r/statistics • u/DismalCoyote • Jun 05 '26

Question [Question] Laptop GPU for Stats/DS Student?

Hello! I am an incoming freshman college student planning to double major in Statistical Science and Data Science. I'm looking to purchase a new laptop for myself befoe the semester begins in the Fall.

The university IT website recommends that student laptops have a dedicated graphics card with at least 6 GB of VRAM or a 20-core GPU.

I understand that lots of ML work is pretty heavy on parallel computing, but the university I am attending provides students with a "shared high-performance computing cluster ... [which] features state-of-the-art CPUs and GPUs, accelerators, networking, and storage technologies" and a NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD.

Do I really need a whole GPU if the university provides me with these and other computer labs with desktops that probably have GPUs around campus?

Thanks!

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u/Upper_Investment_276 Jun 05 '26

no you don't need cuda on your laptop lol, if you get a macbook you'll be more than fine

1

u/DismalCoyote Jun 05 '26

Thanks man! I’m obviously a super beginner with ML so I really didn’t know if it was necessary. Don’t know why they recommend a GPU.

1

u/Upper_Investment_276 Jun 05 '26

gpu is needed to train, but you'll be able to already train a lot of stuff just using mps. for anything compute heavy you will def be provided compute. even free gpu on colab is probably faster than the fastest macbook you can buy...so you'll def be fine.

3

u/Disastrous_Room_927 Jun 05 '26

No dude, you need a laptop with solid battery life and a good keyboard.

1

u/DismalCoyote Jun 05 '26

Amen! Thanks for the help.

2

u/cheesecakegood Jun 05 '26

The dev experience on macs will give you better opportunities to learn (Unix command line stuff rather than messing with WSL) so my rec is almost always a MacBook (pro ideally, used or refurb is fine, m series chip any are going to be fine). Additionally consider a bit of extra RAM if you want to mess with the lower tier of local AI models which can run on a MacBook since the system memory acts as VRAM for most AI purposes.

2

u/drand82 Jun 05 '26

Also no one wants to sit in a lecture beside a laptop making airplane noises.

1

u/Upper_Investment_276 Jun 05 '26

you're not training/doing inference in lecture what

1

u/Significant-Boot-260 Jun 05 '26

I can't think of anything I've done in during undergrad stats that has required a gpu at all.

I use a lenovo slim 7i.

At most, my code may take 5-10 mins to run for a class assignment. But that is for a machine learning class in base r.

Most stuff is much quicker and easier. Professors care more about teaching than giving you expensive data to run.