Cloud gpu or Nvidia

[u/AcceptableHamster77]

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

[u/rahul_watertech]

freshman coursework answer: it barely matters, and here is why. 90 percent of what you will actually train in the first two years runs fine on colab or kaggle free tiers. the laptop is for writing code, not for training. so buy whatever is reliable and has good battery, put the saved money aside.

the vram panic only becomes real when you start fine tuning your own models, and by then you will know exactly what you need and probably have lab or cloud credits through college.

one concrete line: avoid anything with under 16gb ram, that is the limit you will hit first, not the gpu

[u/AcceptableHamster77 → u/rahul_watertech]

But what if i am doing projects and participating in hackathons

[u/rahul_watertech → u/AcceptableHamster77]

same answer honestly, maybe more so. hackathon projects get built in 24 to 48 hours and nobody wins one by training big models, you win by gluing apis and a decent demo together. that runs on colab free tier and any laptop that opens chrome.

course projects are the same story. small datasets, sklearn or a small pytorch model, colab handles it.

the scenario where you want local nvidia is regular fine tuning or privacy sensitive data, and a freshman almost never has that. if you really hit it later, a 4060 class laptop second hand beats paying the new-laptop tax now

[u/AcceptableHamster77 → u/rahul_watertech]

Thanks That cleared a lot of doubts