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Anyone work in PWC FDD? I have a few questions
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Back end or front end?
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Do you really need a laptop? A custom built desktop will be a fraction of the price and significantly better
Bowl Leader
If you don't wanna use cloud, you can ssh to your half price desktop with a very cheap chromebook or something.
If you just want out of the box powerhouse laptop, alienware had surprisingly good non-sale prices on GPU (gaming) laptops. Don't know about holiday sales.
The new MacBook Pro has a great new chip
Buy a regular laptop and use Cloud GPU's to do whatever ML work you need, it's not that expensive
Acer Swift and Asus Zephyrus range have pretty good reviews.
Mentor
Use the cloud if you need a gpu or need to do heavy number crunching.
Your laptop is going to sound like a jet fighter if you try to use the gpu to train a model and you aren’t going to like lugging it around. Plus it’ll most likely end up thermal throttling.
If you are going to be training a large number of models it may be worth while to get an inexpensive laptop and buy a desktop that you can ssh/rdp into.
It’ll be hard to build your own desktop these days as nvidia cannot keep up with gpu demand. I’d look to get something prebuilt if you need to go the desktop route.
Check GPU compatibility with CUDA before buying (https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus). NVIDIA cards are much easier to use with tensorflow. If you really want the smaller form factor you are better off running compute heavy workloads in the cloud. Find a provider that doesn't charge / charges a minimal amount when the VM is off.
Considering a MacBook but would prefer Windows OS
There aren't too many options Mac-wise. The 13" doesn't have a dedicated GPU. MSI has pretty good Cyber Monday deals, saw a couple of machines with Nvidia RTX GPU's <$1k