Fast laptop required

[PhaseThree]

Having read more about machine learning and the likely direction of my daughter's work, I think it highly likely she will eventually need access to hardware with multiple GPUs, in the cloud, or in her university department or computer centre. She may not realise this yet as she has only just got started. A small, cheap laptop seems the way to go to me (with remote access to something more powerful). My daughter has a £1500 grant from the Welcome Trust which she was intending to use to buy a laptop. I need to ask her how flexible this money is, ie could she buy a desktop and a laptop, or spend some money this year, more in a couple of year's time.

Apart from all the reservations raised over heat and power requirements, my daughter does not have a good track record when it comes to looking after computers. It would be fairly devastating if she wrecked a £1500 laptop!

Thanks for all the help. I need to discuss all this with my daughter.

Machine learning is a big field and the hardware she will need access to will depend very much on the problem she is trying to solve. As a lower cost option Google have made their TensorFlow processors (TPU) available as a develeopment board which can be plugged into any PC or laptop.

https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/dev-board/

This may not be the solution for her, but definetely worth a look.

[Urbandreamer]

Apart from all the reservations raised over heat and power requirements, my daughter does not have a good track record when it comes to looking after computers. It would be fairly devastating if she wrecked a £1500 laptop!

Can I recommend a second hand T430 or T440 thinkpad. I posted elsewhere on TLF that my daughter managed to pour a pint of water into her T430 fan exhust. Somewhat surprisingly it survived!

The T and X range of thinkpads are designed to be abbused. It's relatively easy to change the display if broken. The power jack has a flying lead to the motherboard on the T430 (not T430s or T440 I think). Which means that's an easy swap. The keyboard is also easy to replace. If the PC is flat on a desk, rather than on it's side, water poured on the keyboard is guided to dranage hole's in the bottom cover.

They are also fairly inexpensive.

[hiriskpaul]

Having read more about machine learning and the likely direction of my daughter's work, I think it highly likely she will eventually need access to hardware with multiple GPUs, in the cloud, or in her university department or computer centre. She may not realise this yet as she has only just got started. A small, cheap laptop seems the way to go to me (with remote access to something more powerful). My daughter has a £1500 grant from the Welcome Trust which she was intending to use to buy a laptop. I need to ask her how flexible this money is, ie could she buy a desktop and a laptop, or spend some money this year, more in a couple of year's time.

Apart from all the reservations raised over heat and power requirements, my daughter does not have a good track record when it comes to looking after computers. It would be fairly devastating if she wrecked a £1500 laptop!

Thanks for all the help. I need to discuss all this with my daughter.

Machine learning is a big field and the hardware she will need access to will depend very much on the problem she is trying to solve. As a lower cost option Google have made their TensorFlow processors (TPU) available as a develeopment board which can be plugged into any PC or laptop.

https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/dev-board/

This may not be the solution for her, but definetely worth a look.

Thanks. From my limited understanding, I believe these types of board are for running a model after it has been developed. ie, after the "Learning" has been done. Still might be useful though.

[PhaseThree]

Having read more about machine learning and the likely direction of my daughter's work, I think it highly likely she will eventually need access to hardware with multiple GPUs, in the cloud, or in her university department or computer centre. She may not realise this yet as she has only just got started. A small, cheap laptop seems the way to go to me (with remote access to something more powerful). My daughter has a £1500 grant from the Welcome Trust which she was intending to use to buy a laptop. I need to ask her how flexible this money is, ie could she buy a desktop and a laptop, or spend some money this year, more in a couple of year's time.

Apart from all the reservations raised over heat and power requirements, my daughter does not have a good track record when it comes to looking after computers. It would be fairly devastating if she wrecked a £1500 laptop!

Thanks for all the help. I need to discuss all this with my daughter.

Machine learning is a big field and the hardware she will need access to will depend very much on the problem she is trying to solve. As a lower cost option Google have made their TensorFlow processors (TPU) available as a develeopment board which can be plugged into any PC or laptop.

https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/dev-board/

This may not be the solution for her, but definetely worth a look.

Thanks. From my limited understanding, I believe these types of board are for running a model after it has been developed. ie, after the "Learning" has been done. Still might be useful though.

They are targeted a lot more towards Inference rather than training. In the Google world you train your Machine Learning application on their cloud then move the resulting model to the board to perform the inference. However the tutorial at the link above shows the "retraining" of a generic image recognition system on the board rather than in the cloud, so it isn't an inference only solution.

[Urbandreamer]

I thought I'd post an advertising* Youtube link for the T440s.

Don't try this with any old laptop!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5n2WaMMHo

(I love the close ups that show the two streams from the drain holes)
Oh BTW, you will find similar videos that are not produced by the manufacturer.
Of course and a few of competitors.

*Note, lenovo no longer sell this model and I gain nothing from any second hand sales from any source.

[stewamax]

Hope for a lottery win, wait three months, and buy an Asus ProArt StudioBook One with a Core I9 processor and Quadro RTX 6000 graphics and 4K resolution screen. An awesome beast.
Apple - eat your heart out.

[hiriskpaul]

In the end my daughter has gone for a Dell Inspiron 7000 with a 15.6 inch screen. Reasonably portable, but has a higher performing 6 core "H" i7 processor compared with the "U" series used in ultra portables. It also has a low end Nvidia card. This means she can experiment and learn how to use machine learning software before submitting more heavy duty batches to the shared university cluster.

I suspect that the laptop may still get quite hot after several minutes intensive use though and was wondering whether anyone had any experience of laptop cooler pads. They don't seem to cost much, but do they actually work?

[AsleepInYorkshire]

In the end my daughter has gone for a Dell Inspiron 7000 with a 15.6 inch screen. Reasonably portable, but has a higher performing 6 core "H" i7 processor compared with the "U" series used in ultra portables. It also has a low end Nvidia card. This means she can experiment and learn how to use machine learning software before submitting more heavy duty batches to the shared university cluster.

I suspect that the laptop may still get quite hot after several minutes intensive use though and was wondering whether anyone had any experience of laptop cooler pads. They don't seem to cost much, but do they actually work?

Yes. Nobebird. Not as noisy as the laptop fan and if I'm using a lot of power it does keep the laptop cool enough to stop the internal fan coming on.

I'm running an I7 Quad with 16mb ram.

AiY

[Infrasonic]

I suspect that the laptop may still get quite hot after several minutes intensive use though and was wondering whether anyone had any experience of laptop cooler pads. They don't seem to cost much, but do they actually work?

Under clocking could also be worth looking at if running at 100% for long periods, rather than running into thermal throttling issues.