I have used my brothers’ laptop 1)Asus fx504gd:
- hate how bulky it is
- how hot it gets that I can’t play games with it in my lap(I played skyrim on the laptop with the trackpad and trackpad got ruined and my legs had burn marks)
- it’s corner are not rounded , and it becomes annoying to use.
- battery life is 1 hour whatever you do
- service center F1 services in my country didn’t provide warranty even though it was under warranty
- runs stuff like stable diffusion, kobold with silly tavern , VM to cheat on certain tests .
2)HP elite book 840 or 845 g7 (amd)
- 10 hour battery life
- bought second hand with 3 months extended warranty left, was a import. After 1 month of use notice battery goes to 10% if not used for a few days, calls HP and then HP serviceman comes home next day replaces battery is done by time I bring him tea.
- touchscreen
- fingerprint
- aluminum
- just feels nice
- portable
- easy repairs and upgrades
- can’t use stable diffusion, llama.CPP and kobold ai with silly tavern , musicgen or deep live webcam
- no games
- best for most of my use as I only get to play games in summer vacations and have nearly no time for my hobbies like exploring alternative internet, or running ai projects with college and cfa prep
- but I just feel like I should have a gpu
- Macbook
- love the power efficiency
- great battery
- I have no apple products so ecosystem has no benefits for me
- walled garden
- repair man David seems to hate them
- costlier repairs
- price gouging
- non upgradeable -no idea how it might run things had little time with it
My main use cases: watching lectures, reading books on it, need to run VM to cheat a little, running games( occasionally) , llms and SD
What I like Power efficiency, repairable and upgradeable laptops, durable future proof But above all value for money cause I am on a budget which is less than 1000$
My confusion -Mac is price gouging but power efficient and has great battery -Elite book is great but doesn’t have a GPU
- I hate Asus but similar gaming laptops which are bulky and feel crappy have great specs on paper
- Should I just get 2 devices (steam deck is not available in my country, am not gonna buy rog ally and can’t find anything similar second hand) but then if I get a elite book my wife won’t let me get a PC or a something like steam deck
Ideal world scenario I would like a laptop I can use and play games on in my lap, it being with coreboot and Linux mint and still being able to explore my hobbies like ai projects on AMD CPU and GPU (ideally power efficient as ARM) and still being repair able and upgradeable.
But that’s an ideal world Nowadays I’d be happy if I can get a laptop and use with a wireless keyboard comfortably
Repairable/upgradeable are antonyms to MacBook.
Try the Tech Support community.
Thank you for the advice, I will.
Power efficiency
llms
Pick one. To run LLMs with reasonable speed you need a power hungry discrete GPU. On some laptops the GPU can shut down but then chances are the rest of the system is power hungry. You may consider getting a low/mid end laptop for light games and a desktop with Nvidia GPU for LLMs. If you are under 1000 USD, newer Macs or Macs with 16+ GiB RAM (you will need it) may be out of your price range.
Yeah 13b models req 16 GB ram on my borrowed windows laptop too . I was planning on using llama.cpp which uses CPU instead of GPU for llms. On portable laptops I can’t really expect more than 6-8 GB vram(which might not be enough it will offload on ram and swap then which then makes it slower) in my budget and I need to bring it to college( so needs to be a bit portable and req a good battery life. I know in some laptops you can turn off dgpu, I don’t know how? is it something to do with a MUX switch. I have to look into that too.)
Thank you for your advice.
Just my $.02, the m3 MacBook Pro has been the best computer I’ve ever owned. It runs cool, insane battery life, it’s fast as shit, almost nothing makes the fans come on, the screen is gorgeous. I’m all Linux in the cloud, but I wouldn’t give this laptop back for a full refund and a smoothie machine.
Yes it’s great but it doesn’t run things I would like and I find elitebooks just better than macs because touchscreens and it’s design.
Yeah I hear ya!
If repairability and upgradability are you big priorities, the framework 13 is the best choice, by far. Your won’t need repairman Dave, you’ll be able to do it yourself. But, it’s more of a generalist machine and it sounds like you really want to be able to play around with the GPU. The Framework 16 can come with a GPU, but it would be out of your price range.
Framework is interesting
- I hear they ditched coreboot
- I would have to pay king’s ransom to import it.
- it’s already very expensive.
- David and I go way back . It would be just cheaper to get repairs from him .
PS: I am considering Acer Swift X(2021) model with ryzen 5 5600U and 3050 40W at the moment it seems like the best option for my needs at 774 USD (65000 inr)
Look into VRAM requirements of LLMs you want to run, you may be unable to run models with 3050 because it has low VRAM (4 or 6 GiB)
I was planning to run smaller models with llama.cpp with a decent cpu and 16 GB ram.
They say, nowadays nearly any laptop you could get is garbage due to insufficient cooling. Maybe they look promising at first, but you cannot use them for longer than 2-3 years, because the components simply get cooked inside. The only ones worthy of spending money on are the business-grade laptops, but they’re crazy expensive (for a good reason). Therefore you should probably look for a used one, maybe from a company dealing with refurbished devices. Sometimes it’s possible to get one that had been used for like 6 months, and you still have a number of years of warranty on it.
My personal favorite is the ThinkPad T, P or X series. Those are quality products, and there are official video guides, spare parts for self repair. I’ve also read about bad experiences about a T580 (I think) here, on lemmy, but the circumstances were unclear to me. They wrote about a bending motherboard issue, when you pick up the laptop holding only at the corner.
Framework laptops are also recommended a lot, but I’ve never gotten my hands on one, I don’t know their build quality.
This reminds me of first time I saw a laptop being serviced the Asus one I mentioned. My brother opens it’s back for thermal pasting and cleaning fans hand me the back cover and I see it had turned black(just the area where copper tubes would have rested right above)
David had similar advice told me to just get an used elitebook or thinkpad. That does seem like the best option, thanks for the advice.
