Another what laptop thread… CAD and Serato

[ADogg]

Hello

I’m after a laptop. I use Solidworks 2021 for work and faffing at home, Serato for DJing and have an XBOX game account which I may use on it.

My budget is £1k

I know very little about pcs…

[ADogg]

Edited to add my old laptop a 2017 i5 Dell 5570 can just about handle Solidworks on some basic assemblies, but is and always has been shocking on Serato, which is annoying and the reason I’d like to upgrade.

Was looking at the Dell outlet for something with 16GB ram, a gtx 3050 or 3060 graphics card, would that be OK for the money?

Thanks!

[grumbledoak]

The new CPU will be faster, but not necessarily noticeably so. The NVMe "disks" are the big improvement in this upgrade.

It sounds like you need to first work out why Serato was so bad. Although we are on series 11, an i5 series 5 is not an unreasonable spec as far as I can see -
https://serato.com/dj/pro/downloads?systemrequirem...

Any 30x0 graphics card will be fine.


ETA - this Serato "optimisation" advice sounds to a cynic like Serato can run like a dog on anything
https://support.serato.com/hc/en-us/articles/20305...

Edited by grumbledoak on Tuesday 26th October 20:54

[devnull]

You need something with a Quadro GFX card for Solidworks officially, but in reality you can get away with a registry tweak to get a standard Nvidia card accepted by Solidworks.

If I'm honest, a grand isn't going to get you something particularly good new, but if you're OK with secondhand / refurbished, then I would recommend you look at a Dell XPS 15 or a Lenovo X1 Extreme with the suitable GFX components. I have the first gen of the X1E and it runs solidworks beautifully, even a bit of gaming and VR. It has an Nvidia 1060 MaxQ.

[ADogg]

Thank you, I’ll have a look into what you recommended!

[anonymous-user]

ADogg said:

Edited to add my old laptop a 2017 i5 Dell 5570 can just about handle Solidworks on some basic assemblies, but is and always has been shocking on Serato, which is annoying and the reason I’d like to upgrade.

Was looking at the Dell outlet for something with 16GB ram, a gtx 3050 or 3060 graphics card, would that be OK for the money?

Thanks!

Worth keeping an eye out for sales on Dell too.

I recently ordered an XPS 15 9510, 32gb ram, 1TB drive, touch screen 3840 x 2400, GTX 3050 blah blah ......... £950 off !!!! Came out at £1440 so not a bad deal.

Taking a while to be delivered though.