Please help me buy a new laptop!
Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2020 10:31 am
My research group has a fund for buying researchers new laptops. I'm eligible and this year the available budget is £1200. This is much more than I would spend on a laptop myself, but it's there to be spent, you know?
(I'm afraid I can't use this fund to build a tower instead. Laptops can be taken home, and they turn a blind eye to personal use, whereas towers have to be kept in the office.)
I've been told I can just choose whatever I like within the budget, but I've had my head mostly out of hardware news for years and I want to make sure I do a good job. After all, this is a rare opportunity for me to buy something expensive! ( ) So I have a few questions for GRcade:
1. What are some good places to buy laptops? I recall buying stuff from Scan and Ebuyer back in the day, but they seem kinda expensive now.
2. Is there a trustworthy source of reviews I should take a look at?
3. Are there any brands to be suspicious of? I remember Acer were considered pretty low-quality but that was years and years ago.
4. Does anyone have a particular recommendation? (See below.)
I think the most important spec for me is that it has 16 GB of RAM. While I do most of my work on a supercomputer, I do the data-vis part on my laptop and the more RAM I have the better that works. If it's more cost-effective to put an extra 8 GB into a laptop with my own money then that's fine as long as the upgrade is an easy process (ideally a hatch on the bottom) - but I'm not really willing to fully disassemble a laptop to do this because that's too stressful!
The second-most important thing is a modern GPU. This is so I can more conveniently prototype machine learning models before uploading them to our GPU cluster, but I hope a happy side-effect might be that I can play some newish PC games for the first time in about 10 years!
Any and all help on any of the above points would be appreciated.
(I'm afraid I can't use this fund to build a tower instead. Laptops can be taken home, and they turn a blind eye to personal use, whereas towers have to be kept in the office.)
I've been told I can just choose whatever I like within the budget, but I've had my head mostly out of hardware news for years and I want to make sure I do a good job. After all, this is a rare opportunity for me to buy something expensive! ( ) So I have a few questions for GRcade:
1. What are some good places to buy laptops? I recall buying stuff from Scan and Ebuyer back in the day, but they seem kinda expensive now.
2. Is there a trustworthy source of reviews I should take a look at?
3. Are there any brands to be suspicious of? I remember Acer were considered pretty low-quality but that was years and years ago.
4. Does anyone have a particular recommendation? (See below.)
I think the most important spec for me is that it has 16 GB of RAM. While I do most of my work on a supercomputer, I do the data-vis part on my laptop and the more RAM I have the better that works. If it's more cost-effective to put an extra 8 GB into a laptop with my own money then that's fine as long as the upgrade is an easy process (ideally a hatch on the bottom) - but I'm not really willing to fully disassemble a laptop to do this because that's too stressful!
The second-most important thing is a modern GPU. This is so I can more conveniently prototype machine learning models before uploading them to our GPU cluster, but I hope a happy side-effect might be that I can play some newish PC games for the first time in about 10 years!
Any and all help on any of the above points would be appreciated.