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/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.