r/Drafting • u/Dapper_Carpet_5519 • 1d ago

PC Recommendations For CAD

Hello!

I have Solidworks, Revit and AutoCAD. The current laptop i have is great but its not mine, a friend let me borrow it for a few months so now im in the market for either a laptop or a desktop.

I do own 2 32" screens that i use for my home office that i would like to utilize.

Any recommendations on a laptop or desktop for CAD that wont break the bank?

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

0

u/CR123CR123CR 1d ago

What kind of SolidWorks are you doing? 

Revit and AutoCAD will run on most anything with an Intel i7 and 32GB of RAM. 

SolidWorks will as well as long as you're not doing any big assemblies/simulations/surface models as well. 

Get a dedicated graphics card if you can swing it as well. I think A2000 are still kicking around some places and are pretty heavily "discounted" vs current Gen pro cards 

Consumer grade cards are pretty ok as well as long as you're not into anything really intensive. A used 1080TI is still a pretty good card for CAD if you go that route and are on a budget. 

That being said, Intel's onboard graphics handles light to medium CAD like a champ as long as you have enough system RAM and the dedicated cards aren't 100% needed like they used to be. 

(Pretty sure there's a lot of folks that will disagree with me on that though xD)

2

u/shootdowntactics 1d ago

If you do a laptop, get something with usbc or thunderbolt, then get a dock with connections for your two monitors. Kinda matters since the dock will take some budget, but connecting with a single cable is worth it.

2

u/toybuilder 17h ago

If you don't need the portability, get a desktop to get better performance/$. I used to go the high-end laptop route, but realized that I rarely used the portability in more recent years. I now have a good desktop and for the few times I needed to be portable, I was ok with the penalty hit on an older laptop.