Is additional dedicated/discrete graphics memory necessary to run AutoCad on a

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kingstonsean

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new laptop with 3 gb of RAM? My son needs a new laptop and he will be running Auto-Cad, a graphics and memory intensive program. He looked at a new Gateway laptop at BestBuy Canada that has 3GB of RAM, an Intel 1.83 GHz processor and it has 512MB dedicated graphics (ATI).
Considering the laptop has 3GB of RAM, would he really need the additional dedicated video memory?
 
a laptop is not a good workstation for cad period. Some cad draws (1000+ data points), can take up 1gig of ram for video
Auto cad requires a real engineering workstation card, that simply isn't available on most laptops. (it needs a quadro, or a firegl series card).

you can get them on some high end dells/hp, but your going to pay a ton of money for them (3k+), at that price point. you should be looking at workstations.

Cad is not only ram/processor/graphics card intense. It is heavily dependent on the hard drive. The faster your disk, the faster it will render. Laptops are usually made for battery life, having a really fast hard drive is NOT a good way to save battery. Again, this is another reason you should be looking at workstations, not laptops.

I don't want to sound like a downer, and he can do cad from this laptop, however it won't offer the longevity, nor the flexibility of a true desktop workstation class computer can offer him.
 
No it doesn't...You can use that laptop for autoCAD no problem. No need for additional memory...it will run fine. 3Gig of RAM is plenty, unless he works in 3D extensively. Otherwise, the laptop is good to go for autoCAD.
 
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