UPD: renamed this thread to Laptoc vs NUC.
The reason for this being that I start to see less sense in that benefit of a laptop battery.
I am looking forward to buy a laptop for work (development, java). Im not a big fan of laptops since Im a big fellow and every time a contractor company gives me a laptop, I hook it up to a monitor, pheripferals and hide it somewhere… I thought of minis forum stuff, but the selling point of the laptop is battery (sometimes have issues with electricity) and being portable.
One of the biggest concern of the new fresh intel laptop, which I have, is thermalthrottle. Someone thought it was a good idea to buy slim laptops for production…
But the question I want to ask is the following: Does one really win if going for i9 or ryzen 9(sorry, I am bad at amd namings) if you go a laptop (and not a 5 grand one)? When I was building my desktop 13900k people told me that with a good gpu it would be good to go with two good 480 radiators for my custom loop. And over time I can see why is that.
And now, looking at a regular laptop, I realize two things:
I don`t actually know how the cooling of a certain laptop looks like. Yes, there are reviews. But still…
Most doubtfully I will manage to replace it… without ruining the laptop idea. Nor do I wish to mod a laptop.
So the thought is - am I really gaining an advantage when going for a i9 mobile instead of i7(or amd analog). Yes, it will run faster, but it will faster reach the thermals, which will be dissipated by small loud fans and heatpipes.
And I cant really say that A will be faster for me than B. I have 3 pcs - a 13900k for my regular home use, a 9900k, which was the previous main and now used as a tv system… and an odroid h3+, running a 4 core intel something. And even on that I can code from time to time…
I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of this either - makes no sense to me that this slim little laptop will be able to do any sustained heavy lifting.
Therefore, I go with garbage-tier in the laptop (i7-1185g7 in this laptop I’m typing on right now) and offload anything substantial to the desktop. I have one monitor pretty much always remoted in to one of my desktop machines unless I’m on the go.
Curious what the experts have found on this, and if it’s worth actually getting a great laptop…
Minisforum still has its quirks, so you might want to stay away until they mature a bit more.
Personally, I would go with a Lenovo Thinkpad P16v. They make a bunch of different variants you can find on Lenovo’s Amazon store they don’t normally have available thru their official website.
Since you hate laptops, maybe consider an ultra small form factor PC? You’d need an ITX, maybe consider an single radiator AIO liquid cooler (or just a good low profile cooler).
Wireless KB and Mouse, preferably the 2.4 GHz…
You probably need to leave the monitor at work or get a portable one:
PSU will severely limit what you can put in it:
But at least you can put a video card if you want to.
Final thing to consider is what case to get - see:
Depends… The most powerful laptop CPUs will always throttle at some point. But you also get more cores, and 16 cores at e.g. 45W TDP will still do significantly more work per second than 8 or 12 cores at 45W. So if multithreaded performance is important do look at the amount of cores.
Laptops are tricky though, it also always depends on the cooling system, fan curves (often not tunable in a precise enough way), …
I am about to create a question thread in the manner of NUC(I think there is a naming here, which gives more understanding…) vs a Laptop. Because I have found I think a gaming Legion with an AMD, and a ThinkPad. But then I saw that both of them are Slim…like my smartphone slim…
After which I saw that 45w power limit.
And this is where my brain started to raise questions…
UPD. I`ll rename this thread not to loose the conversation.
This is what troubles me. I get it that the younger generation is used to noise and uses a gamer headset, while the fans whine as hell. And you dont really see innovation in cooling.
Its small. But I am now more thinking that I can get a good desktop ryzen 9(7x or even 9x) with 32gigs of ram, a good msi board (because I like msi) in a lian li mini itx case, with a gold bequiet atx psu (I know I can go smaller, but meh)… slap even an aio… and it will cost cheaper than nuc… and will perform better than nuc and the laptops, costing twice the money. I calculated that the build will cost somewhere above 1k usd (while laptops go for 2k… and dont really deliver much).
