I've got to spec up a laptop for Solidworks 3d for the MD's daughter whose off to uni to study product design or something but looking at the Solidworks website it seems to only have certain graphics cards listed, does it require a graphics card listed or will any old onboard Intel GFX card work?

If you can, stick to what's on the web site. Other cards will work but may not be 100%, ie, you may get bits missing when you spin the model around. The 'profession' cards are often the same as cheaper gaming cards but sometimes the drivers aren't as good.
Will need a 'real' graphics card. Onboard will not have the speed to do anything useful (plus lack of drivers).

for 3d rendering you need a pretty powerful set up.

You could run off an onboard card but it wouldnt run very well so I would reccomend getting a graphics card for it – at least 256. I run 512mb with 8gb ram on a dell precision M6400 but I am running CATIA which is a bit more processor heavy than solidworks. About half that spec should be fine (plus if you go ith 8gb youll have to run a 64 bit operating system)

My laptop had one of the listed cards at the time so can only really comment on that. Yes it did work.

I think its is more to do with cards that have been tested to work. It is a way of guaranteeing that it will work. Every week a company will bring out another card and it would be hard for SW to keep up. Suck it and see, or go the tried and tested route – its up to you. Sorry, thats not really that helpful.

What Richmars said – if the graphics card isn't up to it any visual manipulation of the model turns into a "…wtf is going on…' moment.

Unless shes doing a masters or phd she wont need a laptop that can run solidworks To full potential anyway.

Hell i studied courses in conjunction with the product and interior design students at my uni – im surprised they could dress them selves in the morning !

We could get on a solidworks/ansys/autocad/pro engineer equipped computer at anytime of day or night no bother ….

but if thats the brief you have been given best stick to it …obviously wants to spend the dosh …

I had solidworks running on my 1300mhz 512meg and shared graphics laptop with few issues when i was at uni – slow to start and when the models got pretty complex – i was modeling a bank auto teller at the time. it slowed down

Also, if the laptops you're looking at only have on-board graphics, it's unlikely to be man enough to run Solidworks at a reasonable speed.

A mate of mine runs a 3D visuals company and uses it – he uses Server farms to process/render images – HUGE amount of processing power needed for some of them!

It'll work on other graphics cards. I've used it on all sorts, it even runs pretty well on my cheap laptop for simple stuff. If you do have any issues then you'll need SW approved stuff to get useful help from SW. If it was for yourself you could get away with just getting a good spec pc, for the MD's daughter you probably want to go by the book.

that 'might' be a bit overkill for uni surfmat

Trail – yep but shows it can be resource heavy. In other words, go with the right graphics card!

It's not your money so spec something that uses a recommended card or when it crashed all the time you'll be the one blamed for not speccing it according to Solidworks approverd list. It probably will still crash anyway but atleast you've covered yourself.
For reference I'm using a Dell Precision M4400 with a Nvidia Quadro FX 770M with 512mb.

can't believe we haven't asked whether she's hot or not? 😉

God point thom – she might well be worth "rendering…"

Good career move; post a photo of your bosses hot daughter on sad bikers forum.

lol, thankfully he can't see where i post online as its me in charge of websense 😀

think i'll give him a choice of a £1500 dell precision which will work and a £500 Vostro which will probably work but might not.

thanks for all the help anyway.

Solidworks seems to be one of the least resource intensive CAD packages (compared to Catia or Pro/E anyway which are awful), so you don't need a crazy powered laptop. I'd say go with a better specced graphics card than processor in the cost balance. Any half decent processor will be able to run SolidWorks, but a good, discrete, graphics card will really pay dividends.

I had to buy 3 new laptops about 5 months ago for the CAD guys to run solidworks, did loads of research and went for Dell Precision M6400

nice bit of kit and runs solidworks no worries