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Seeking best laptop for daughter entering civil engineering college program

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kyrathaba:
My stepdaughter is starting the University of Kentucky this Fall and will be in a Civil Engineering program. She is required to have an i5 or i7 laptop, minimum 16 GB ram, 2.8GHz or faster processor, and Win 10 Pro/Enterprise/or Educational. If it supports a discrete or add-in graphics card, that's a plus. Can anyone recommend a good deal. We want to get her a machine that suffices, but we don't want to pay through the nose any more than we have to...

Shades:
Get one with at least one Thunderbolt 3 connector. That allows you to connect a separate desktop video card (in an enclosure) to the laptop. This connector has a throughput that is sufficiently fast, which your stepdaughter and the software running on the laptop will appreciate.

Such an enclosure is not that cheap, but it allows you to put in whatever video card you wish to put into it. For civil engineering, it might be wise to buy a video card that supports raytracing. An RTX 2060 from NVidia might be the best price/performance for your purposes. Going about this way, gives you many more options than buying an expensive laptop with 2 video cards built in. The separate enclosure doesn't consume battery power, it allows your daughter to either travel with or without the enclosure, which could be handy if she only needs to take notes or something like that. The laptop can be a cheaper model as long as it has a Thunderbolt 3 port. And if it breaks, you can connect the enclosure to the replacement laptop. Or your own laptop, if there is a (momentarily) need for it.

However, You'll still look easily at a 1000 USD, for just the enclosure and video card. A cheap, yet decent enough laptop will set you back at least that much as well and it is more than likely you still need to buy extra RAM to get to the 16GByte RAM requirement. Won't be cheap either. Most laptops have 2 DIMM slots for RAM, but depending on the RAM configuration in the laptop you purchase, you might need to buy 16GByte of new RAM anyway.

I would expect to pay at least 2.500 USD for such a laptop setup that meets the requirements you specify. A more expensive model with everything built-in, will set you back just as much. A Macbook running Parallels will set you back at least as much. Heavier to carry around all day, battery life is much more limited, because 2 video cards consume much more, even if you leave the discrete one turned off most of the time.

So, take into account how you expect the laptop to be treated by your daughter at school/study to decide which route you should take.

Myself, I am partial to Lenovo laptops. These units seem to last well, when compared with other brands I can buy here in Paraguay. Doesn't necessarily mean that Lenovo units are good, but that they are better than the crap units other brands dump into the South American market.

mouser:
Get one with at least one Thunderbolt 3 connector.
--- End quote ---
That sounds like serious overkill to me.

I would instead make reliability and trouble-free operation my top priority when it comes to this kind of thing.

In these cases having a super fast computer is way down on the priority list.  I'd find out whether she wants a heavier computer with big screen, or a very light computer that's small.
And rather than spending money on squeezing out performance that you'd only notice when playing the highest end games on, put the spare money towards things she can get some use out of, an online cloud backup service and/or a little plug and play backup drive, etc., or printer.

wraith808:
Get one with at least one Thunderbolt 3 connector.
--- End quote ---
That sounds like serious overkill to me.

I would instead make reliability and trouble-free operation my top priority when it comes to this kind of thing.

In these cases having a super fast computer is way down on the priority list.  I'd find out whether she wants a heavier computer with big screen, or a very light computer that's small.
And rather than spending money on squeezing out performance that you'd only notice when playing the highest end games on, put the spare money towards things she can get some use out of, an online cloud backup service and/or a little plug and play backup drive, etc., or printer.
-mouser (June 02, 2019, 09:31 AM)
--- End quote ---

I'd agree.  What you want is something that is reliable, and that has pretty reputable after purchase support.  What are you looking to spend?  And will she be taking it to class?  Always remember that you can get an external screen and keyboard to keep at her desk if she needs more real estate.

mouser:
Yeah we have to remember that what an extreme computer power user cares about is not what normal users care about.  Even the docking station, external keyboard/monitor stuff, most college kids won't give a hoot about that.  They are much more likely to be living in a smaller place and just want something reasonably fast and reliable that they can bring around with them.  For me the main question is still would you rather have a smaller super light laptop that you can carry everywhere without a second thought, or a bigger screen and keyboard that is significantly harder to lug around but is more enjoyable to type/read on.  Having said that, most kids won't know up front which is more important to them, so it's a bit of a shot in the dark.

Another thing to consider, most kids going to college probably care less about the specs and performance of their laptops than their phones and tablets.  Might be better to get a basic laptop and put spare money towards phone upgrade..

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