I do fear the amd chips (because of the hassle there was with the boot timings and stuff), but until Intel can get their head out of mud, I`m willing to give amd a shot.
How much of a headache is a real ITX? I mean in terms of building, maintaining and stuff. And how well it fairs if you slap a 7950x into it in terms of actually not accumulating heat? Today, according to hwinfo, somewhere close to 50 percent of me working, I set in thermalthrottle. Was fun…
Because I feel like spearing a bit more room for a mini ITX with a 360 rad will make my life a bit better.
You might want a triple radiator setup (hence a physically larger setup) if you plan to actually use all, if not most, of the power of the 7950.
With that said, I don’t have really have experience building and using powerful workstation such as those so I cant really comment how it will fare in a Lian Li case.
I have been wanting to do that but miniaturization isnt really cost efficient enough for my palate these days.
Yeah, I get what you mean. My watercooled 13900k is sitting in a fulltower Phanteks case, and I really like that amount of space.
But the thing is - I don`t want to occupy a lot of space for the second pc, since it will be on the same space with my main pc(I just switch the input for the monitor and pheripherals).
So the 7950x is warm? That case does allow to place a 360 aio (not gonna do a custom loop). I wonder if that will be enough, or I am going for a cpu, which is too much for this kind of cases and cooling.
Look at tiny business class desktops (Dell Optiplex, HP Elite, Lenovo ThinkCentre). They typically continue to receive BIOS updates many years (5 to 7) after they are discontinued. Replacement parts such as coolers are cheap and plentiful.
Thing with those systems is that I worked on a few back in the days.
They work. But they don’t really go farther than the laptop I have (and that one, if to believe the price tag, is a somewhere 1.8k USD).
They are loud. Have problems with dissipating continuos stacking heat. And they are a nightmare to disassemble if something needs to be done (I’m not even speaking about nonsense like adding an extra fan).
There is always the option to go custom SFFPC. Like mine that is build in a NFC-4TF is quiet and would be able to have a RTX A2000 and a Ryzen 9700x no problem (a 9900x would be noisier)
There are two obsticles.
First one is that I have no real experience with building in an SFF. I found the MiniITX Lian Li case, which is quite small, but still seems to not go into the art of what an sff case is.
The second one is basically living outside of the modern world in terms of retailers(no amazon or that most of the global pc part market). I`m a bit limited in my options. With stuff like CPUs its OK (I even saw a 5080… for 2k usd), but I barely found anything for sff.
So you would say that an 9900x is more of a hassle and actually requires work if to cool it. But, even so, I think I`ll go 9900x or even 9950x and if needed, will downclock it or something. I understand how it sounds, but I extremely hate selling parts at a local version of Kraigs list (or how its called), and buying now a 9700x just to buy a 9900x later (I am building this machine for work, and don’t really plan to swap out the mobo and cpu for at least 3 years… unless Ryzen will give me a bad time).
Or is 9900x similar to Intel`s 13th+ i9s, where people from custom watercooling suggested from the beginning to go for an at least 360(480 rad) for the cpu alone?
Not really, even at stock (230W) differences are minimal to a good air cooler. You can get 95%+ of performance without it for heavy sustained loads. For mixed workloads probably not perceivable.
If you worry about temperatures too you can still powerlimit and get most performance.
The 9900/9950x are even more efficient.
For an SFF/ITX system I’d go for a power limit and a reasonably sized air cooler. Probably with a 9900x or 9950x depending on the budget. What’s the point of ITX if you’re putting a massive radiator in? Sure, you lose a couple percent but that’s the tradeoff for size and portability IMO.
Depends on the case and cooler you get, and if/which GPU. It can be more difficult/impossible to get to m.2 slots with a bigger cooler for example. Cable management could also be annoying since power cables are possibly way too large. That was my main issue with ITX, but I used an ATX PSU, not an SFF one.
