What should you watch out for when buying a laptop?

I'll start my master craftsman next year (plumber & heating engineer).

I would like to put a laptop to me. Now to the questions.

Does anyone already have experience on the subject of master school - laptop? Maybe with the same professional group. What kind of stationery / equipment do you need in general?

The best price ceiling would be 500 euro but if it is a hammer then I would spend almost 1000 euro.

So I think it would be important to me:

medium-sized display (doesn't want to have a fat buzzer lying there) (13-15 ")
long battery life (if possible)
Fingerprint sensor (no MUST)
fast ready for use after booting
fast program openings & multiple programs / pages open, no problem
CAD (possibly) should be able to do it
light / comfortable
possibly illuminated keyboard for late work, touch (if possible)
excel and all office programs in general
Maybe one and two games (such as PubG, Call of Duty or racing games) just as a feature for the breaks😂 so that the laptop does not cause me to hang up, but runs smoothly.

Otherwise I'm of course grateful for every tip!

Kind regards

D.

p.s. Had once looked at an Acer (think Swift 5 or Swift 5 pro?!) two years ago when you could still go into business. But then I was a bit stingy. I still think the fingerprint sensor is good and important to me! (But not a must)

If the 1099.00 euro are not too much, I could recommend a laptop that you can definitely play with games like pubg or cod with high settings. It also has a long battery life of 9 hours. The problem is it "only" has 512gb ssd (it starts up quite quickly because of the ssd). The PC has the latest graphics card, an RTX 3060 which, as a mobile version, is 6% stronger than a gtx 1070, which was a decent thing back then. In addition, my colleague has diesw gtx 1070 and cod was zone around 100fps with medium settings. With the others the problem is that they are "only" 200-300Euro cheaper but have built in a dirty graphics card 1650 and 1650 max q with which you will not have fun in cod. CAD should run easy + you can have 2000 items open on the side.

https://m.notebooksbilliger.de/acer+nitro+5+an515+55+521k+gaming+692651

Thanks! So with the cod is of course only secondary and now not an important criterion! I actually can't get away from the elegant design of the acer swift 5 / pro. Would he be able to do that?

which GB RAM / SSD storage do you need? 🙈

1000 euro for a laptop with which you can play fluently is very optimistic. Since you will have to spend something in the direction of 1200 euro -1500 euro.

The laptops with the CAD capable GPUs can quickly become even more expensive.

You will also have to decide what is more important to you. The fluent work with CAD or the fluent play. You can't have either or only to a limited extent.

For CAD, for example, you need an Nvidia Quadro card. No idea if there are laptops with AMD Pro GPUs. Their drivers are optimized for applications such as CAD. Games run on it, but with significantly less performance than the gaming GPUs.

With gaming GPUs it is exactly the opposite. Here you have a solid gaming performance but because of the lack of optimization only a limited performance for CAD and co.

If you want to make both even halfway smooth, you need a dedicated GPU. They like to make the laptop a few hundred euro more expensive.

As of now, the best laptop CPU is an AMD Ryzen of the 4000 generation. Very high-performance with low to moderate power consumption at a good price. Intel can't offer that at the moment. But that may have changed again next year.

Battery life is one of those things. Most batteries do not last longer than 2-3 hours under heavy loads. When it is almost idle (surfing, Netflix, bureaucracy, …) a battery can last a good 8 hours or more.

The more battery cells are installed, the longer it lasts.

Depending on how complex your CAD projects are, you may need more ram than usual. It should be 32 GB to be on the safe side. 16 GB Ram is also possible at first, but then make sure that it is not soldered and that the mainboard can handle more than 16 GB. Then you can upgrade if necessary.

You can find something like that in the data platform or the detailed view on the website of the corresponding laptop.

I don't have a specific suggestion, but I hope that I could help you narrow down your decision.

With an absolute pain threshold of 1000 euro, however, you will have to make some compromises. But I strongly advise against a laptop up to 500 euro. They are far from having the power that is necessary for a reasonably good workflow in CAD.

Thanks for the detailed information!

Min. 8 as recommendation 16gb and memory I have 500gb ssd and 1tb hdd as recommendation min 500gb ssd.

What do you actually want to do in CAD? My recommendation is based on the fact that you want to do 3D heavy projects. Like games, they just need a good GPU. Laptops with good CPU performance are available for ~ 1000 euro without any problems.

I'm not even 100% sure if I need cad, but if I want to create system diagrams or materials in 3D, for example, I thought it would be good to be able to do it. Is not a must have. More like something on a voluntary basis.

Then it is best to really wait until you are sure that you really need the performance for CAD. With a PC it's no problem to upgrade something. When it comes to the graphics card, the laptop can only be done via an external solution with a PC graphics card. But the whole thing is quite bulky, unwieldy and relatively expensive.