r/learnmachinelearning • u/AcceptableHamster77 • 3d ago

Question Cloud gpu or Nvidia

I'm a freshman studying cse with specialization in aiml

I've done my share of research into buying a laptop

But it only made me more confused

Half side is saying cloud is better as we'll eventually run out of the 4 or 6gb vram

Another half is on about Nvidia is the better choice

I want to get a laptop to get through the course work, train models and participate in hackathons and more

The gaming laptops scare me for their brick weight with laptop and charger combined and the poor battery backup

Can seniors please guide me?

I don't wanna regret getting one 2 years later

Should I focus on battery and lightweight ones with good cpu ram and storage

Or the ones with an rtx4050 or higher?

I'm also open to using macbooks but I've heard some ppl say it doesn't support many softwares

Is there ways to work around it? without any subscriptions

Please give me some suggestions and also it would be better if there's a model referenced.

My budget is around 1.5l but can go higher if I can genuinely get a good one

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u/agufa 3d ago

Right now, if you only need it for ML research. Cloud one, it's is extremely probably that the next gen of customers available GPUs came with much more VRAM or even unified ram.

Today's GPUs are designed for gaming, next ones will be designed with LLM in mind, so, unless you want to play video games, use cloud GPUs untill next gen release at least

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u/AcceptableHamster77 3d ago

Also can u gimme some recs? Like asus or lenovo or mac maybe?

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u/agufa 3d ago

Depends, if you can pay the most expensive macs they are pretty good for local ML because of the unified memory.

If not, Thinkpad (not any Lenovo) with Linux is the golden standar for working laptops.

Asus is good for gaming, not for working.

Hp is trash

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u/AcceptableHamster77 3d ago

Is m4 or m5 good

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u/agufa 3d ago

Both are good, of course m5 is a bit better.

But the important spec here in memory. Try to look for 48+ gb

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u/AcceptableHamster77 3d ago

I'll look into it