topic Please recommend me good notebooks as a student in Installation & update

Please recommend me good notebooks as a student

bxglarka — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 20:57:00 GMT

Hi everyone! 🙂

I'm a fourth year architect student in Hungary. I need a new laptop but extremely lost. I tried reading the subreddit's discussions about laptops but I'm still confused. Please help!

My current laptop is ASUS Vivobook S15 S530. It crashes when I use Archicad and do rendering and is basically super slow.

https://www.asus.com/laptops/for-home/vivobook/vivobook-s15-s530/techspec/

Its properties:

- CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8265U (1.60 GHz) (6M Cache, up to 3.9 GHz, 4 cores)

- GPU: NIVIDIA GeForce MX150

- Memory: 8 GB

- 1 TB storage

I'm looking for az upgrade. I mostly use Archicad, Sketchup, Photoshop and Indesign and sometimes do rendering.

My (i guess very little) expectations:

- CPU: Intel i5 or i7 or Ryzen 5 or 7 (I think these are within my budget)

- GPU: would be good if I can get an NVIDIA

- Memory: at least 16 GB

- Storage: at least 512 GB

My budget is $1000 (400 000 Ft).

Could you recommend me some models or even good CPUs or GPUs? Which aspects should I focus on? Which models/CPUs/GPUs should I avoid?

Thanks for the help!!

Re: Please recommend me good notebooks as a student

Ville — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:56:06 GMT

Hello!

Unfortunately 1k€ is too little budget for "professional" Laptop, in my opinion. I think minimum is 2000€, and it will not be "renderer" tool. We recently bought 4000€ laptops (mac+pc) for my collegues in our company. And i bought a PC desktop with same specs worth 1300€ (not including display) for my teenager son. His computer beats the pro laptops in cinebench render tests by far.

Display cards in 1000€ laptops range are typically integrated, with limited memory, and not always updated, not CAD/BIM certified... They are not good if one needs external display (like many designers would need) either.

So i heavily recommend either to save for 2000€ or consider desktop...

BR,

Ville

Re: Please recommend me good notebooks as a student

Lingwisyer — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 03:18:00 GMT

As Ville has mentioned, if you are wanting to do renderings on it in a half decent time your budget would need to increase a decent amount... There is also the question of how portable does it need to be? Is it an actual laptop that you can take out and about or a desktop replacement that you need to plug in somewhere? Portability is very expensive...

Ling.