[Rathji]

I would never purchase an Alienware PC for any reason. There ismuch better value available.

What you need to do is find out what software is needed (Autodesk, Solidworks, etc) and determine the Video Card requirements of that software. Typically the best performing drafting video cards are not the same as a good gaming video card, but sometimes one card can give you reasonable performance in both areas.

There is a maker of high end laptops which essentially gives you an 'Alienware level' of laptop but at a much more reasonable price, but I can't recall the name of them off the top of my head.

That said, I have clients who RDP into their workstation remotely who run Autodesk apps, so this *should* be possible to do what you want as far as a desktop/remote access situation, but some video applications (normally games) won't actually run under RDP, so you need to be sure that whatever application it is, will run fine before you commit. You can probably download and install a trial and then just RDP inside your network to test this out, even before purchasing any equipment.

If it does cause issues, you may need to ditch the Remote Desktop Connection program and use something else, like Teamviewer or Chrome Remote Desktop. This is probably not a bad idea as randomly opening ports needed to use RDP externally to your home PC is not a risk-free process.