Laptop that will be capable of comfortably working with CAD (Illustrator, Photoshop and possibly AutoCad)

Yashy
Yashy used Ask the Experts™
on
hi guys

I'm looking for some advice here for purchasing a laptop. I have a friend who is a fashion designer and will need a laptop which she can use to work with programs like Illustrator and Photoshop and some 3D modelling.

Her budget will probably be set to around £1,400-1600. It shouldn't weigh more than 2.5kg and that's probably the heaviest.

I was looking at the following:

Lenovo ThinkPad P53s Core i7 8565U 8GB 256GB SSD 15.6 Inch NVIDIA Quadro P520
13.3-inch MacBook Pro 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with Retina display

I'm even looking at Dell laptops too.

The thing is, she won't be using any of this for gaming. So I also don't want to get her something with too much overkill.

I just wanted some thoughts about any recommendations you guys might have regarding the above information?

Thanks for helping
Yash
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skullnobrains
Commented:
You need a decent cpu. A decent i5 is good enough. You need LOTS of ram. 16go would be nice, possibly 32. That is not very expensive. You need very good drive performance. A secondary ssd dedicated to photoshop would help a lot. And a dedicated graphic card, but that should always be the case with such setups. 2.5 kg might be difficult but feasible with a 15.6 screen.

I would clearly forget about the macbook which will NOT provide the required io perfs nor feature enough ram to compensate
Yashy

Author

Commented:
Thank you for responding.

For the CPU, would you rather go for something that has hyper-threading?
skullnobrains

Commented:
it does not matter
serialband
Commented:
Modern  CPUs support hyperthreading.  They can be turned off, but exist by default in its design.  i7 and 16-32 GB RAM is what I'd shoot for.  I'd also consider at least 256GB SSD or 512 GB SSD since AutoCad files can get large.  If you're doing the AutoCAD web, you may not need the large disk drive.  Is this going to be on an AD Domain network?
Top Expert 2013
Commented:
as said above - you need more ram, and instead of a second SSD drive, buy a laptop with a bigger SSD, even a 1 TB one
if that does not fit your budget, you can use an external SSD drive on USB 3 also

you can of course buy the Lenovo - upgrade it with ram and SSD ( because finding laptops with 16 GB or 32 GB will cut steep in your budget

here a couple suggestions :  https://www.it4nextgen.com/best-laptops-for-autocad-3d-modelling/
more :  https://gearsdaddy.com/best-laptop-for-autocad/
Yashy

Author

Commented:
Thank you all for responding.

Serialband, it will be for personal use so not on corporate network.

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