Relatively portable PC for AutoCAD and stuff

[Tamas]

If you are an architect who needs a big screen and a computer to handle AutoCAD and other similar stuff with ease, plus you may need to move your machine with relative ease to showcase stuff to clients, what would you buy?

I am thinking something like the HP Z1 Workstation, ie. something that is embedded with the display. But maybe there are less pricey alternatives which are also good.

Thank you for your attention.

[Beenherebefore]

Something with a pretty nasty Radeon card in it, as it's much better at computing than what Nvidia offers.

And as long as it's not for gaming, the drivers won't be that much of an issue. You'd probably also want an Intel processor with a few cores and something like at least 8 gigs of memory.

Have you had a look at the Asus range of laptops? Some are completely over the top with specs.

This one's a gaming laptop, but should have a rather good gfx card.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/msi-gaming-destroyer-laptop-amd,25965.html

Another option is just building a mini-ITX one yourself. A lot of options there.

[Iormlund]

What I've done in the past in similar circumstances is to use a rather powerful workstation-class laptop, which you can dock in the office (to use multiple big screens for design) and yet carry around easily on the field. Detailed renders could be done at a farm or another, more potent workstation (licensing might be an issue there though).

As for the video card, workstations equip the professional cousins of gaming chips (I don't know how they are called now but used to be Quadro for Nvidia and FireGL for ATI). The main differences are optimized OpenGL driver robustness and pre-sets for most design packages. They are much more expensive than their normal counterparts, though.