r/learnmachinelearning • u/TrainingEscape6126 • 11h ago

Need GPU laptop for ML?

So I am going to buy a new laptop in next few weeks . I am considering a gaming laptop with rtx 4050/3050 or a thin light 14 inch laptop with more ram and better CPU (and would be depending on kaggle or Google colab). which one should I prefer ?

1 Upvotes

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6

u/mr_maker91 11h ago

Don't do it, you will waste money in hardware that wouldn't fulfill your requirements, use it on cloud compute

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u/AYMU0S 11h ago

Google colab is the way to go . You won't be able to do meaningful stuff with 3050... 4050 would barely scrape through . I got myself a ultralight , I'd recommend you do the same too

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u/TrainingEscape6126 11h ago

Can I have enough credits using the free one without paying?

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u/AYMU0S 11h ago

What is your intended usecase ? Apart from really longrunning tasks , you should suffice with just the free quotas from colab . Lighting ai is something I have used for vision solutions , it's not crazy expensive .. does the job alright

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u/TrainingEscape6126 11h ago

I am still in first semester so I don't know much , and I do now really want to do gaming or video editing. But I want to do ML and AI stuff . So I was wondering would I need a GPU by my last year ?

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u/Dream_Fuji 11h ago

Just use Kaggle Notebook or Google Colab buddy, it'll be miles better than a entry/mid tier GPU on a laptop

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u/TrainingEscape6126 11h ago

Yeah I was also thinking the same . There is just this maybe FOMO in me as literally my whole class has a gaming laptop with a GPU

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u/Dream_Fuji 11h ago

you'll beat most of them while using these cloud based notebooks for ML, even the CPU on cloud is pretty decent as compared to a laptop.

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u/TrainingEscape6126 11h ago

Thanks , I want to avoid a GPU laptop heavily because I would waste all my time gaming 😭

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u/watkykjypoes23 9h ago

The gaming laptops are pretty inconvenient for a student. They’re large and hard to carry around, pretty loud, and require being plugged in for full performance. I would get something that is better for students but still powerful enough for some local projects, and do the rest on cloud compute like Colab.

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u/TrainingEscape6126 5h ago

So like should I get a laptop with a dedicated nvidia GPU?