Laptop for Aerospace Engineering student

[Titaniumboy]

Any recommendations on a laptop for an Aerospace Engineering student for his junior year? He is transferring into a UC school after doing his lower division class work at a community college. They are going to be using Solidworks, MatLab, and Abaqus (FEA analysis).

He currently has a 3 year old MIcrosoft Surface Pro i5 with 8gb ram and no dedicated graphics card.

Thanks!

[mattpeneguy]

For SW it's generally recommended to use a certified (Quadro or Firepro) video card. Most people recommend Quadro.
You can get away with using the gaming cards for SW, but with mining for all the nonfungible tokens prices for them are probably the same as for the workstation cards. So, it's probably best to stick with a Quadro for SW.

I used MatLab in college, but that was over 20 years ago. At that time you didn't need anything special to run it (of course I wasn't in aerospace engineering and the that program probably uses more computing power.) So any advice I'd have would be dated and may be completely incorrect at this time.

The FEA may drive the decision here in at least a different direction. AFAIK Abaqus uses multiple cores. SW only uses 1. So for SW the advice is to get the highest clock speed, but not to focus on the number of cores. Seems the math may work in reverse for Abaqus.

This question may be better answered over at the http://eaaforums.org/forum.php or some other place where there's more aerospace people. Most of the people here are mechanical engineers, like me.

But, because this always comes down to budget, your money can go further if you purchase it used. Dell, and others have returned computers that they resell at a much lower price than brand new, and they come with a full warranty.

If I had to guess this one would be perfectly sufficient:
https://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSal ... M%2f7zngCG

It is $2,500 though, so I'd make certain it would work for Abaqus and Matlab, but it appears it would work with SW.

[MJuric]

Any recommendations on a laptop for an Aerospace Engineering student for his junior year? He is transferring into a UC school after doing his lower division class work at a community college. They are going to be using Solidworks, MatLab, and Abaqus (FEA analysis).

He currently has a 3 year old MIcrosoft Surface Pro i5 with 8gb ram and no dedicated graphics card.

Thanks!

I wasn't familiar with Abaqus but that is also a DSS product so one would have hope that SW and Abaqus are not night and day....but we are talking about DSS here so no guarantees. The system requirements for Abaqus does not look all that different than SW and of the three I think MatLab is the least hardware intensive.

All that being said there's a huge difference between "What is needed to make these run" and "What is needed to make these run well with the least problems and best support". So there's a huge range to look at depending on desired outcome.

On the low end essentially any relatively recent CPU, graphics card combined with an SSD and 16GB of RAM will "Run" these. On the high side you will want a Gen 9,10 or 11 i9 CPU, preferably K version with a recent "Professional" card. Quadro series seems to be preferred and the RTX Quadro series is the most recent "Best". Looking just at the video card you can drop from $700-$800 dollars to multiple of thousands for the crazy high end version. 32GB RAM, SSD card (Want to pay attention to type here).

Not sure I have a recommendation for a specific laptop by brand model etc though.

[Titaniumboy]

Matt,
Thank you for the Dell Outlet link, but unfortunately that link does not work. Could you provide some of the specs you searched for so I can search over at Dell?

Also good idea about looking over at EAA.


MJuric,
Thanks for your ideas on what the low end looks like and what the high end looks like. I didn’t even realize there was an i9.

One of the options I suggested to my son was to go ahead and download SW now and see if it will “run” on his Surface Pro. If it does “run” then that will take some of the pressure off him to buy “right this moment”. That would allow him to get on campus and see what others are running successfully.

[Tom G]

One of the options I suggested to my son was to go ahead and download SW now and see if it will “run” on his Surface Pro. If it does “run” then that will take some of the pressure off him to buy “right this moment”. That would allow him to get on campus and see what others are running successfully.

Simple canned tutorials will run well on minimal spec computers, but the real challenge will be: 1) how complex will the designs become, and 2) how soon will this complexity apply. Tertiary is some understanding of best practices, to balance pending complexity with the efficiency to avoid errors and delays.
For example, if you are making a wing profile and testing that, then it sounds simple.
However, if you are making a complete aircraft, then it sounds appropriately complex, yet less complex than an aircraft carrier.

I'd suggest:
Start with the old PC for learning, while accepting some strange errors due to non-certified graphics card. Not ideal, but good enough to dip toes in.
Once real problems arise, or more capacity is clearly required, purchase a dedicated PC for this purpose and appropriate spec per budget. Plan for this one to last through schooling.
Either before or after graduation, as applicable, upgrade to a pro workstation and non-student software licenses.

