Looking for a new laptop for a friend.

[Cyn]

Friend is looking for a new laptop, mostly for CAD (Vectorworks) and hooking up to his TV to watch movies. What he's looking for is a 15.5" screen, dual core processor 2GHz+, 4-6GB of decent RAM, 500GB HDD and a decent video card that can quickly handle rendering. Budget is $600 or less.

[The Stig]

Uh, if it's for CAD I don't think $600 is going to cut it as you'll want Nvidia's Quadro line of GPUs on it (optimised for such work, etc) which doesn't really come cheap as people sell it under the pretense it's for "professionals" (i.e. Dell's Precision Laptop line).

Although I'm sure a normal GPU would also run CAD software fine, I have no experience in this field so I'm unsure how much of a gap in performance there are.

Visiting newegg.com (it seems a lot of people here link to it) the cheapest Quadro GPU laptop is $1389 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834246431), so I think you might need to resort to eBaying for an older generation laptop with a Quadro.