Topic Title

If one were to buy a new computer, laptop to be specific, what features would one look for to be able to run SketchUP as well as AutoCAD and DataCAD effectively? Plus some nice games like the Myst series.
General question I know but I am trying to help a friend.

I'm pretty sure Neil will have a good response for this, but heres my 2 cents:

Games tend to be the most power hungry application for computers, So any laptop capable of running graphics intensive games (like Myst) should run fine for DataCad and Sketchup (I don't know anything about Autocad requirements).There are a couple of companys that have developed laptops designed for gamers, Dell now has a series for games as wellas Alienware (do a google for them).

Features I would look for, lots of ram - 1 Gb at least, decent processor, (I am partial to AMD but Pentium M are good too), Sketchup plays best with Nvidia cards (according to them), but I use a laptop with an ATI 9600 and I have had no problems. You also need a good size hard drive for all thos applications, probably 120 gb or so minimum. Of course you will want a DVD burner, and I would suggest at least a 15.4" wide format screen and maybe a 17" if you can swing it.

Battery life will be an issue, better get a spare one.

Last thing will be a backpack to carry this monster around with, cause its going to be heavy!

Man, Ailien ware has some smokin' computers.
What is with the liquid cooled system? Pretty soon they will need Prestone.

The liquid cooled are for those intense online gamers. It helps keep the computer cool, helping them run fast or so I have been told. As for your computer question, if you are getting a laptop, make sure it has a seperate video card, not intigrated. The other thing with laptops, make sure you get everything you want. They are extremely hard to upgrade, with the expection of memory. Other than that follow the tips from RPadgett, all of his suggestions are accerate.

Hi Eric,

The main thing is to get a good OpenGL video "card" for SketchUp. They recommend nVidia over ATi. I would get 1GB of RAM, and hopefully have a slot left open for a future upgrade.

Myst is pretty tame, as far as hardware goes, I think.

The best laptop CPU's for efficiency (IE good computing power vs battery use) is the Pentium M (not the Pentium 4M they are very different!), followed by the Athlon 64 Mobile.

Are you actually going to use it on it battery very much, or just as a portable computer, and plug it into AC power? Are you going to "dock" it for a majority of the time, with a large external monitor, or are you going to depend wholly on the laptop screen?

We just purchased a Dell Latitude D810 with 1.73GHz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, and 15.4WUXGA display. Since this system is to be used in a variety of locations and we didn't want to hook it up to an external monitor, display issues were important. 1920x1200 @ 32 bit color and amazing off-axis visibility make this a winner.

If display issues are important, don't cheap-out on screen options.

Thanks guys.
Neil, this info is for a friend so I cannot answer your questions directly. I will pass this on though.
Thanks again

Here's a thread on the Sketchup forum that may help, too:

http://www.sketchup.com/forum/read.php? ... 08&t=61608