
Ask HN: Best gaming laptop for machine learning/deep learning research? - allenleein
I need to travel a lot so thinking about some high end gaming laptop like Razer Blade...any thoughts please?
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PeterisP
Running machine learning jobs on a laptop essentially turn your laptop into a
desktop.

Let's say you get suitable hardware, possibly with an external GPU enclosure,
and launch a 24 hour training job (which is not that long)... and then what?
You can't really close the lid and take it with you anywhere without stopping
that process. The workflow becomes unwieldy and inconvenient, requiring
compromises between running the ML stuff and your personal mobility. And how
about when you're done with proof of concept experimenting and need to train a
larger system on all data available, which would take for your laptop, say,
two weeks?

Get a decent "conventional" laptop. It will run small jobs quite well anyway,
even on a CPU; and for anything beefier connect to a dedicated system
remotely, no matter if it's owned or rented, that's the way to go.

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ea016
If you're going to travel a lot, I would recommend using a lightweight laptop
and use a remote server with GPU.

You can either access GPUs on demand or rent a server by the month. Hetzner[0]
offers a GeForce 1080, 64 GB ram and Quad-Core i7 for ~$115 / month (+ setup
fee).

[0] [https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-
gpu](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu)

~~~
znpy
This.

Other options could be:

1\. Get an external gpu with an enclosure that you can attach to your laptop
when needed.

2\. Build a GPU enabled desktop computer, leave it connected to the internet
somewhere (home or office) and access it via a VPN connection.

These, together with renting from Hetzner, are the options I would
consider/advice.

~~~
jryan49
Wouldn't this require a constant internet connection?

~~~
znpy
Maybe not constant, but certainly "readily available".

Don't get me wrong now, I understand that this might not be feasible or
comfortable. But OP did not actually describe his/her needs that much, so we
are all speculating.

Some good questions that OP could answer might be:

1 - Do you need to do your computation on the spot, like gather data and
perform computations in "real time" ?

2 - When you say "travel", what do you actually mean? Do you "travel" like "I
am always on a train/plane/bus" or "I move from a site to another constantly
but when I'm there I can access a desk and a stable internet connection" or "I
move from an airbnb to another" or something completely different ?

3 - What are your security/confidentiality requirements ?

4 - What are your constraints (weight, connectivity, budget, operating costs)
?

5- What are your preference in terms of tradeoff?

6 - What can you compromise on? And what do you value the most? Speed?
Computing power? mobility? Energy efficiency? Operating costs?

OP should really answer some of these questions, then we can all come up with
better solutions.

~~~
znpy
Tangently related (mobile GPU):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjty3I3Cdg8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjty3I3Cdg8)

In this video Linus Sebastian is using a Razr Blade because that is the laptop
he chose as a daily driver, but OP could use any laptop compatible with the
enclosure.

I would like to add that using external GPUs is nothing new and there are
people that have successfully attached high end external gpus even to old
laptops like the glorious ThinkPad X220 (via an ExpressCard adapter).

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gravypod
You can take a look at the P71 which has a serious set of hardware (if you're
not going to be too far from a plug at any given time).

    
    
        GPU: Quadro P5000
        RAM: 64GB DDR4
        CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1535 or Intel Core i7-7820HQ
    

[https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/Th...](https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/ThinkPad-P71/p/22TP2WPWP71?menu-
id=P71)

~~~
Hydraulix989
I have the P50, and it is so heavy that carrying it around all the time has
literally damaged my back. It's fine if you don't walk everywhere in a city
with it in a backpack or messenger bag.

~~~
gravypod
There's also the P52s which is lighter (4.39lbs instead of the P50's 5.6lbs).
You give up the nice screen, gpu, and Xeon but you do save some weight.

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slashcom
Buy a dumb terminal. A very cheap, lightweight laptop that can handle a web
browser, ssh, and ideally drive an external monitor or two. Then rent time on
a cloud service of your choice.

Deep learning is very power hungry. Pretending you can do it on a battery is a
fool’s game.

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strooper
Like most comments, my strong advice is to go for a light laptop with long
battery life, and setup servers in AWS/DO/Linode as per your requirements. You
will always be able to destroy the server instances to save significant amount
of money. You will always be able to add/remove resources depending on your
requirements. And you will never have to worry about power supply. Can you
imagine how efficient it will be when you run time consuming tasks before
flight and get those done on arrival? ;)

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danielepolencic
It's cheaper and easier to have a workspace in the cloud than having a laptop
that consumer more than a kettle.

Just spent the past few weeks setting up distributed Tensorflow on Kubernetes
and I can say that the amount of power you have at your disposal is
phenomenal. I was able to do hyperparameters sweeping in a blink of an eye.
The best part if that you can delete your cluster when you don't need it
anymore. I can't think of a more cost effective setup.

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lesighh
would a laptop be optimal for such things? Wouldn't you be better loading data
into a home server where you can have more powerful cpu and multiple gpu's?

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crb002
The one you like developing on. Thinkpad for Linux, Mac for MacOS. Don't skimp
on RAM.

Rent GPUs in the cloud or buy a GPU box that you can run jobs on.

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gaspoweredcat
wouldnt something with a Vega M or Nvidia MX150 chip in be the best bet?
something like the XPS 15 maybe, thees also the nvidia quadro in the likes of
the thinkpad P but im not sure what the performance is like.

the other option is to get a fairly modern laptop with thunderbolt 3 and get
an external GPU enclosure to house a card to do the heavy lifting

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rektide
Get a light cheap laptop with a great display - maybe a Chuwi Lapbook 12.3 if
you really want to go #lowend - and spend those $2000 you'll save from not
buying a ghastly expensive laptop on cloud resources to do your research
right, and at a scale you'll never be able to achieve with a GPU or three.

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chriskanan
Like others mentioned, I'd go with a laptop with a long battery and remote in.
The main advantage of using a Razer Blade or similar laptop would be doing
live demos of algorithms, likely after training them, but that is a pretty
niche application.

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zkms
Have you considered getting a laptop that lets you export PCIe lanes (i think
they do that with Thunderbolt these days, not exactly sure) so you can use the
external GPU of your choice?

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lykr0n
The Dell Precision 5530 is XPS-15 like and has a dGPU option.

Razer has well known quality and support issues.Asus and MSI both have strong
laptop lines, but again support and quality is hit and miss.

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BenoitP
Get the one with 8 GPU NVIDIA Tesla V100 clustered with NVlink from amazon;
actually, rent it, but only when you need to train a model. It'll be cheaper.

