Laptop for Engineering School

I'm a big fan of the quality of Dell laptops, I've owned many different brands over the years, and have been happiest with Dell. I bought my wife an ASUS laptop last year, and have no complaints about it either.

As far as an optical drive goes, I wouldn't worry about that. Worst case scenario spend $20 and get a USB optical drive if you need one.

Radeon28 said:

If you want to go budget you can get a cheap little Dell Latitude with an i5, 4Gb RAM, and a 15" screen for cheap.

If you want to treat yourself get something nice like an ASUS with similar specs and an SSD.

Final thoughts, most of your engineering software will be distributed through CDs, so unless you are good at making .ISO files and thumb driving them, I would recommend getting something with a CD Drive (ultrabooks don't have CD Drives). Also, don't get a laptop with a huge internal HDD, but something like a western digital passport; you will like it because engineers trade files around A LOT.

Click to expand...

Haswell hd4000 or a8 Kaveri . Should be enough right ?

Since you still havent given a price range

400$>
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA42J1AH6282


800$ ->
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834313582

994$ ->
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231333

1500$-> this is pretty similar to the 994$ one, just factory fresh.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152477




Wellp radeons be cheaper.


450$, 8gb, 1tb, amd A8, and radeon 8510G
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834257888

and for
750$, this is kind of a beastly machine. i7, 6770m, 1.5tb. The 6770 with a 900p resolution screen will probably give you pretty decent fps on a lot of things.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834158589

I did my BS and MS in EE, and I used a somewhat outdated Dell laptop with no issues. Most of the engineering stuff you'll be doing will be on lab computers anyways, since the software is outrageously expensive, but they give steep discounts to educators when software is used in the institution itself (not at students' homes). Stuff you'll do at home are lab reports and writeups and other stuff that's not computationally intensive.

The only thing I ever used on my personal laptop that was somewhat taxing is Matlab. For that, a speedy CPU and decent RAM are the most helpful. That being said, I never had a script that took more than a few seconds to run until I hit grad school, and for that stuff, C/C++ should really be used in its place.

TL;DR - you don't really need to get something specifically for engineering

I was thinking something along the lines of http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200482&pf_rd_i=507846

The ssd would be nice for boot times and i can always upgrade that as long as its a msata (which it should be). Also I saw that the ram is only 4GB but that should be upgradable when I need to.

I have to agree with what most people here have said. I'm currently at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for my second semester of Computer Engineering and I have my main desktop for large projects that need to be done with a full keyboard and mouse (as well as blowing off steam with a game of BF4). I spent ~$225 at the beginning of the year to buy a used laptop from the classifieds here. It's a dual-core with HT (i3 cpu), 8gb of 1333 ram, Nvidia 330M graphics and a 320gb hard drive. It has been nothing but flawless for me. I have it dual-booted with Ubuntu 12.04LTS and it allows me to work on homework assignments and browse normally from within Windows, but I can do all of our subversion and coding assignments from home using my Ubuntu partition.

So I guess the main point I'm trying to make is this: Don't be afraid to buy used. As long as it has been taken care of, and you continue to take care of it, there is no reason a laptop can't last you at least 4 years of solid use. Also, don't break the budget and buy the first one you see. I looked around for a few months before I found what I wanted, and I have no regrets with my purchase.

Also, best of luck getting into engineering. Thus far, it's been super cool and I've already learned much more than I expected after 1 semester.

You could always do a shoe box build

Since I'm getting the vibe that you have to buy this laptop my best advice would be find something that fits your needs and then add 20% more and see what you can get. This process, called "overbuying", allows you to plan for that future in the not so distant present. (read the important stuff below)

Take a look at my two rigs below. I personally feel, even though I'm an electrical engineer, that they are both overkill. I use these for all the other stuff I like to do such as gaming, photoshop editing (on an AMD yes), Hackintoshing (also on an AMD (that was fun)), music creation, and a few others such as maintaining a constant basis for which to access all of my stuff off of.

As far as student needs go, if you only want/need a laptop then find something with low voltage parts, because that is beneficial in a campus where everybody will be fighting for that one plug to do their last minute lab report that you might have to do also because you were sick and ect. That will be the death of you.

I don't use SSD's... yet. The problem is the long amount of time you'll be writing to your SSD before you get into the critical, have to make an A+ on, stuff. After two years (and let's face it, I'm in my second year in EE and have yet to take a full on EE course) of writing to that SSD in might become bad. This is because those SSD's have a limited amount of writes in them before they fail.

