Best laptop under $1,800?

Hey everyone, I could really use some pointers on picking up a new laptop... I'm a third-year architecture student, so I'm basically forced to upgrade to something with some actual muscle. It’ll mostly be for schoolwork, heavy 3D modeling, and maybe a little gaming on the side when I'm not drowning in deadlines. My budget tops out at around $4000. Someone on another forum already pointed me toward this machine

The plan is to immediately slap an extra 8GB of RAM in there to beef it up. I'm trying to figure out how it actually stacks up against other laptops in the same price bracket—like, say, this one

It seems like a ton of laptops sitting around the $1,000 mark have similar specs... But what caught my eye about the ASUS is that it packs an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M 8 GB DDR5 instead of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5, so I'm wondering which one is actually the smarter play here?
Also, how much of a difference does it make moving from the Intel Core i7-4710HQ in the ASUS to an Intel Core i7-6700HQ? I know the first one is a bit older, obviously. And does it even matter if the RAM is DDR4 versus DDR3L? Honestly, since the ASUS comes with a free backpack, the whole deal feels pretty solid—I haven't seen many combos this cheap that include decent gear like that..
If you guys know of any better deals within that budget, please, for the love of god, let me know 🙂

So, you really need a $1,800 laptop for architecture school?

Come on, just admit you actually want to play games. I bet you could breeze through that entire degree with a $450 budget laptop, and honestly, you could probably handle all your coursework on a cheap machine. I even know people making a killing in this industry using budget laptops.

Haha, it’s definitely doable—it can be done

I'm pretty sure I already sent this link your way on that other forum.