I downloaded Autodesk inventor on my Surface 3(for cadding my robot) and after it freezing up over and over again I decided that it just won’t work. For Christmas I’ve been looking at different laptops that I would be able to run autodesk on and I came across the Hp Envy 17 m7-u009dx model. This seems to be one of the only laptops I’ve found that would meet the requirements for inventor while not going too overboard on the price. what does everyone think? Should this computer work for inventor 2016(or can I install 2015 on win 10?) or is there something I’m missing? Any other laptop suggestions? Thanks in advance 
Try getting a Toshiba satellite. Those work well with autodesk.
You could for sure find a cheaper laptop that can run inventor, but the important question is why run inventor on a laptop at all? I think you could get a desktop for no more than 200 that could easily run inventor. As for this laptop, it looks good, but do you really need to spend 1000 on a laptop? I would personally consider this if i was looking for a desktop alternative though.
I got a Lenovo for $800 with a graphics card and it runs Inventor really well. IMO you want to get a computer (Desktop or Laptop) that has an Inventor approved graphics card. Those are the Nvidia Quadro or AMD Firepro. Non-approved graphics cards will work until your build gets too big and then it will freeze or quit.
You don’t NEED Quadros or Firepros for vex. Both these types of cards are insanely overpriced and only worth investing in if you do tons of professional work. The integrated graphics card, albeit slow, works just fine on my desktop for autodesk.
Mystical Pie either you have a better PC (with a better integrated graphics card) or are building simpler designs and you haven’t maxed out your Integrated Graphics Card yet.
Joseph, if you are interested in trying the Lenovo, PM me and we can work out a time to meet.
My point was Quadros and Firepros are a bit too much. A graphics card is always better.
I looked at the graphics processor the envy has and it will work fine. The requirement was a direct3D 11 capable or higher graphics card and it has a nvidia geforce 940m which is direct3D 11 capable, thanks for the info though. I hadn’t even thought about making sure the graphic card was compatible 
Since this computer checks out fine for autodesk(though the battery kinda sucks; if someone’s found a better battery that you can link me too i would appreciate that) i think i may just get this one, it has several specific things that i wan’t/need for all the things i’m going to do on it. Thank you all for the help
Wow this thread is crap. Crap advice, so hard.
I vowed to never buy a Toshiba after my first laptop came with a dead pixel day one and Toshiba refused to fix it. It’s a crap company and a crap brand but that’s not why this comment bugs me.
Blindly recommending any brand without SPECS is horrid. Just don’t do that. There are Microsoft, Apple and Dell laptops I wouldn’t recommend for CAD, at all. Going by “get an X brand” isn’t good enough.
MacBooks are generally really good, but a MacBook 2016 can barely run Facebook let alone Inventor.
Wrong-ish. Some types of work, generally scientific needs Quadros. Most gamer types of people don’t understand the difference, it’s simply that the Quadro’s have ECC RAM on the card.
Which you absolutely don’t need obviously.
HOWEVER RECOMMENDING INTEGRATED GRAPHICS is massively misleading for many reasons. Generally speaking I would say that integrated graphics are not acceptable for CAD applications.
ALL CARDS WILL STOP WORKING IF THE MODEL EXCEEDS THE VARM TOTAL. The Quadro’s just tend to have a lot of VRAM.
OK OK, here’s the skinny:
Laptop < Desktop
Laptop $$$, Desktop $$
Get a laptop with a good discrete graphic card, I prefer nVidia and would recommend a 950 or above however my MacBook Pro with it’s 750 does well enough to limp by. I personally CAD on two desktop GTX 770s and wish I had 970s.
WATCH OUT FOR THE THERMALS, you really want enough thermal venting power to actually keep the freaking card / CPU cool.
CPU wise, get a quad-core something. Like an i7 with better than 2.3 GHz is fine. MAYBE (and I mean maybe consider an i5 if it’s screaming fast, like > 2.8 GHz).
RAM wise, 8GB is kind of a minimum, I recommend 12GB. Upgradable to 32GB would be nice. I’ve got 16GB in my MBP and 32 in the desktop, although I rarely ever manage to use over 20GB.
Get an SSD, everyone should have an SSD (there’s a TED talk on that).
1080p screen or better.
Recommend something like this. Yes it’s expensive, good tools cost good money.
I second the XPS 15 recommendation wholeheartedly. I, relatively recently, was also in the market for a laptop for CAD (among other content creation things); I would not settle for anything without discrete graphics. The XPS 15 and Lenovo P40 Yoga were my top contenders; I ended up choosing the P40 Yoga because it fit my needs better.
If you do go with the P40 Yoga, I would recommend selecting the base model to customize and buy (as far as I can tell, that’s the only way to get all possible options open to you). The main thing I would be sure to upgrade from the base configuration is the RAM: 16GB can definitely make a difference if working with complex CAD models.
Side note: I assume you’re looking for a portable CAD computer, hence the laptop preference. The HP Envy mentioned above is 6.75lbs… not very portable by my standards.
Edit: The Inspiron 15 is also probably a a solid option, despite being significantly cheaper.
An SSD helps tremendously with the constant disk interactions of Inventor. The prices on these have come down a ton. And yes, all computers should be SSD based.
8GB of memory minimum is also good too.
I ran Inventor on an old quad core CPU but with an NVIDIA graphcis card just fine. Only once I got 8GB of RAM did it perform OK. Then when I put an SSD in there it runs beautifully.
This is my new pretty heavy laptop that rocks. I got the Black Friday price on it of $1099. My trusty 6 year old Acer finally died on me.
(And it plays Skyrim Special Edition at the top graphics level. It’s still an amazing game. It’s like visiting and catching up with an old friend.)
From my experience…you need a computer with at least a minimum of eight gigabytes RAM. At our school, we have found it also to be important to have a graphics card as well if you want it running well.
I actually think that I’m going to go with the Hp 17-ab067nr. It’s a bit more expensive but oh well. It has a nvidia gtx 960 discrete graphics card i think (I don’t remember) along with 16gb ram and other stuff but unfortunately that’s pretty much all i can spend on a laptop. I’m homeschooled so i can’t have a school pay for some of it and my team doesn’t really have much money left from sponsors so around the $1,000 mark is the max. Anyway, thank you all for the help
Inventor ran fine on my old system for basic robots, it would really only choke when you got to ~200 part assemblies with constraints, here were the specs:
AMD FX™-4130 Quad-Core - $60
8 GB 1600Mhz RAM - $40
GeForce GTX 750 $80 (superseded by 750Ti)
if you are looking to put together a machine for CAD on the cheap
The exact computer that you recommended is what I do professional CAD work on. It has stutters in huge assemblies, but I’ve never had something that wasn’t workable.
@legomstr1 Good to know.
@Joseph W(182 C) Consider a desktop then, $1,000 would build a killer rig if you build it yourself.
I need a laptop though
I’m going to travel with it quite a bit so the 6 cell battery seemed like a plus too.
The only downside is I’m not sure how the hybrid drive (1Tb HDD + 128gb SSD) will perform.
K.
The battery on this thing is fantastic, and it’s super light as well, cannot recommend enough
you will basically get the speed of the SSD for your purposes, you only lose out on long sequential writes and extra latency from uncached/scattered files