Anyone using a Razer Blade for Fusion 360? I am looking into getting a new laptop that I can do design on, and it came up on a lot of lists. I may play a game or two so it is appealing to me. I am asking all over the place to see what others experiences have been.
I am using a 2020 Blade 15 advanced for CAD and 3D work. I mostly use Rhino 3D and AutoCad but also use Fusion 360. Razer is a good company and the laptop have been great. As a bonus it will also run games like FarCry on ultra settings 
My currently portable work station is MSI Z16 Creator. 12700K, nvidia 3070, with very nice 2k touch screen. I think it is similar price with Razer Blade. Works great for fusion and blender. Especiall if you are going to learn some sculpture design in the future, touch screen is going to be handy. Only down side is graphic card driver is studio verison, sucks on gaming.
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Slicing is a memory/processor intensive workload so faster CPUs and memory are good for that. But Studio (and CAD software) useability depends on the video card more than anything else. All that 3D geometry is just a raw list of polygons, it’s the video card that turns it in to something you can make sense of. And when you rotate the viewport, or zoom or pan, it’s the video card that’s handling it, not the CPU.
That being said, anything that’s a 2070 level of performance or better is going to be fine for all but the most complicated models. Higher “number” NVidia cards cost more but aren’t going to make much difference for most Studio or CAD users. We don’t need 120FPS animation speed for CAD. Spend the money on DRAM and CPU speed instead.
A laptop is not, IMO, a good platform for CAD. You need a decent mouse or trackball or other pointing device. And a large high-res display. That actually might be the biggest drawback to a laptop. Really high resolution on a smaller laptop panel doesn’t really benefit CAD, resolution below your ability to discriminate might make things look a little nicer, but that’s about it.
You’re going to want to include budget for a docking station, mouse, and desktop display to go with the laptop.
Pound for pound, laptops are more expensive because they’re harder to engineer. If you don’t have a specific need for a laptop, a desktop might be a better choice, you’ll be able to get higher performance and a better display for what the laptop would have cost.
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I used a beast of an Alienware laptop for the last seven years. It was my mom’s old one and she basically stuffed it to the gills with all the upgrades. At the time it was easily a $5k+ machine.
However, it eventually started slowing down as I got into more and more CAD work. It was okay, if a little slow, but then the screen started dying and I knew it was time to replace it.
I really really wanted another laptop because of the convenience and how space saving they are. But, as you say, they are expensive as hell in order to get something with a decent CPU and GPU. They’re also harder to upgrade on your own.
So, I went back to a desktop. I built it myself, too. Spent about $2k on components and got something far superior than what I could’ve realistically gotten from a laptop or a pre-built desktop in that price range. I can also upgrade it down the road because I left room for that possibility.
It’s fast. No lag with Fusion 360 either. And I have a much bigger screen which is perfect for all the docks and such in my other graphics programs. I’m glad I didn’t go with a laptop. Best decision IMHO if you have the room for it.
I think I settled on the Razer 16 2023 model. I am going to pop it up to 32gb of ram from Amazon which should be plenty for me.
what cad software do you use , i use solid works
Fusion. I have access to Solid if I want it.
Mainly on MacBook Pro 14 M1 Pro for design works and render.
I also have a rig 11900k + 3080 FE but I don’t use it.
What specs would you recommend for a desktop?
CPU, RAM, video card.
My old laptop is slow and I’m looking to upgrade with a desktop.
Thanks
Anything that comes with an i5 or higher numbered Intel processor, minimum 32GB of DRAM, and a NVidia 2070 or higher graphics card. And a SSD. Even mini-PC sized boxes have excellent performance nowadays.
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