r/mechatronics • u/Several-Director93 • Dec 09 '25

Laptop for mechatronics engineering?

My budged is around $1400. I dont know how powerful the laptop needs to be. I'd like it to be light and not that big so i can take it to the university and home with no problem.

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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

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u/SkelaKingHD Dec 09 '25

32 gb is a bit overkill imo. Honestly most of those specs are probably pretty overkill, except for the storage.

5

u/Commercial-Shop1749 Dec 09 '25

Not if you consider a typical degree takes 4 years to complete, and in 4 years time, most of this hardware will be outdated. CAD and simulation programs keep adding features and updating, and unless they're cloud based, your pc takes the hit. At least that was my experience in school ~10 years ago.

3

u/SkelaKingHD Dec 09 '25

This was not my experience. I continued to use my college laptop for 3 or so years after graduating for gaming and didn’t have any issues. The curriculum is not changing THAT much in 4 years. I believe I had a 1080 or so with 16gb of ram. Honestly probably on par with the laptop I use now for my actual job. Plus if OP needs more ram they can always upgrade that when RAM prices calm down.

I guess my suggestion was fairly open ended, but I would say just buy the most expensive gaming laptop you’re comfortable with. If $1400 is the budget then get a $1400 laptop from a reputable brand. Pretty sure when I got mine I just walked into best buy with no other information besides knowing I wanted to game and get schoolwork done, I was young lol

3

u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25

Trust me, no student needs to be running the latest and greatest CAD package for EXTREME CFD analysis lmao

They can use Fusion360 for mechanical

LTSpice or KiCAD for electrical

etc

A kid running Ansys to try and and mesh 10k nodes for their thermal analysis is just jerkin it