Engineering Student: Desktop or Laptop?

Desktop or Laptop?

  • Desktop

    Votes: 2 66.7%
  • Laptop

    Votes: 1 33.3%

  • Total voters
    3

Echo304

Estimable
Jun 7, 2014
1
0
4,510
Hello all, first and foremost I'd like to thank you to start off for helping me.

Down to business, I am an outgoing senior in high school (6 days left, woohoo!!) and I am going to be attending The Ohio State University's College of Engineering. They have an at-school store called WiredOut, which sells laptops but also has a pamphlet that has requirements for the rig that you build/buy. For Engineering they recommend:
-16 GB of RAM
-750 GB HDD (I'd almost think just round up to 1TB overall space)
-For Laptops they recommend a discrete card with 2Gb+ of dedicated memory

Now, I am unsure of whether or not to get a desktop or a laptop... The monkey-wrench in the system is that I do intend on doing some gaming, and although I don't care about getting 100 FPS on Ultra settings (being hyperbolic, sorry) I would like to be able to play games with some resemblance of quality and a decent frame rate. Reason being is the laptop that I currently have is a 2 or so year old ASUS X54H with an Intel Pentium Core (2.2Ghz) and 4Gbs of memory, so basically anything that is capable of running the CAD programs that will be required (Ohio State uses SolidWorks) will be able to run games at a higher quality than I have now.

My budget is approximately $2100 (if anything that is the high end of cost).

So I guess my question, in TL;DR format is: Desktop or Laptop, and if possible some suggestions for quality parts or builds.
 

Danbuscus25

Estimable
Feb 15, 2014
92
1
4,610
99% of the time, go desktop if you dont need mobility. if you need to move around a lot, then consider a desktop that you move around (pain in the butt sometimes) or a laptop. you can get a desktop to play the latest games on ultra for ~$1200.
 

Danbuscus25

Estimable
Feb 15, 2014
92
1
4,610
if you decide on that prebuilt, or just about any prebuilt, you might want to replace the psu, because prebuilts usually use cheap crappy ones to save money.