NOT SO IMPORTANT - read at your own pleasure
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VERY IMPORTANT - If you want an answer read here! (OMG it is so dang long)

If you're thinking on a budget, then think AMD and their Kaveri. Not for compute performance but for graphical power, as you'll be using that, if anything at all, for EE. It also allows you to do some light gaming such as Civ V and Titan Quest because the on board graphics can handle it.

If you're thinking anything else then as a student this is what I'd do. Find some "good looking" laptops and look at their specs, write them down on paper exactly (including the model number of the Laptop) and then go to notebookcheck.net and the many other tools that benchmark the various parts. Notebookchek is helpful with the actual reviews themselves because that's what they do for a living. Next, if you must have an SSD (or anything else really) get a backup drive, preferably NOT cloud based. This will allow you to have the data physically in your hand and not have to worry about the bad campus wifi (I have 1 MB/s and half the time it's not even on ).

After looking at the reviews of the laptop online, see if you can locate them in a store somewhere and test it out. All metal construction usually means high quality, but if you've read those reviews then you shouldn't need to worry about what's inside (cuz ya already knows). Mess around with it, learn how Windows 8 works with it. Maybe replace with 7? Ubuntu (or your favorite linux distro)? Maybe Hackintosh it? Just buy a Mac? (I'm not advocating Mac is Better than the rest. I work on AMD stuff!) Learn how that laptop works and does it suit your needs as the physical laptop. How heavy does it weigh? What kind of keyboard layout is it? Does the keyboard feel good? Trackpad responsiveness and multifinger gestures? Screen size? Glossy or Matte? Fingerprints? Battery life? What adapter specs come with it? Is the battery embedded? Can you upgrade it? How hot under load? Does it throttle under load? Sound test (hint: it'll suck). I/O ports (yes, VGA ports are very. damn. handy.)

After you've found that "magic" laptop, see where it is the cheapest. Online usually unless you are frequent with other stores that have rewards. You have an entire half year before this thing'll be needed and so it's best to wait until you absolutely have to have it or it is on sale.

Take a break... Good? Come back because now you're going to need, what I'd call, a lifesaver.

Anker has a 20000mah external battery out there on Amazon. It can charge your laptop provided it has a 12V, 15V, or 19V adapter for your laptop. I can't stress this enough: This thing is a bloody lifesaver. Not only can it charge your phone/tablet on the go, but return to that wall plug situation up above (the not so important stuff). Unfortunately, that will happen (if not consider yourself lucky and with good planning). This is where that battery comes in as it'll give an extra life and possibly save that A+ you've been slaving to keep.

Anything else is completely at your own disclosure because as a brand new student, knowing what I know now, I'd do what's up above. Notice I didn't touch specs once with the exception of AMD's Kaveri. It's what is most comfortable to you the guy who'll, no doubt, have to lug that thing to class, use it in class, use it outside of class, watch your netfilx on, skype your mother on, and make sure it is your second best friend because you now have a laptop that will last you four (if not more) years. Seriously.

Okay, rant over.

I can pretty much jive with that. Don't look too deep into the specifications, but if you find a super comfortable laptop that would be perfect to carry around campus, but it has a dual core, some poor integrated graphics and 2gb of ram, you might want to think twice. Comfort and ease of use are very important, but you do want this laptop to function is a usable computer for the next 4 years.

That only becomes an issue if he/she buys used. Stay away from terms such as celeron, pentium, A4, A6. Everything else is pretty much okay with 4GB of ram and since you're looking to upgrade that, it should also be fine.

You'll definitely want more than 4GB if you're going to be working with mixed architecture (e.g. Android and FPGA) projects. IDEs tend to use lots of RAM, especially the more advanced ones. Even more so if you want to use VMs. 8GB should be plenty, but having more can't hurt.

If you're going to do FPGAs (you probably will!), get as much CPU as you can afford. The Xilinx tools are CPU heavy. Microcontroller IDEs will run fine on a low end CPU if that's all you have.

Get a nice GPU if you plan on using it as your LAN party machine or doing CUDA (which is really more for the computer science side of things), otherwise integrated works fine. Beware that it's expensive (i.e. usually replacing the whole machine) to upgrade a GPU later so buy a good one from the start if you think you might need it.

On not having enough outlets, the university labs I have worked in had plenty of outlets to go around. In the off chance it doesn't, a cheap power strip fixes that. Just bring the strip and encourage sharing.

I plan on just making sure that the RAM is upgradable at least so i can just drop in an upgrade if i need.

As for the CPU would you guys say that i will greatly benefit from more cores or should a better single threaded performance be more important.

