The Dell link just worked for me. You may want to try it again. We have been doing a lot of research on this subject as well and from what I understand you don’t HAVE to purchase one of the recommended systems although for business class workstations the prices are pretty good. Yes, you can get a similarly spec’ed consumer laptop for a little less but it appears that the ones purchased through the partnership with A&M have a longer included warranty. Right now I’m leaning toward the Dell from the link above with the following additions:
-Upgrade the RAM from 8GB to 16GB
-Upgrade the 500GB SATA Physical Drive to 512GB SSD
-Upgrade the 3-cell battery to the 6-cell battery
The main differences you will see with the recommended systems and consumer grade systems is the video card. The recommended systems will have a Video Card that is certified to run with programs like Solid Works and AutoCad and will have drivers and updates that are certified to work with these types of programs. The consumer grade (aka gaming) video cards may run the programs fine but stability issues can become a concern due to the drivers for the cards which are not certified for the programs they may be running when they get into their higher level classes. The drivers for consumer cards are tuned for peak performance mostly for gaming.
With all this said they will probably be fine with a system with similar specs purchased from Costco or other retailer and I’m sure current students can chime in with their experiences.