Laptop for inDesign, AutoCAD, Photoshop < $1000

Lzkdy on 15/10/2016 - 08:29

Well now another laptop question. But we missed some good deals before. my girlfriend is looking to get a laptop for her design work (casual). It has to support indesign, autocad, photoshop, illustrator, and the likes. By the looks of it she needs at least 8gb ram with a dedicated graphics card of 2gb. She told me she doesn't mind the SSD or HDD as she did some research before that for archi work using HDD is slow but once it boots up m, you'd rely on the HDD storage size more. Not sure if you will agree to that.

She needs it in the next 2 weeks (which is why we're skipling on the recent lenovo deal e470). Right now we're having a look at the good guys ebay site but if there'/ any suggestions you guys have re: deals right now, we're all ears.

Cheers!

Computing

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Lacerta on 15/10/2016 - 09:43

+1

If she is serious about design work, then your girlfriend should probably be looking at A. Spending more than $1000 on a laptop, or better yet B. Getting a desktop.

Good luck with the search.
ACTGBilly on 15/10/2016 - 09:48

+1

Good Morning,

To complement the comment above. $1000 is a decent starting point. Your thoughts on specs are about right :) HDD/SSD shouldn't make much difference except for app loading times.

To speed things up with the CAD/Photoshop etc it's all about the CPU. Make sure that the laptop has the best i7 that you can afford. 16GB RAM (upgradeable later to that, perhaps?) will help also.

Best of luck,
G
- ACTGBilly on 15/10/2016 - 09:50
  
  PS a crappy screen is going to drive her mad… so splash out for a laptop with a decent one or be prepared to use an external monitor when possible. Cheers
- alvian on 15/10/2016 - 11:11
  
  Graphics acceleration is definitely not all about the CPU. If the GPU isn't compatible then advanced features will not be enabled or accelerated. For examples,
  
  For Photoshop: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cc-gpu-card-f…
  
  For Illustrator: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/system-requirements.html…
  
  For AutoCAD 2016 Large Datasets, Point Clouds, and 3D Modeling: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooti…
[Deactivated] on 15/10/2016 - 09:51

Why would you buy a computer where the software costs more than the hardware?
- silverrat23 on 15/10/2016 - 11:38
  
  I imagine she'll be using the educational versions of the software as they're free.
klaw81 on 17/10/2016 - 22:37

You really need a quad-core CPU and a half-decent GPU for those applications, but your budget is a bit low.

Your best best is to look out for deals on the best known "budget" gaming laptops, such as the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 and Acer Aspire Nitro - both of these have 960M GPUs and normal retail is around $1300 but you can find them cheaper when discounted, or 2nd-hand.

Example: http://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/the-gap/laptops/dell-inspiron…

Laptop for inDesign, AutoCAD, Photoshop < $1000

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