Do I spend all of my budget on a laptop?

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1

Hi,
So I’m a PhD student in CS and I work on designing digital chips (ASICs), My professor told me I can get a computer for up to around $2300.
But I’m not sure if I should blow all my budget on a laptop or should I go for a Desktop + a refurbished ThinkPad (L14 G3 Ryzen 5).

Even with a laptop I have to options, I can get a laptop with 7945hx but bad battery life. Or a laptop with the new AI 9 hx 370 and good batterylife.

I have access to servers for GPUs or other heavy tasks.

What do you guys think I should do? I personally prefer to have a desktop with a cheaper laptop.

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I think you should do this. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I agree. I bought a gaming laptop in December 2020 - [**ASUS ROG Strix G17 with the Ryzen 4800H, 16GB DDR4-3200, 130W 6GB RTX 3060, and 512GB NVMe.
I upgraded the RAM to 64GB and the NVMe to a 2TB.

Even with that, it is my least favorite device to use.

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I’m no CS student, but I highly favor the cheap laptop and offload the heavy lifting elsewhere. The only time I may have regretted that at all is compiling something specifically for the laptop, but I suppose you can offload that if you’re not too lazy.

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Having a lightweight type-writer with you and something to do number crunching elsewhere is reasonable, I’d say.

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6

Can always remote into number cruncher too

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I would concur with the others, get a laptop, small & portable for notes and stuff, and a Desktop for more heavier tasks.
I’m quite fond of the HP Dragonfly series. If you can get a G2, or G3 model in good condition, with good battery life, you should be good to go.

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Its the same with me. The heavier / the bulkier the system the less likley I am to take it with me.

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Bro. Don’t spend a budget on a laptop unless you using it for pure video editor use and or smaller things like YouTube videos. I’d rather you use as a gamer to gamer perspective to just go to microcenter and get something with at least a 3070 gpu in it and you can even ask help with staff for the rest of the build around that.

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Like most have said here; get a lightweight laptop for presentations, writing papers and doing research. Something like a $800 Lenovo Yoga would be a nice addition and then you can always spend some more on a KVM switch so you can dock it to your desktop rig. You could even do a Chromebook for that, though CBs are kinda pushing it.

For the number cruncher, I would recommend these parts with a budget of ~$1500. Not top of the line, but still pretty good. Also consider a 7800 XT for ~$500 if you need more VRAM, as 12GB is a bit on the low side today. Nvidia is the better number cruncher though.

Also, please don’t rake me over the coals for the Realtek NIC, intel parts were like $100 more which made it really hard to fit it within budget, so I decided to prioritize RAM and disk space over network. Everything below is a suggestion, feel free to do with it what you want to, it is meant to help where you should be not what you eventually end up with :slight_smile:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7900 12c24t $368.14
Motherboard ASRock X670E PG Lightning $199.99
Memory TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 2x16 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 $91.99
Storage Western Digital WD_Black SN850X w/Heatsink 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 $139.99
Video Card Zotac Twin Edge GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER 12 GB $599.99
Case Fractal Design Focus 2 $49.99
Power Supply Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 (2024) 750 W 80+ Gold Fully Modular $84.99
Total $1535.08
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not clear what your actual software and hardware requirements are. If you are laptop shopping, there is not much reason to get anything besides a MacBook of some sort. By far the best hardware quality especially for a student. The only reason to consider anything else, is if you have some specific software that you cannot run on macOS for some reason.

I have access to servers for GPUs or other heavy tasks.

then you have absolutely no need for a desktop and no reason to get a beefy laptop either

either get a cheaper model MacBook refurb; Refurbished Mac Deals - Apple

or get a new one with Student Discount

typically I look for 16-24GB~ish memory and minimum 1TB storage, you can get the MacBook Air variety in that ballpark for about $1800 on the refurb and should be roughly similar prices for new with Student Discount.

having a “beefy computer” is a pretty huge waste when you can just ssh into your lab’s servers to do your work. And if you are not playing video games then there’s especially no point in any Windows laptop or PC either.

when I was a student doing computational work, I used a mix of the lab’s HPC servers, the publicly available PC’s throughout the campus and lab, and a small Chromebook. The Chromebook cost $250 and I wrote my Thesis on it while I ssh’d into the lab servers to do the analyses. Otherwise I used the public campus PC’s to also ssh into the lab servers to do work

at one point, as a student, I built a ~$1400 PC to have for “number crunching” at home, it ended up just collecting dust for years. Completely useless. Because you cannot take it with you while you are on campus. And whatever hardware you can pack into it on a budget, or into a “beefy” laptop, are going to be absolutely dwarfed by whatever servers your lab offers, and your work will get out of sync between the campus systems and your home systems too making it more of a pain to move back & forth.

was always easier to just keep everything on the lab server and ssh in from whatever computer you are sitting in front of at the time. Run a simple rsync script every once in a while to backup your lab notebooks and source code and files from the remote server onto your personal system just in case someone in the lab accidentally rm -rf /'s the server.

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I ended up…well significantly lower budget, but going with the gaming laptop route. Now, it’s served me well but I do lightly regret it.

At the time, I didn’t have an actual place for a desk, and I flip-flopped between spending all day at work (where I also needed a device) and at home, where I still needed to do the same things. So the contiguity made a lot of sense, as did being able to set up and play a game anywhere I ended up because I didn’t have a dedicated spot. Plus, it was GPUmageddon where even the lowest-spec cards were hundreds of dollars, and getting a “freeroll” on price going with a laptop seemed to make sense at the time.

Now having lived with it for a few years…again, it’s served me well, but I do wish I was able to just buy a GPU and throw in a big upgrade and instead I’m staring down complete platforms, and not that I have the budget for either but that’s a big hurdle now.

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I recommend going for a desktop along with a refurbished ThinkPad. This setup will provide strong performance for your ASIC design work while offering the mobility and convenience of a laptop for everyday tasks.