And i never thought of bringing a power strip but i could see it coming in handy for many things.

In the long run, more threads. If you're just doing word docs for papers and lab reports you won't need much of anything. But if you went gaming or something that requires fairly demanding graphics work (Photoshop, CAD softwares) then you're going to want the graphics performance as well.

Anything recent from AMD or Intel from A8 and i3 up will do you justice in Undergrad. Intel usually has the better singlethreaded whereas AMD tends to have better graphical performance and a slight edge, if any, on multithreaded applications. As for what you need it's anyone's guess except your own because we've listed what you will be using it for and you might as well find something that you want to do with it too.

You're also better off just maxing out the RAM at purchase so that you don't need to get in there. In my experience repairing laptops it is a pain in the butt to disassemble every little part of your computer only to find out that the ram is soldered to the mobo and you just voided your warranty.

Specs are just part of the equation, you need to know how it feels in your hands and how to use that specific computer because each one feels different. You don't want to buy a highly speced pc only to find out that is heavy as f*ck (and if it is highly speced it usually is!) and it's trackpad sucks and you need to carry around an external mouse for the remainder of it's life, or that it has a horrible screen that is so highly washed the green appears yellow. This thing is going to be your life for the next four+ years and you don't want to live with it, you need to live for it.

Electrical engineers pretty much all have to do some embedded programming nowadays. You don't need anything fancy to do small microcontrollers, but FPGA development environments are pretty CPU intensive.

Just got a Comp. Engineering degree, and as far as programming microcontrollers and such went, I didn't need much. I mean, I used my X220 which has an i5 2520m and stock had 6GB ram, and even that was over kill. As long as the laptop had a port to plug the microcontroller in, it was good. FPGA stuff was a little more intense, but we got total overnight access to the labs which had workstations with higher end Xeons for that. More than anything, it depends on what you're programming for and what IDEs you're using.

I also don't know if anyone went over this, but to me, screen resolution is important. My X220 has a 1366x768 screen, and I wish it was higher. I found with a lot of things, screen space is important, especially with class work (having the assignment open, whatever you're working on, and maybe some notes open all at once). A lot of IDEs take up a lot of screen realestate for toolbars, debugging windows, etc., and having a tiny 400x250 window to actually do any coding is frustrating. A higher resolution screen may also help if you're doing actual circuit design, such as Eagle.

One thing ZeypherUndellus said that I don't fully agree with is a good amount of laptops do NOT have ram soldered directly to the board and accessing the DIMMs is fairly easy. Most have a compartment on the bottom with access to the ram, worst case one of the DIMMs would be under the keyboard. The only ones that might be a problem are ultraslim/"ultrabooks" style laptops, where that extra millimeter or two for the actual socket simply had to go. But if you type most laptops into google, there should be some break down pics somewhere which should show if the ram is soldered. I've worked at the IT department while in college, and I can safely say that HPs, Dells, Lenovos, whatever, as long as it wasn't something funky, accessing the basic internals (ram, HDD/SSD, in some cases the wifi cards, etc.) was pretty basic. Also, my X220 has an SSD, it's probably going on about 2 years now, and it still works fine. If you're worried about normal wear and tear, just remember, backing stuff up is important, and should be done anyway. I had several back ups of all my course work - a copy on my flashdrive that I always had on me, a copy on my external HDD in my dorm room, a copy on my NAS, and a copy on dropbox, which synced to the internal drive on my desktop and laptop.

@freakdiablo
Yeah, the RAM. It's on and off when that statement is true. But why even bother with it? If you have the budget just max it out now.

Screen res isn't as important to me because that is what I use my desktop for and then second screen it, and one can usually find uberpowered computers in the labs that have that stuff.

I will be checking to make sure that the ram is upgradable anyways to be sure (and also how easy it is to add in the sticks).

And i can see how i could use the extra res, or maybe i will set up a dual monitor in my room so i can multitask with that easily.

The PCs available in the Texas A&M engineering labs (at least when I took classes there) were pretty disappointing. They were mostly old P4s while my laptop (at the time) was a nice Core 2 Duo with Nvidia graphics.

Also, their "Cepheid Variable" club (Sci-Fi, gaming, and computer science club) was "bring your own stuff". I remember working on some code for senior design that involved dsPIC and Android (digital power meter that interfaces to Android over the network) and with both the dsPIC and Android IDEs open along with a few PDFs, 4GB was starting to run low. (Still got some very good advice from the more experienced programmers in the club and everything worked as expected for the demo...)

I highly recommend Dell as they're built very well and last a long time. Avoid HP as they're infamous for early breakdowns.