The UPEI FSDE Welcome packet recommends 16GB of RAM on a Windows machine.
Here are some recommendations from our Student Success Associates:
Best performance: 512 GB hard drive, 16 GB RAM, Windows 10
- Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga I7 with 16 GB ram & 512 GB SSD hard drive
- Through Lenovo, on sale through Sept 13, 2020, ~$2000
- Through Amazon ~$2100
- He also had a Thinkpad T430 with an i5, 8 GB ram, and a 256 GB SSD, but the 256 GB was limiting
- Should last for your entire degree
Most economical and confirmed that it works well
- Surface Pro 7 with an i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM and 128GB of storage
- Through Bestbuy, ~$1000
- However, very little storage space for other items so you may be upgrading in a few years. I recommend increasing the specs to 16 GB of RAM and a minimum of 256 GB storage for ~$1500 through BestBuy
Desktop
- One SSA built a desktop:
- Processor is6 core Intel Core i5 8600k
- 36GB of DDR4 3000mhz RAM,
- The graphics card is an Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB of VRAM,
- 2TB barracuda Hard drive paired with a 512 GB SSD
- The operating system is Windows 10.
- If you are interested in building your own high-performing machine, too, email us at engsuccess@upei.ca
Other laptops
- One of the SSA’s has a laptop that now works well, but had trouble with the sound card and display initially. Here are the specs: i7 Lenovo Yoga 730 with 8GB RAM and 512 GB storage.
If you have a mac, be sure you have at least 70 GB available to partition the drive, I’d recommend more like 100 GB (55 GB per apple’s website, 16 GB for solidworks, and 30 GB for any kind of storage).