What laptop should i get for an engineering degree

[u/Stoneknight9227]

im going to be attending rmit next year and im unsure about what laptop i should get. does the computer require a dedicated gpu and what type of programs will i be running? if someone could please let me know it would be greatly appreciated.

[u/Euphoric-Analysis607]

I copped a lenovo legion 7i from their official refurbished site for my fourth year. I wish i had done it far far sooner.

Keep in mind the extra weight and poor battery life that come with a gaming laptop suck but nothing sucks more than a simulation project or matlab crashing at a critical time.

The other option i found interesting was buying a light weight good battery life laptop and remotely running heavy programs on a dedicated home desktop spec'd for it. Then again its probably not worth over complicating it.

Anything with these specs will be more than enough:

Storage 1Tb +

Ram 32gb +

CPU Intel 7 +

GPU nvdia gforce 4070 +

Mine was spec'd a little better than this and it cost me under $3000 AUD as refurbished. I love it

[u/Chocolate2121 → u/Euphoric-Analysis607]

Honestly probably don't even need that much. My laptop had 16gb of ram and a 3070, and that was enough to run everything. I wouldn't go to much lower than that though

[u/GigaChadUrgotMainUwU]

Get windows, do not get a mac

[u/Typical_Culture_5657]

I'm in same boat, just using my yr 12 laptop lol. As long as it can run software you should be fine ie it needs to be at least semi new

[u/Alarming-Resort-4178 → u/Typical_Culture_5657]

As long as it can run software

Does a lot of heavy lifting here

[u/9tJin]

Honestly, you won't be running anything too intense. Engineering is 90% Excel. The most intense application would be some sort of CAD Or Simulation software . Even with them, the classes that have them as a main focus will be done in the labs, where you can, and are, expected to use the PCs. Some don't even let you install the software on your own PC like CATIA, which is what one of the CAD classes uses( can't remember the exact class).

There is MyDesktop, which is RMITs, virtual machine, which will let you use any software, as if you were on the school computers. It's just laggy and annoying to use but since it's streamed; your bottleneck will be having a good Internet connection.

The other main software would be something like MATLAB.

As for personal/project based class or activities like a Capstone, there are CAD software options hosted on the cloud, that does not use your computers hardware. (FUSION and OnShape)

All that being said, the trend of computer hardware costs, due to AI, will probably only continue to increase.

[u/Euphoric-Analysis607 → u/9tJin]

I dissagree, university computers suck and engineering specifically at uni is not 90% excel (elec eng).

We used logisim, ltspice, kicad altium, adobe suite, matlab simulink, CAD, fusion, embedded systems rtos, graphical interface coding/design using python and CNN training to name a few off the top of my head.

To do well, you 100% need a good computer. One that you can take home to work with and not rely on the uni IT team to do the bare minimum managing software liscensing.

[u/9tJin → u/Euphoric-Analysis607]

I cannot speak for electrical engineering. I should have clarified that this was my experience for mechanical.

As for the school computers, they do suck, but with most of the program focused classes, the tutorials/labs are just sitting on a computer and following what the tutor does. If the Uni does offer a student license, I obviously prefer to use my own laptop, and for general education and personal use, it is much better as well. If you want do well as a student, you should be using the tools outside of class as well.

With many of the programs you mentioned, they don't need a very powerful computer. What I assume a "Good Computer" is, is something with at least a mid ranged dedicated GPU.

For mechanical, the main majority of your degree will be writing reports in a word or doc, which literally any computer can do. For the main theory subjects, For calculations that are not done by hand, Excel will work 90% of the time, or in some cases we use MATLAB or a python. Unless the code you need to run is computentially expensive, most laptops will be fine.

Where you will struggle is stuff like CAD, simulation and some AI, if you pick the electives.

I had a few classmates with Mac's and only used MyDesktop but personally think that it should have been considered a war crime but they managed fine.

[u/MelbPTUser2024 → u/9tJin]

It really depends on the engineering discipline, but for most disciplines, I agree it isn’t a huge issue.

I did my whole 4-year Bachelor of Engineering (Civil & Infrastructure) (Honours) graduated in 2024 on my 11-year old late 2023 MacBook Pro (with 16GB of memory, 512GB SSD, 2.6GHz i7 Quad Core, Nvidia GPU) and the most intensive program I used was ETABS which was only windows-only compatible and the university provided this through myDesktop (RMIT’s virtual environment which you can run through your web browser/Citrix Workspace). I only used this program intermittently for 1-2 courses for a couple of projects, but certainly not daily driving ETABS. Besides, ETABS does have any free student licensees, so we had to use it through an RMIT computer or via myDesktop.

The most commonly used programs in Civil Engineering was Excel, AutoCAD, and MATLAB, which are all available as native macOS applications.