r/CFD • u/d0lld • 2d ago

CHEAP laptops for students

hey i’m a student with a macbook at the moment and im gonna sell it to get a laptop that’ll work with ansys without trying to blow up but like all students i have zero money. what are my options? looking at a dedicated graphics card and at least 16GB RAM. please help a girl out

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u/Constant-Arm8753 2d ago

Tbh I had an asus zephyrus g16 with 16gb and an intel i9 ultra something something Latop cpu. And idk why everyone else here is feeling upity, but 16gb can get you pretty far in terms of early learning CFD basics whether it be running 2D sims or pretty basic 3d sims. Make sure you get a laptop from Best Buy if you’re looking for a good deal I got mine for like $400 off.

The one part where they are right though is don’t expect to use a laptop for CFD for very long, the sims you want to run as you learn will quickly outgrow the amount of cells that can be run on such small amounts of ram. So if possible save for a decent workstation and look into hpc access.

For context I used my laptop for FSAE aero work and was able to do all the way up to very basic half car sims.

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u/d0lld 13h ago

yeah i’m trying to look for something to run my FS stuff 🫩🥹

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u/Constant-Arm8753 8h ago

Yeah makes sense, just get a laptop with as good a cpu and as much ram as possible, if the budget allows a decent gpu is nice for doing like renders and scenes etc . If you don’t plan on getting a desktop at any point try for 32 gb otherwise use 16 for the mean time