hardware thoughts

T

tOsYZYny

If you were to buy an off-the-shelf budget-friendly workstation and laptop, what CPU and GPU would you be leaning towards and why?

For 99% of my time, I don't need a dedicated GPU; however, it might be nice to have a decent GPU to have the ability to run an LLM locally. For that reason, I am looking more at AMD since I can run wayland and still have accelerated LLM performance. For nvidia, I believe for the most part, I need to use nouveau drivers which then means I cannot have accelerated LLM performance.

There are decent laptops around $500 USD with a performance rating near 24k on cpubenchmark.net, and about $700 USD with a GPU rating near 15k.
 
It will be tough reaching acceptable LLM performance in a laptop for $700.

FWIW I am much happier with my AMD CPU laptops than the Intel powered ones. I do not have a recent AMD GPU, so can't say anything about them.

I seem to remember that ollama can use NVIdia GPUs through Vulkan on FreeBSD, but at low performance. I wouldn't risk it unless you want to go on a crusade to make CUDA work with a Linux oillama through the Linuxulator.
 
What were you happier with AMD compared to Intel? What were the comparative models? Was it performance, power consumption, etc.?
 
The 8-full-core AMDs are generally faster for `make world` and large ports buildings than the hybrid laptop chips. Various T14 models, Intel and AMD. Power consumption not measured. The Intel laptops often have odd soundchips and webcams.
 
Ok, I use cpubenchmark.net to baseline the processor against what I have presently. My baseline is an old Intel i5-3470 - 4671, pretty slow :). I have the itch to replace it, but also, it works fine and most of the time I'm not even utilizing 1% of its power, but yeah, for building software, it tests the patience as I recently was running a 10th generation i9 which ranked about 3.5x faster, so it ripped right through builds.
 
I view Laptops as two classes of systems , you have the Lowcost consumer notebooks , and you have the professional workstation laptops. A mobile workstation is often more expensive then procuring a deskside PC. ( eg 3000 -4000 USD ) , However the peformance of the mobile workstation with a 3 - 5 Ghz CPU and dual memory bus is very good compared to the lowcost consumer models with sub 2 Ghz cpuspeeds.
The way to be able to afford a mobile workstation is to buy it second hand , There is a refurbished market place for 3 years old 2nd hand mobile workstation that comes back to a vendor after the lease time has expired.
 
drsnx60 said:
I view Laptops as two classes of systems , you have the Lowcost consumer notebooks , and you have the professional workstation laptops. A mobile workstation is often more expensive then procuring a deskside PC. ( eg 3000 -4000 USD ) , However the peformance of the mobile workstation with a 3 - 5 Ghz CPU and dual memory bus is very good compared to the lowcost consumer models with sub 2 Ghz cpuspeeds.
The way to be able to afford a mobile workstation is to buy it second hand , There is a refurbished market place for 3 years old 2nd hand mobile workstation that comes back to a vendor after the lease time has expired.
Click to expand...
What site(s) do you recommend - I used dellrefurbished.com and got a decent machine for the price.

I've had good luck with Dell hardware both in terms of driver support and reliability, but perhaps the quality control 20 years ago wasn't as good.
 
I don't buy refurbished, I'm not a fan. But generally, AMD processor and GPU in a Lenovo laptop is a safe bet. Not the latest stuff, but a couple generations back. The latest gen of AMD processors is 9000 series. I think that will run FreeBSD OK if you pair it with a known supported GPU (Radeon RX 7000 series, not to be confused with the older Radeon HD series).

$3-4k USD is pretty absurd for a laptop, even a high performance once. It's pretty unfortunate, but EU seems to be a bad place to buy laptops - For the exact same hardware, in US I get quotes for about half the price that gets quoted in EU/England. You can buy a plane ticket to JFK in addition to the laptop itself, just to blow the same amount of money. And even in New York, with its jacked up prices, same laptop will cost half of what you'd pay in London. Might as well blow $2k USD on a transatlantic 7 hour one way flight there, taxi to a Best Buy, grab laptop, taxi back to JFK, and another 7 hour flight back. Total money spent will be the same as walking into a London shop and buying there. The only difference - 14 hours of flying is effectively free.
 
tOsYZYny said:
If you were to buy an off-the-shelf budget-friendly workstation and laptop, what CPU and GPU would you be leaning towards and why?
Click to expand...
Intel: I've done PCVR with a $10 eBay USB hub Rift CV1 and 3 sensors on a Skylake laptop no problem; a X470 board choked with AMD's chipset-side USB with more than 1 sensor/etc, and I've heard issues 500+ still

NVIDIA: AMD's GPU encoding tech sucks notably for PCVR :p (I was on Windows during the 22.5.2+ driver re-write mess 6600XT; detailed Oculus encode notes, but a RTX 3060 did notably better)
 
For me, it is entirely about wide spread mainstream compatibility.
I do no work on any 'nix platform... everything I do is Windows specific.

Some of the bleeding edge software requires the latest instruction set extensions such as AVX-2, which I don't have in my aging i7-870.
I'm somewhat tempted to build a bleeding edge workstation with the latest and greatest, then keep it another 12 years like the one I have now.
But... I inherited a very nice Xeon with 8-cores/16-threads and 128gb of ECC, and am not inclined to throw it away.

SSD and generous RAM sure makes for a big performance boost.
 
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