looking to get a laptop that can run 4-6 vms at a time. Nothing more than a few linux vms a windows and maybe pfsense. Looking to spend Under $1000 if possible. I and looking at
It’s a referb. Looking to pick that up with a 1TB hdd upgrade and 16GB Ram.
What do you think? Do you have a better suggestion?
The Asus Ryzen 7 1700 laptop (if you’re not doing passthrough) is literally the best laptop to run multiple VMs on the go, and you can use RadeonSI on Linux cause it has a RX 580 4GB internally.
It’s an extra $500, but it’s worth it cause of 8 cores, 16 threads.
http://www.microcenter.com/product/481879/ROG_GL702ZC-WB74_173_Gaming_Laptop_Computer_-_Black
I wonder if any of the raven ridge / R5 2500U laptops are worth looking into (4 cores / 8 threads , amd graphics for running wayland and priced under $1000)
It’s only acer swift / hp x360 / lenovo ideapad 720s that I can find on the market with these… not sure how configurable they are with ram e.g. if 16GB could be slotted in, that could be nice
Looks like a nice laptop, but a Ryzen laptop might be helpful since it would use less power although if you need a dGPU, there are a couple of Acer SKUs coming out with an RX 540 and another with an RX 560.
but the dell refurb is like $500, maybe $750 after disk and ram upgrade… only downside is it’s a 4 core / 8 thread haswell .
I guess a lot of it depends on jessepage1989’s definition of “on the go”.
VMs if you want to start fresh is pretty much Ryzen, Threadripper and EPYC at this point.
my only issue with gaming laptops is they all look ridiculous. I like a lot of the tech specs and price point for these laptops but they all look unprofessional. Why can’t they just make a normal looking laptop?
Like along the lines of mobile workstation. The Referb Dell precisions are at the same price point I just don’t know how I feel about the K1100m graphics card.
Back in the day, Eurocom made sane looking laptops but the parts in it are all desktop components. So they’re more for mobile workstation use rather than being on battery power. They also succomed to RGB keyboards and the gamer stuff…
I feel like the same thing has happened to PC cases. It can be so hard finding an elegant looking case. Everything looks like a damn rocket ship now
Define R6 should be the solution to that, cause everything else that isn’t a tower shape has gone wildly out of control, like the Cougar open air case or the Thermaltake open air case.
I think this is the first time ever I have seen a thread say that the down side is you have an intel cpu you should go amd. lol Hardware culture has always made my feel disappointed for buying my phenom 1090T setup back in 2010. Which I’m still using.
I’d consider maybe going for something thin and light and just using Google Cloud Compute Engine or AWS EC2 to run your vms.
The problem with the Ryzen 7 laptop from Asus is battery life and price… Using full desktop grade components kills battery, especially when you factor in that because the R7 1700 doesn’t have an integrated gpu, the RX 580 in that Asus laptop is always on powering the screen.
According to the NoteBookCheck review, that Asus laptop lasted:
Needless to say that battery performance is abysmal…
Well, VMs and high I/O suffered big time in terms of performance because of Meltdown. The patches to fix it also caused people’s PC’s to crash and hard lock. Ryzen is the future, and if you were considering something new, Ryzen is the choice, cause Spectre is purely software.
So I should probably wait until more Ryzen laptops come onto the market.
You could check out the Lenovo P50, probably comparable to the Dell and you can find them on eBay for about that price. You will get the Maxwell Quadro instead of the Kepler variant.
You didn’t really specify how much work the VMs would have to do so it’s hard to say if a quad core can handle it but AFAIK the 6 core laptops aren’t out yet.
So I’m going to be doing some defensive testing. In terms of testing vulnerabilities in systems. For the most part the only things that will be running are say antivirus/malware maybe snort and other intrusion software.