What high-performance laptop should I buy for university? What tweaks are preferred?

diwang99

Honorable
Dec 21, 2012
6
0
10,510
Hi community.

It's been a few years since I've been on this forum. Glad to see it alive and well.

Anyway, I am now going to Uni, and I'm looking to buy a high-performance laptop.

From the stickied post:

1. What is your budget?
Anything below 3800 USD. Preferably at the 3000 USD range or below. Also note that any money I don't spend on a laptop will be extra cash for me to spend on useful devices like the neural compute stick or Nvidia jetson.

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
Just has to not be a behemoth in dimensions. The thinner the better, without sacrificing performance.

3. What screen resolution do you want?
I don't really care. Honestly, I'll be using this laptop for a multitude of purposes, including some 3D modelling. Just need good, crisp, images that aren't blurry.

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
Definitely. I plan to train neural networks and perform other very-high intensity tasks with this laptop.

5. How much battery life do you need?
Preferably, only doing minimal activities like web-browsing, note-taking, and coding, the laptop could last 4+ hours.

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low, Medium or High)?
While I don't play games anymore. I hope I could have a laptop that could do admirably (60+ fps) on High (if possible, Ultra) in almost all AAA titles and major releases.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
Unity game building, training deep learning models, and 3D modeling and animation.
I also plan to run matlab simulations involving plenty of matrices with high-dimensions.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
Preferably 512 gb or above. This doesn't have to be an issue since I could hook up an external hard drive.

9. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
Probably for 3 years or so.

10. What country do you live in?
United States

11. Please tell us any additional information if needed.
I don't need the laptop to cook my desk.
 
Solution
Take a look at www.xoticpc.com, can sort by a lot of things there. In your price range there will be no bad systems. You can customize the setup also from there, which is another reason I recommend that site. It is a lot better than wandering through Amazon with 30 laptops that look the same but are tough to compare.
Take a look at www.xoticpc.com, can sort by a lot of things there. In your price range there will be no bad systems. You can customize the setup also from there, which is another reason I recommend that site. It is a lot better than wandering through Amazon with 30 laptops that look the same but are tough to compare.
 
Solution