top spec laptop for interior design?

[G-design]

Hiya!
I'm not great with technology but have done a bit of research so hopefully this makes sense. I'm studying interior designer and need to get a laptop for the demanding software that I'm using at school at the moment.

I've got a budget of about £1800 ($3000) but would happily spend less!!
The most important thing for me is the graphics, I've been strongly recommended by tutors to get a min of 128MB of stand-alone VRAM, and res of MORE than 1280x800. This is a long term investment and I will need to take this to clients to show them my work, so already there needs to be a tradeoff between screen size and portability.

At the moment I'm thinking of either:
asus W2V if I'm going to go 17"
or
acer travelmate 8106 if I'm going to go 15.4"

Does anyone have any GENERAL advice on these types of machines?
or SPECIFIC experience with either of these machines?
or experience, good or bad, with ACER or ASUS?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[alanuofm]

both have excellent video cards. what is the purpose of this laptop?

 

[G-design]

both have excellent video cards. what is the purpose of this laptop?

Sorry! I need it to run Vectorworks, a 2D and 3D CAD program, and possibly Autocad in future depending on where I go and work. My tutors have informed me that even the best laptops need to be left to run overnight for final rendering at "final print"-quality, so there the quicker the processing sped, the better. But there again, overnight is ok too!

 

[alanuofm]

if the laptop is going to be plugged in at all times and portability is not a factor, you will benefit more with processor that can run multiple threads at once.

 

[spamdos]

i dont know about the gpu of the first one... if u want to play games the second is probably better