Please help. I'm a first time poster. I've also never used Inventor 2014. My son will be taking an Engineering class next semester at our local high school. I've looked at the system requiremts page for Inventor 2014 and I don't know where to start ... Can someone out there recommend a laptop (hopefully for less than $2,000) that will run Inventor 2014? I've read about issues with Windows 8.1 (but there seems to be a patch that fixes that). I'm also not clear on what graphics cards will work well. Truth be told, I think he wants the laptop for gaming more than for Inventor 2014. But, if I'm shelling out the cash, I want to make sure that the laptop will actually work well for Inventor 2014. I suppose it would be nice if he can use it for gaming, but as far as I'm concerned, that is secondary. From what I've read minimum is something with a Core I7 processesor running at above 3GHz and with RAM of 8-16 GB.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
A good "gaming" laptop will suffice. I use a Alienware Mx17 on the road. I have included the system requirements: http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autocad_design_suite_standard_2014.pdf
Look at a 8Gb of memory as the minimum.
The Toshiba laptop in my sig line cost me $699 in 2011. It runs Inventor 2014 just fine, and did so even before I spent ~$300 to get more RAM (8 GB instead of 6) and the SSD. I don't think I'd want to push it too hard when it comes to doing FEA and such, just because it will overheat and burn up, but that just means I need to make sure I've got a cooling pad underneath it when I do hard work.
Rusty
My home computer is more or less set up as a gaming rig, but it handles Inventor 2014 just fine. It is a desktop with an i7, but is a few years old and only has 8GB of RAM. It might have some trouble if I got into very large assemblies like I do at work, but my home projects are much smaller and it handles those fine. I suspect a high school class wouldn't get into assemblies large enough to cause serious problems for a decent gaming machine.
Similarly, gaming graphics cards seem to work well for Inventor. From what I've seen, building a gaming computer gets you a pretty decent Inventor station unless you're getting into large assemblies or heavy FEA, both of which seem unlikely for a high school class.