Tech Check: New Gadgets to Boost Engineer Productivity

Dress up as a more efficient engineer this Halloween with a spooky stylus, scary screen and creepy CPU.

October air hangs heavy, full of mist and melancholy, soughing auburn leaves and restless spirits, and the spicy sweet scent of cinnamon and sorrow for another dying year.

But it’s a good time for tech! These devices won’t keep the fall phantoms away, but they may make you more productive.

Stylus in Style

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of a pen in the hand, and fortunately that analog tool is making a slow comeback in the digital world. Among the pen’s main proponents is Japanese peripheral maker Wacom, which has announced its newest digital pen display: the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27.

The Wacom Cintiq Pro 27. (Source: Wacom.)

The Wacom Cintiq Pro 27. (Source: Wacom.)

The Cintiq is a 27-inch touchscreen display that’s optimized for Wacom’s new Pro Pen 3, a digital stylus with 8,192 levels of pressure for extremely fine input. The 4K display is a dream setup for digital artists, but design engineers might also salivate at the thought of using CAD as naturally as sketching on a sheet of paper. With a stylus in one hand and the other free to pinch, zoom, and rotate 3D models, designers could forget their mouse exists at all. The Cintiq Pro even comes with a free three-month trial of Shapr3D, arguably the most intuitive of all professional CAD programs for its native touch and stylus support.

Many tablets and touchscreen computers now support styluses, but the user experience is highly variable. For our money, no one does digital pens better than Wacom, which just happens to license its technology to OEMs that include Samsung and Hewlett-Packard. The pens are comfortable, accurate and highly customizable with hotkeys (the Pro Pen 3 has three, and the Cintiq display has eight more, four per side). Plus, the battery-free pens are powered from the display itself with Wacom’s electromagnetic resonance technology, so you never have to worry about charging.

The one downside of the new Cintiq Pro 27 is its price tag: $3,500, plus another $500 for the Wacom Ergo Stand it’s sitting on in the picture above (the Cintiq also has a VESA mount for non-Wacom stands). For a smaller and more affordable option, consider the Wacom Cintiq Pro 16—or go even bigger with the Cintiq Pro 32.

View From the Top

Look!—It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s the NexPad, a portable display that mounts above your laptop.

The NexPad portable display. (Source: Nex Computer.)

The NexPad portable display. (Source: Nex Computer.)

Portable screens are rising in popularity, with both major hardware manufacturers and small startups offering their takes on a secondary screen that fits in your backpack. There aren’t a ton of ways to innovate on the core concept—thin and rectangular, with pixels on one side—but some companies are thinking outside the box. We’ve seen portable three-screen setups, we’ve seen mobile 3D displays, and now we’re seeing the answer to the question: what if you want your second monitor above your laptop screen instead of to the side?

The NexPad mounts behind the display of certain laptops thanks to a foldable kickstand and built-in magnets that keep it firmly in place. This means the NexPad will only work with laptops that have a magnetic chassis, such as the aluminum used in MacBooks.

(Source: Nexa3D.)

(Source: Nexa3D.)

The 12-inch NexPad has a touch screen with a standard 1920×1080 resolution, and it connects through a USB-C or Mini HDMI port. The display is also compatible with Android smartphones that support desktop modes (like Samsung’s DeX mode).

The NexPad is compatible with select Android smartphones, which magnetically attach beneath the screen. (Source: Nexa3D.)

The NexPad is compatible with select Android smartphones, which magnetically attach beneath the screen. (Source: Nex Computer.)

The NexPad is currently available for $249.

Blistering Speeds Out of the Boxx

BOXX is among the first workstation manufacturers to adopt Intel’s latest processors. The company’s APEXX S3 engineering workstation now features Intel’s 13th-Gen Core i7 and i9 CPUs, which are notable for their extremely high clock speeds of up to 5.8GHz.

The BOXX APEXX S3 workstation now features Intel’s 13th-Gen processors. (Source: BOXX.)

The BOXX APEXX S3 workstation now features Intel’s 13th-Gen processors. (Source: BOXX.)

BOXX says the APEXX S3 is purpose-built for CAD users. That’s because the workstation is overclocked out of the box to achieve the highest possible clock speeds, which is one of the most significant performance factors for lightly-threaded applications like most major CAD software. The company says users of SOLIDWORKS, Revit, AutoCAD, Inventor and other CAD programs will see increased responsiveness during intense tasks.

The APEXX S3 also includes 128GB of DDR5-4800MHz memory and up to two NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics cards, though it’s safe to expect an update to NVIDIA’s forthcoming RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics cards later this year.

APEXX S3 workstations with 13th-Gen Intel processors are available now starting at $4,700.

Written by

Michael Alba

Michael is a senior editor at engineering.com. He covers computer hardware, design software, electronics, and more. Michael holds a degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Alberta.