a high quality, high resolution, color calibrated touch display with a pressure sensitive active digitizer pen (with a good selection of different pens for different uses) with virtually no input lag. They're used by professional animators, designers and the like, and are generally considered to be the best there is for pen input. And they pair with pretty much any laptop (or desktop).

 

[Andrew Carnegie]

There are actually no workstation laptops with touchscreen display and Microsoft Surfacebook isn't a reliable machine for intensive tasks such as CAD!
I would recommend you to buy the workstation laptop and a good graphics tablet to do your designing works on it. Your laptop will provide the perfect performance to get all your works done and the graphics tablet will help you with designing.

The Best Workstation laptop will cost you around $2500 and the best graphics tablet from Wacom (Best Brand) will cost you around $800.
You can also opt for gaming laptops which will significantly reduce the cost but as you're going to do CAD work on your laptop, I would recommend you to buy the workstation laptop with Intel Xeon or AMD FX CPU and NVidia Quadro or AMD Fire Pro GPU. These CPUs and GPUs are recommended by the AutoCAD and SOLIDWORKS on their websites to run their software. So, definitely it would be better to go with the workstation config.

You can refer LaptopUnderBudget's article on CAD laptops which has some of the best workstation laptops listed and refer this article to choose the best pen display tablet for your CAD and designing workstation rig.

I personally like the Lenovo Thinkpad P50 workstation laptop ($1742) and the Wacom Cintiq 13HD tablet ($799). Both of them provides best value for the price.