Laptop recommendations under $1,000

Hey everyone,
I'm wondering if there’s anything similar—or even better—on the market for the same price or less. I need a laptop for school; I'll be running AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, Photoshop, and some 3D rendering software...

Sorry if this has already been covered, I'm a bit pressed for time right now so I haven't had a chance to dig through the archives properly.

Anyway, here’s my current pick:

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It all comes down to what you actually need. If performance is the main goal, then that Dell is a solid bet. The Skylake platform brings some genuine improvements to the table, so it makes sense. But if you aren't obsessed with benchmarks, older generation chips like the Intel Core i5 4200H or the Intel Core i7 4720HQ will still get the job done just fine.

So, if you like it, go ahead and grab the Dell—it’s a good choice. If you'd rather not blow your entire budget, you can look for something cheaper here that hits the right specs:

Like I said, for gaming, you're looking at Skylake i5 or i7 (6xxxHQ) chips, an older i7 47xxHQ, or even the bare minimum i5 42xxH. As for graphics, don't settle for anything lower than an NVIDIA GTX950m if you can find one with GDDR5 memory. RAM is easy to upgrade and cheap; you know the drill—more is better. 8GB is the absolute baseline for this kind of work, but 16GB is much better.

These configurations would be decent enough:

You'll mostly find candidates from two brands: Dell and HP, since they tend to pack the strongest GPUs. The HP Pavilion might have a slight edge over the Dell because of HP's extra "quality guarantee," though personally, if everything else lines up, I'd hunt for a candidate in the HP N series because the build quality is significantly more durable...