Laptop Advice: Does Civil 3D work well with multi-core processors?

[istill316]

I have a student civil engineering friend who has asked me for laptop buying advice. He specified his need for AutoCAD Civil 3D and the general lousiness of his current 2009 Macbook Pro. He wants to spend between $200 and $300. (Yeah, it's not much.)

Two options are as follows:
1) ASUS X501A-HPD121H Notebook Intel Pentium B980(2.4GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD Intel HD Graphics
2) DELL Inspiron i13Z-3636sLV Notebook Intel Core i3 3227U(1.90GHz) 13.3" 6GB DDR3 Memory 500GB HDD 5400rpm Intel HD Graphics 4000

The latter has a newer, higher-rated processor in general, including multithreading, but the indiviual core clock speed is noticeably less. It does, however, have 2GB addition RAM.

Given these are budget systems, which would be better for his student civil engineering purposes, and why?

[dgorsman]

Neither.  Civil3D requires a lot of power to operate anywhere reasonably well, which includes reasonable speed modern processors, significant amounts of RAM, a dedicated video card, and a screen large enough to work on.  He will be spending more time fighting the hardware than learning with both of those.

You might be able to find a workable refurbished laptop in the $600-700 range from the major manufacturers, but will likely be looking at $1K plus.

[braudpat]

Hello

CIVIL 201X 64 bits needs a lot of memory (to run correctly) : 8 Gb is a STRICT MINIMUM !

Your Win Seven (or Eight) 64 bits will use about 2 Gb (or more), so ... 

Bye, Pat