what hardware configurations for the future

Personally I wouldn't go within 10 feet of a Packard-Bell computer. But it's your money so buy whatever you want.

 

Why not buy or build a desktop computer?

 

What is your max budget?

 

Other good hardware forums? Have you tried Tom's Hardware?

i m in pc world now ,also i had know tom's .do you know another famous forums? i can't work with a desktop because i have to

go to school with it,to teacher's room and if not i would still choose laptop they are much more comfortable you can go where you want with them. you dont still give your ideas about GPUs.can you say sth.my new computer must work properly else i m finished.

7 or 8 years ago, i heard that apple's macintosh computers were popular for cad.what is the situation now? and nowadays i heard that nvidia is more suitable

for cad than ati?and meanwhile am looking for a good engineering forums especially for

mechanical engineering subjects such as mass transfer,thermodynamics,numerical methods

for engineers and machine elements,differential equations,linear algebra,calculus,kinematics and dynamics fo machineary which is intimately related with mechanisms..i tried physics forums but there aren't enough answers to questions especially for subjects i mentioned.I know here is

a cad forum but I think a little information exchange does not damage the aim of this site.

thanks for your help.

The situation with Macs is as follows. You'll pay way more money than for a PC; AutoCAD for Mac will be missing some features that are on the PC version and 95% of your classmates will be on a PC and won't be able to help you. Other than that the Mac is a good computer.

Yes, there is an engineering forum but the name escapes me at the moment. When I remember it I'll come back and post it.

here is a another strange case.some people think that cad should be done on a work station class machine. what is that is it much more expensive than pc?

A workstation is usually built using a higher end cpu, populated with extra RAM, and outfitted with a better grade of video card. There may be other hardware upgrades (ex. - RAID setup).

A workstation is usually built using a higher end cpu, populated with extra RAM, and outfitted with a better grade of video card. There may be other hardware upgrades (ex. - RAID setup).

Are they laptop or desktop PCs? And I have never seen them while being sold.Are

they being sold specially or in a nonstandard way?

Yes there are both laptop and desktop workstations. That's what Xi Computer sells. They may also be referred to high end computers. The original designation is a holdover from the days of DEC, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics (one of my favorites), and IBM. Dell and HP offer workstations too. You just have to be smart enough to know one when you see one. For Dell it would the Precision line of computers. For HP its the "Z" line like the Z820. HP offers workstations in the all-in-one, desktop and mobile (laptop) configurations.

Another company that offers custom built workstations would be ThinkMate.

amd a-10 has four real cores.intel i5s have 2 two real and two imaginary cores.I tested them in a cpu web site.a-10 seems better than most of them (because of core number and caches). But the problem is that although I said people in pc world forums a-10 is similar to i7 they said me that a10s performance is similar to that of i3. This situation is confusing me. Do you know any thing about them?everybody says different things,so the important thing here is which one is better for cad,taking render etc ...

My top two picks would be a Xeon or an i7. My work computer uses an i7 chip.