Yup! Tuxedo seems to offer a choice between different keyboard layouts. I would probably get the Tuxedo, since it avoids the tax issue within EU. But boy, I sure would love to get that Bonobo WS! sigh
Is there a reason you can’t get by with something along the lines of a Thinkpad P1? What work are you doing that you need a GTX card for? Otherwise you would probably be better off with a dell or lenovo workstation laptop and doing an egpu when you are at home. Those custom built gaming or linux laptops just fall apart after a year or two in my experience. How long does it take to install Ubuntu or Manjaro? Everything works out of the box with the kernel drivers on those machines as well.
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Yep! Not nearly enough rendering power, let alone visualizing.
Rendering 15T magentic resonance and electrophysiological images concurrently and changing both spatial and temporal resolutions, as well as voxel sizes, in real-time. Think of it as playing a very demanding gaming, where depending on the mission you have to continuously scale the display ratio, graphics settings and anti-aliasing up and down, with a window of about 10-15 nanoseconds.
Believe me, if I could I would take Wendell’s advise, and get a xps 13 and an eGPU set up. But the problem is, university red-tape don’t think so efficiently. For them, high-end worstation laptop = working hard, external graphics card = hardly working and playing video games. You and I may understand it is getting the same the thing done in different ways, the senior scientists will also understand… but since this is not the 1970s, scientists don’t make money calls anymore. They have “specialists”, finance officers, for that these days – people who couldn’t tell the difference between “a laptop and the… the large one” (IT Crowd reference) will nevertheless tell you what you can or cannot spend your own grant money on. You gotta work around them…
I did not know this! I have never owned a custom laptop, to be honest. Thanks for the input.
Hmmm… I suppose! I wonder what the compatibility is like with MSI dominator pro, or the Aorus models. But I don’t suppose they will have fully-supported firmware. Tuxedo though provides self-programmed drivers, and their Euro reviews seem to be generally good. German engineering is supposed to be good, and the chasis and stuff are the same Clevo models that System 76 uses!
If you are interested in System76 but are in Europe, you may want to check out Entroware which has the same Clevo models with Linux friendly components.
Entroware don’t have any GTX 1080 options!
I wonder if you buy from Germany and import to UK, and the VAT is already charged by the seller (in Germany)… do you pay VAT again in UK? Shouldn’t be seeing as how it is part of the common market!
OP I had that exact same laptop that I bought from XoticPC. even had a wts thread on it [WTS] Sager Clevo Gaming Laptop 7700K GTX 1080
So it’s not specialized by any means. good laptop and it’s snappy, just bulky and inconvenient to move around (the power cable is a damn brick.)
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I’m in Belgium and purchase stuff from German and UK sellers all the time. You only pay taxes in the country where you purchase the item (taxes are typically included in the item’s price), it can then be shipped throughout the EU zone without having to go through Customs again. It’s only when you purchase something outside of the EU that things get complicated.
Of course if the UK leaves the EU without a good agreement and access to the internal market, you’ll most likely be screwed whenever you purchase anything outside the UK.
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I’m not sure what software you’re using but you would still probably be better off with a quadro card. Plus a monster gaming laptop with some giant logo of a company noone’s heard of isn’t going to look the best to your boss. The egpu you would keep at home.
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Ah! I thought so. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the lab in France, but I might end up in UK. I will join by Feb, and hopefully with the state the deal is in nothing would be finalized by then.
sigh The UK is like Europe’s America, and getting more so everyday!
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Neither Tuxedo nor System 76 have a giant logo! 
Plus I used an Alienware for so long, with all the obnoxious neon lights everywhere. They were more amusing at conferences.
Also, I don’t have a boss, per se! I do have a supervisor who is a huge name… but he is amazing… still going strong at 81 and wears tie-dye tshirts. So there I am fine!
I’d like to give my 2c on this.
It appears that Tuxedo outsources to the same manufacturer that System76 does for their hardware. I know system76 is moving to in-house manufacturing shortly, but at the moment they’re outsourcing still. System76 does a good job upstreaming any patches they make for drivers, at the least. I wouldn’t be worried about support. You just might need to run a slightly newer kernel than stock if you’re on an LTS distro.
I can’t answer this because your workload seems to be a bit unique. If your workload is mostly rendering, SLI 1070’s are probably the way to go, but if you’re going to be relying on reliable realtime outputs from GPU, I would recommend a single 1080 because microstuttering could require some work to fix. It’s too bad Nvidia can’t sync the crystals across multiple GPUs. 
My final recommendation would be to try the tuxedo. You’ll be avoiding the import tax and will have a very similar machine to the Bonobo.
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I wondered this as well, why a gaming card and not work quadro for this work?
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Probably a combination of cost and availability.
Linux laptops with Quadros are quite niche. Less so than Linux laptops with a powerful GPU.
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Theres a bunch available in the EU.
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Mostly because, Pound for Pound (pun intended), quadros are priced a lot higher than a similarly performing GTX card. Like I said, I feel bad splurging other people’s money on something when similar or better performance can be had for less.
There’s currently no quadro listed on notebookcheck.net that even comes close to the GTX 1080, and a Tuxedo with i7(K) + 32 GB DDR4 + GTX 1080 + 960 GB SSD still costs less than a Precision with similar specs + Quadro P4200. The 4200 is more or less similar to the 1070.
Now, to be sure there are applications that would probably benefit from the Quadro, but none of the self-programmed stuff I use would (at least not significantly)!
But @Eden is right! There’s a bunch of Quadro + GNU/Linux option available in Europe!
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Thanks, Sgt.! That was probably the most concise and to the point response I have seen in a long while!
You’re right, the realtime output is quite important… and frankly, if I tell the 15 year old inside who never seemed to have enough firepower to pipe down… heck, who am I kidding? The 1080 is going to overpower, and by a wide margin too, anything I can throw at it!
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I’m glad I could help.
In that case, absolutely go for the 1080. If the 1080 is more than enough, I have a feeling you’ll be satisfied with the Tuxedo. I can’t specifically speak to it’s quality because I haven’t had my hands on it or any of it’s “brothers” but I know a lot of people who are satisfied with the Bonobo Serval, one of the brothers, so I’m feeling confident about it.
Absolute worst case, you could try to sell it on the forums, I’m sure there would be a couple people who are interested in such a machine.
EDIT: s/bonobo/serval, always mix those two up
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He’s the Community Manager of the Thunderbird Project now.
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I really like System76 and the work they do, but for now, I think their laptops are kind of garbage.
I had an Oryx Pro for a while that I absolutely hated. The build quality was pretty bad, feeling like flimsy cheap plastic, the keyboard was squishy, thermals needed a lot of love. It would power off to prevent overheating, which is a really bad sign.
Their NUC (Meerkat) is one of my favorite little boxes, and their workstations are pretty good. I’m avoiding their laptops until they’re completely redesigned though, because non-Linux specific commodity laptops (without the premium) are about as functional in real world use cases.
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This is news to me! I saw a pretty good review of the same by Lunduke! Also their Bonobo and Serval WS models use pretty standard Sager and Clevo chasis! Did you try getting support from them? What was the experience like?
I see your point, and frankly I ran GNU/Linux (Antergos) on an Alienware for six years without much hassle! I am kind of looking into a few MSI and ROG laptops regarding their BIOS and firmware compatibility. But I would probably go with the Tuxedo since I haven’t heard any terrible things about them yet… hopefully that doesn’t change!