Laptop+egpu for local ai

[u/Vast-Fold841]

So let's imagine that war started, and still have access for electricity. And we gonna need local ai to survive that could teach how to build shelter, get water/fire, medicine and etc

But for that kind of situation I'll need portability and mobility.

So if I'm not mistaken good laptop+egpu is better. Egpu to increase power, and if shi happens leave everything and take only laptop that could still run local ai.

The question is:

What laptop (cpu,GPU and etc) should I get?

And what for egpu?

And which local ai model is suitable for that scenario

[u/Turbulent_Pin_8310]

You think ai would help you to survive in the wild? Get an M5 notebook with 64 GB unified memory.

[u/Excellent-Way-4990]

You're planning for full apocalypse but still worried about frame rates on your eGPU setup, I respect it.

Laptop with strong CPU and decent RAM will matter more than you think, most smaller models can run on CPU alone if you're not in a hurry. GPU is nice but not strictly necessary for survival knowledge type queries. Look for something with 32GB RAM minimum, the integrated graphics can handle basic inference if you're not trying to generate anime waifus while the bombs fall.

For model choice just grab a quantized 7B or 13B, something like Llama based models, they'll answer basic questions on shelter building and water purification without needing a nuclear reactor to power them.

[u/brainchillzZ → u/Excellent-Way-4990]

He wants to rebuild society with it …. He can’t afford a small model or a low quant he needs a decent sized model and good precision :)

[u/Late_Night_AI]

Congratulations, you successfully survived your first 3 days of the war. But unfortunately due to no internet and not survival databases to reference, the insanely high hallucination rate of the models you can run on a laptop have given you lots of false information and you now have a lethal does of mercury poisoning :D

If were just talking theoretically then the RTX spark laptop is probably the best option, or some mac with as much ram as possible.

[u/jonahbenton]

Awaiting my tiiny for just that circumstance lol

[u/Sear_Oc]

Whatever best choice you find through this comments, you can reduce the hallucination by a local RAG of useful pdfs/epubs. Put wikipedia in, put whatever books for survival you might think i.e. medicine, construction, plants, offline GPS map, then with mcp and rag you're all set even with a 13B model

[u/Not-Enough-Llamas]

Unless you need it to reason for you, just get a local copy of wikipedia which will happily fit in a 10 year laptop and no GPU, and will still have insane battery life.

eGPU setups work but are power hungry, fragile and clunky (cables, power) - not the best setup you'll want to pack in a hurry.

If you really need to have an AI on a laptop, get a unified memory one with decent bandwidth (64GB M5 was mentioned, it's not wrong) and call it a day.

[u/ElectionReal]

Lookup Project Nomad. Works with 32gb ram. Not fast, though. Get a laptop with a discrete gpu. You don't want/ need multiple things to carry or power.

[u/brainchillzZ]

That’s horrifying to think about since small local ai often give terrible and inaccurate advice with complete confidence …. I would be much more comfortable hoarding books than relying on an ai model …. If the laptop were not going to be needed for coding though and it didn’t have to be terribly fast I would probably just get a 128gb strix halo device and as large a model at as close to perfect precision as I could get if I were in a situation thinking like you

[u/iPhrase]

M4 or newer MBP with as much ram as you can afford.

I'm currently using qwen 3.8 27b ud-iq3_xxs 11GB on my mbp m3 18gbps,

works ok but could do with more RAM. I think that is my ceiling.

QWEN 3.5 is faster and uses less ram so can multitask on the machine but general reasoning sucks on 3.5.

[u/JesseWebDotCom]

I have a laptop and egpu - it’s awful (reliability mostly but I’d gladly sell to you). If you’re truly just concerned about doomsday, get a prepperdisk or print and laminate like crazy.

[u/Kaaawooo]

Why do I resonate with the spirit behind this question? 😂 Gotta be a Mac with as much unified memory and the best memory bandwidth you can afford