51-70k Laptop for architecture , to be used in our office and personally

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Ameet Singh

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  • What's your Budget? (e.g. >30K, not more than 50K etc.)
    • 41-50k
  • What will be your primary usage for the notebook be? (e.g. web surfing/office apps/Casual Gaming)
      • Autocad
      • Revit
      • Sketchup
      • Photoshop
      • Maybe casual gaming (only on the rare nostalgic occasion mostly beer spurred)
  • What size and weight considerations do you have? (e.g. Do you want a 17" desktop replacement or you want an ultraportable 12" or something in between)
    • 15.6 inches should do
    • the lighter the better
  • Any brand that you prefer, or any brand that you detest? (e.g some would prefer to stay away from Acer or Dell)
    • Brands looked at and already own (am open to newer brands though find dell very clunky)
      • Asus
      • Lenovo
      • Toshiba
  • Any other considerations? (e.g Battery life; Widescreen/non-widescreen; Glossy/Matte screen etc.)
    • Standard battery life as our work cannot be done without it being constantly on the adpater
    • widescreen preferred (if budget permits)
    • matte screen (again have noticed that the budget does not permit this)
    • is an full HD screen possible in this budget

a few brands and models i have looked at are
  • Asus S550CM-CJ054H Ultrabook (3rd Gen Ci5/ 4GB/ 750GB 24GB SSD/ Win8/ 2GB Graph/ Touch)
  • Sony Vaio SV-T1511M1E/S
  • Asus K55VM-SX086D Laptop (3rd Gen Ci7/ 8GB/ 1TB/ DOS/ 2GB Graph)
  • Acer-Aspire-Timeline-Ultra-M5-481TG
A basic question i have is after seeing reviews at notebook check is that the sony viao inspite of having a generic intel hd 4000 graphics solution beats the asus s550cm hands down in system performance. It is due to i believe a low voltage CPU on the asus and a fully powered one on the sony. The quesiton i have is that for my kind of work what specs matter the most, the graphics card (as i know of most laptop GPU's they cannot be compared to desktop GPU's) or a fully powered CPU?
The asus k55vm has the best specs on paper amongst all the above (it does not have an SSD add on in the HD). From what i know does the SSD cache makes a significant difference in seek times?

Would highly appreciate your inputs on this!
 
Ameet Singh said:
  • matte screen (again have noticed that the budget does not permit this)
  • is an full HD screen possible in this budget
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Business laptops (Dell Vostro, HP Probook) come with matte screens. Getting a Full HD screen though might be difficult.

The asus k55vm has the best specs on paper amongst all the above (it does not have an SSD add on in the HD). From what i know does the SSD cache makes a significant difference in seek times?
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The Asus K55VM does look good on paper and AFAIK its the cheapest quad core laptop in India, but I remember the notebookcheck review said it had trouble keeping the i7 quad core + graphics card temperatures under control and kept shutting down. Most laptops tend to have this problem of keeping quad cores cool, so its probably a better idea to stick to an i5 dual core.

A basic question i have is after seeing reviews at notebook check is that the sony viao inspite of having a generic intel hd 4000 graphics solution beats the asus s550cm hands down in system performance. It is due to i believe a low voltage CPU on the asus and a fully powered one on the sony.
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Actually even the Sony you listed has a ULV proc - anything with the U suffix is a ULV proc. PCMark is a bit confusing since it appears to be heavily influenced by the storage sub-system as well. 3DMark might give a better picture on just CPU/GPU power. You shouldn't read too much into it since its easy to put in an SSD yourself and get better performance than stock SSD options. Keep an eye out for laptops with mSATA slots for the SSD so you can keep both your normal HDD for storage and the SSD for the OS/Apps.

The quesiton i have is that for my kind of work what specs matter the most, the graphics card (as i know of most laptop GPU's they cannot be compared to desktop GPU's) or a fully powered CPU?
Click to expand...
Avoid Ultrabooks/ULV procs. They do turbo up, but on sustained loads the turbo speeds mostly cannot stay within thermal limits and will go back to base clocks which are quite low. A regular i5 + a dedicated GPU should be a good balance. Like photoshop, a few architecture CAD tools are starting to offload tasks to the GPU as well.

Check out the Vostro 3560/3460 since it meets most of the requirements = i5 dual core, matte screen, optional dedicated graphics, except Full HD. If you're looking for a really good screen, have a look at the Sony SVS15135CNB - Full HD, matte screen (my bad, its glossy) and its IPS too. But its a bit over your budget at ~60k.
 
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Thanks for thereply crazy_eddy. Just one more thing all quad cores overheat? The specs of the asus model still attract me and we already own an sus k53s series i5 laptop with no such problem.

Thw quad cores will help autocad and processor intensive tasks in revit. The 8gb ram is also great for revit.
 
Yes quad cores tend to overheat because laptops have inherent cooling limitations due to their compact size, and quad cores obviously throw out more heat. Continuous 100% CPU loads from tasks such as rendering will be quick to bring a laptop's cooling system to its knees, and consequently cause CPU clocks to throttle.

Quad cores on paper will have more power for Autocad, Revit, etc. But here's another example of another quad core laptop having the same problem as the K55V : http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/stress_25.PNG ; notice the clock speeds for all 4 cores throttling to 1.2GHz? 4 x 1.2GHz ~ 4.8GHz. A decent i5 dual core will have 2 cores running at say 2.5GHz which it can usually sustain without throttling, giving you a net processing power of ~5GHz. In situations like these, it becomes obvious how even a dual core has more processing power on tap than a quad core.

The mobile i5 chips are all dual cores, not quad cores, so I would not expect your Asus K53S to show any problems.
 
Big up for your reply crazy_eddy. I spoke to the dell guys about the vostro 3560. Apparently only the i7 has an msata drive built in (way beyond my budget at 66k), the i5 config (at 56) does not have msata connector on the board.

this website states otherwise
http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/msata-ssd-compatability-list.html

any idea about this

And any good recommendations for a laptop with esata sub 60k (i have upped my budget), otherwise i think i will go with an i5 laptop sans esata. (with 2gb dedicated graphics)
 
@Crazy_Eddy thanks again!

btw can i add an ssd by swapping the optical drive with one?
I think ill narrow down on an i5 processor with an 'M' CPU and get 8 gb of ram instead with a 2gb dedicated vram.
 
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