Another consideration: His Peers. What are his fellow students using? No one wants to have the dullest tool in the shed, or its interpersonal implications.

Another aspect that EAA may help you with is a Student License of SWx included with their $40/year membership. This may help your analysis if you cannot, "go ahead and download it now," to test it out.

OK, now I digress.
There is a VERY new solution available that replaces your hardware purchase with a subscription. Windows 365 is a new offering of full remote cloud computing. You pay for the spec you will need, and then can access that always-on Windows PC while owning and using a much less capable PC to access it. It is new. No, I haven't tried it, and really have no clue how this software would license to that use. Ed Bott writes good analysis on it, without any focus on software or apps used. Did I say this is new? This is new. Good luck.

[MJuric]

One of the options I suggested to my son was to go ahead and download SW now and see if it will “run” on his Surface Pro.

SW will only run on Windows Professional and unless he asked for that specifically it's probably W10 home addition. That will be more of a killer than the hardware. I'm guessing you could upgrade it though, not that familiar with surfaces...although I have two sitting on my desk.

SW will "Run" on some pretty outdated, low end and "Not certified" hardware. However as has been mentioned "Running" is different than being able to use it without tearing your hair out.

If he can get W10 Pro and it runs fairly well maybe he can keep the pro and just pick up a docking station and decent monitor. Personally I would go blind using SW on a surface. I would say that an i5 and 8GB of RAM is pretty minimum, but it will probably work for parts, small assemblies. You be staring at an hourglass for anything much more than that though.

[MJuric]

Matt,
Thank you for the Dell Outlet link, but unfortunately that link does not work. Could you provide some of the specs you searched for so I can search over at Dell?

Look at https://www.boxx.com/systems/mobile-wor ... goboxx-slm for SW specific specifications. Then look elsewhere for something as close as you can get for your price range. Boxxxxxxxxx is stupidly expensively priced but it can give you an idea of specs for "High end"...just go down from there.

[Titaniumboy]

Thanks for all of the replies. I sure appreciate all the help.

Update: My son downloaded Solidworks last night and installed it on the Surface Pro. I am told that he was able to successfully launch Solidworks and model up a simple part. No apparent problems for now.

His Surface Pro is running Win10 Pro.

Tom G said:
“Another consideration: His Peers. What are his fellow students using? No one wants to have the dullest tool in the shed, or its interpersonal implications.”

The apparent success of the Surface Pro “running” SW takes this from an immediate need to something he can deal with at his leisure once at school. It will be interesting to see where the other students laptops fit in the spectrum from low end to high end. And maybe one of the other software packages they will be running will be more a challenge than SW? We shall see.

[mattpeneguy]

Matt,
Thank you for the Dell Outlet link, but unfortunately that link does not work. Could you provide some of the specs you searched for so I can search over at Dell?

Also good idea about looking over at EAA.


MJuric,
Thanks for your ideas on what the low end looks like and what the high end looks like. I didn’t even realize there was an i9.

One of the options I suggested to my son was to go ahead and download SW now and see if it will “run” on his Surface Pro. If it does “run” then that will take some of the pressure off him to buy “right this moment”. That would allow him to get on campus and see what others are running successfully.

Sorry, I guess it sold out. Some of the specs were:
15" 1080p screen (this was the lowest priced one available with this resolution, and is a big deal. 768 resolution monitors do not provide enough space on the screen.)
1tb SSD (some of them came with as low as 256GB, which will fill up REAL quick)
64GB Ram (I'd say 16 or 32 would be fine, but it came with 64)

I'm glad to see that SW works on his existing Surface. He may be fine with what he's got and it's probably best to wait and see what he finds when he gets there. Or, you could save the money for something else he may need?

[MJuric]

I'm glad to see that SW works on his existing Surface. He may be fine with what he's got and it's probably best to wait and see what he finds when he gets there. Or, you could save the money for something else he may need?

Prices right now are so jacked that if you can put off buying just about anything for a while you'll probably come out ahead. Most computer parts are 25-30% high at the moment with video cards running 100% higher than normal.

[matt]

Any recommendations on a laptop for an Aerospace Engineering student for his junior year? He is transferring into a UC school after doing his lower division class work at a community college. They are going to be using Solidworks, MatLab, and Abaqus (FEA analysis).

He currently has a 3 year old MIcrosoft Surface Pro i5 with 8gb ram and no dedicated graphics card.

Thanks!

"aerospace engineering student"? You mean a rocket scientist? Give him a pad of paper, he'll be able to figure it out.