I had been looking at either a new tower or laptop and I decided that since my job doesn't involve travel, I am starting to work with what I consider larger assemblies (latest assembly had almost 1,000 parts), and we're hinting at doing some Simulation (purchased two network licenses of Simulation Professional), that a new tower should be in my future.

I just found out that our Drafting Supervisor and one of her Designers (I work outside of our Drafting Department) are all set to order laptops at the first of the month.  (I plan on getting the specs from them to see what they plan on ordering).

I'm not sure what their reasoning is in gettng laptops over workstations.  As far as mobility, I use remote access over VPN on a hand-me-down 32bit laptop to access my tower. 

Here are the specs of the tower I was looking at:

HP Z420

Xeon E5-1620 3.60 GHz, Quad Core 10MB Cache

16GB Ram

1TB HDD

128GB SATA III SSD

AMD FirePro W5000 - 2GB GDDR6

I had a quote for a similar system from Xi (overclocked to over 4.5GHz), but I'm guessing our IT department would prefer I stick with HP.

Am I wrong if I say they should stick with towers for their primary Design machines?  The Drafting Supervisor isn't a SW user, and the Designer might see about 75% of his day in SolidWorks as he also does some Document Control with other software (AutoCAD, MS Office, etc.)

Thanks