Laptop For Masters Engineering

Hi Guys,
Need a laptop for Electrical Engineering at Southampton, Will include medium usage CAD, Solidworks, Inventor and other programs, will connect to a bigger display when at home for movies, coursework.
Does need to be as portable as possible, At least 8 hours battery. Please don't suggest a desktop, I neither have the use or the room for one, something I can leave in a backpack for use anywhere would be perfect.
Have been looking at the XPS 13 but feel the dual core may struggle,Ram is also limited. Also have been looking at the 13" Retina Pro, but again the dual core, however does have the 16GB Ram. Bumping up to the 15" is an option but looses some of the portability factor.
Budget is £1500 to include any student discounts.

Thats the price you pay for ultra slim laptops....look at lenovo, medion, saveonlaptops, novatech, pcspecialist, scan 3xs, etc

Yeah I realism that, no matter what I pick it'll either be underpowered but Light or powerful but heavier.

You are generally going to get the best value for money from custom manufacturers like Scan. However, you do need to reach a compromise between power and portability - whilst you can get some very powerful light laptops, they are going to have serious overheating problems so it's not necessarily the best way to go. On a similar note, they're also not going to have a great battery life.

Spec-wise, you can easily get a top-range i7 and 16GB+ RAM (and a powerful GPU) for <£1500 but if you try to cram that in a small chassis, you're going to have a very noisy, very hot machine.

Also, unless you're actually bringing a monitor with you to Southampton, I'd suggest you don't go any lower than 15.6" - I wouldn't want to work on a 13" screen.

Thanks, I will be bringing a monitor with me but don't want to be constricted to my room
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