I'm in my final years of engineering school, and I have to have something that I can use for everything. Some of my classes revolve around 3D design and CAD/simulation work, and some of them are just document writing and proofing. I do have a custom-built desktop in my apartment with a Ryzen 9 7950X3D and a RTX 3090 with 64GB of RAM for more complex projects, but when I'm in class, I can't exactly have my desktop with me.

LAPTOP QUESTIONNAIRE

• Total budget (in local currency) and country of purchase. Please do not use USD unless purchasing in the US: <2700USD
• Are you open to refurbs/used? I've had pretty bad luck with refurbs recently. I want something new with a warranty.
• How would you prioritize form factor (ultrabook, 2-in-1, etc.), build quality, performance, and battery life? Don't really care about 2-in-1. I am looking for something with an all-aluminum/magnesium chassis. That's one of the things I loved about my Z13 and my old Zephyrus, the all-metal laptops have always been my thing. I hate seeing a laptop sag when I pick up one corner with one hand. It makes me sad inside. Battery life is another big issue for me, I need something with a pretty large battery. Evidently, my Z13's battery wasn't going to cut it, and I see that some brands are putting 95Wh or 99.99Wh batteries in some of their machines. One of those would be pretty nice. In regards to performance, at minimum I need an RTX 4070 or higher. Solidworks didn't like running on my 4050TI in the Z13 before it died.
• How important is weight and thinness to you? Weight isn't exactly a massive issue, though thinness is. I'm not looking for something that's super thick like an MSI Titan or a ROG SCAR. I've always had a soft spot for Razer's clean and thin designs, to give an example. ROG Zephyrus G-series is another good one.
• Do you have a preferred screen size? If indifferent, put N/A. 14-16". Anything bigger than that won't fit in my suitcase for when I'm travelling. My Flow Z13 was smaller, and I really struggled sometimes for screen real estate.
• Are you doing any CAD/video editing/photo editing/gaming? List which programs/games you desire to run. Solidworks, AutoCAD, Revit, Fusion 360, Inventor, DaVinci Resolve
• If you're gaming, do you have certain games you want to play? At what settings and FPS do you want? Minecraft, FH5. Looking for something at least 1440p, medium-high settings.
• Any specific requirements such as good keyboard, reliable build quality, touch-screen, finger-print reader, optical drive or good input devices (keyboard/touchpad)? I'd prefer to have something with at least 32GB of RAM if it's soldered, or it can have socketed RAM that I can upgrade to 64GB. SSD capacity doesn't really matter, as long as it has a secondary NVMe slot that I can throw my scratch disk into. It would be very very nice if I had an ethernet port so I can continue being the sysadmin for the house.
• Leave any finishing thoughts here that you may feel are necessary and beneficial to the discussion. My previous few laptops have been a mixed bag. The most recent failure was a ROG Flow Z13 tablet that I used for about two years until it started smoking while charging a week ago. Previous to that, I relied on a ThinkPad P52S that I specced with a Quadro GPU and 64GB of RAM, in addition to the highest level of Core CPU that I could get. The batteries in that machine only lasted about an hour and a half until they died, which isn't even enough to get through one of my classes. The Z13 also had a battery that used about 1.5% per minute of idle operation, which meant that I always had to be by a power socket when I was in class. I'm considering the following laptops so far:
  • MSI Stealth 16 AI Studio - RTX 4070, 64GB RAM, Intel Core Ultra 9 195H - $2599
  • Razer Blade 15 - 13th-Gen i7, RTX 4070, 16GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB. - $2299 $200 for RAM
  • Razer Blade 16 - 14th-Gen i9 HX, RTX 4070, 32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB - $2461 $200 for RAM
  • Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 9 16" - i9-14900HX. RTX 4070, 16GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB - $2289 $200 for RAM

Let me know what y'all think, and if you have other suggestions, I'd love to hear them