Ask HN: Should I invest in a desktop PC in 2017? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I invest in a desktop PC in 2017?

I'm currently using a Thinkpad X201, with a first gen i7 processor, 8GBs of ram and an SSD.

I want to purchase a new computer to own a faster machine.

Currently I'm mostly using the thinkpad on my desk with two external monitors.

On the other hand, the battery life of it is pretty good and I like that it's small and lightweight.

I'm not a gaming person, so I don't need a discrete graphics card. I'm mostly using either Linux or FreeBSD with single-boot, but for Photoshop and school-work I sometimes need to work with windows. If I had two graphics cards I could forward one to QEMU and get near native response times on VMs.

Last but not least, one part of me wants to experience building a desktop.

Calculating the expenses, building a desktop would cost me arround 550 euros. But in the same price range I could buy a low-end 7th gen kaby lake laptop.

I know that desktop processors are much better than their laptop counterparts.

This question has been eating me away for the last 6 months. On one hand, the performance of my current machine is bearable, on the other hand I think I'm missing out on the speed of newer processors and limiting myself.

What would you do,

is desktop still relevant for dev-work in 2017?

Will I experience any difference in day to day use (heavy browsing, emacs, photoshop, occasionally an IDE) if I buy a 7th gen laptop instead of a 7th gen desktop?

View on HN

In my opinion there is only one answer to this question for anyone doing development:

Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor, right now thats 6700k, add at least 16gb of ram, 1 mid-size ssd, 2x 4tb drives in raid.

If you want to do any kind of GPU work add the fastest or second fastest consumer nvidia card, like the 1080 or 1070.

If you want to game get a second ssd and install windows on it. It goes without saying one should install some flavor of linux on the first ssd.

This is a sick development machine and represents the sweet spot in price/performance, saving money on your axe is a false economy.

You will also have the ability to overclock in case you come across a task that needs it.

Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor,

What I typically do is buying a used company workstation from eBay (they are often sold by the tens). This gets you a nice robust 4/8 core Xeon machine with a lot of CPU cache and 16 or 32 GB memory (somtimes ECC) for ~300-400 Euro. Add an SSD you are done.

They typically come with a Windows Pro license as well if you need that.

Edit: since the hardware is typically 2-3 years old and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, everything typically works out of the box on Linux or FreeBSD.

> Buy the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor, right now thats 6700k,

7700K. The same clocked higher.

Whether a gpu that expensive is worth it highly depends on what is meant with GPU work. For non-core-gamers, non gpu-accelerated-AI-guys, something like a RX 470 is plenty.

> the fastest non-extreme consumer intel processor

> the fastest or second fastest consumer nvidia card

> represents the sweet spot in price/performance, saving money on your axe is a false economy.

Care to explain your reasoning? Going with high-end components seems to be the opposite of the sweet spot. A $200 i5-7600 and $250 GTX 1060 are going to be indistinguishable in non-benchmark settings for most workloads when compared to a $700 GTX 1080 and $350 i7-7700k. Or even a $100 AMD A10-7860K and a $200 RX480.

I have a hard time believing that reaction times to differences of a few milliseconds or one extra frame being painted actually add up to matter. If they do, why not go with the extreme edition processors and triple SLI 1080s?

Because developer time is worth much more than the hardware cost delta.

There are a number of tasks we do that are compute bottlenecked, how about compressing an archive, or compiling, or transcoding?

Even things like apt-get install is faster with a faster processor, and vim plugins can be ridiculous with their lag. It all adds up to hours and days and eventually weeks of your life over time.

I don't think the tradeoff of saving $100 or $200 on a chip that will last three years and will be worth more on resale is worth it.

This is exactly what I did. For $1200 I have a Manjaro/Windows box along with a Chromebook running Lubuntu. My desktop runs at 4k resolution and my chromebook has over 10 hours of battery life

I've settled on a similar setup.

I built my desktop box three years ago and coupled it with a 449 50" 4k monitor, and am still on a four or five year old laptop.

I see now that the 7700k is 23% faster than the 4770k I built my box with. 23% improvement in bzip2 time is worth it to me.

It's great bang for the buck,

8tb sounds too much for just development.

I sure hope it's just 4TB, because if you're running Raid0, god help you when it fails (unless you're somehow backing up 8TB to Glacier or something)

It's 4tb in Raid 0.

Why not buy the biggest disk that fits in the space your case and sata cables will support?

All that I am proposing is a maxed out micro-atx case -- it only costs about ~1200

>1 mid-size ssd

NVMe

if you need a desktop, these are tempting https://www.amazon.com/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC6i7KYK-Mini/dp/B01DJ...

> It goes without saying one should install some flavor of linux on the first ssd.

Surely it goes without saying that one should install whatever OS they want to on the first SSD? Why is Linux mandatory?

As someone who just got a decent desktop for $250, go check out eBay. There are absolutely amazing deals on used workstations. Warning: only buy from the people with good reviews and >50 reviews.

Examples:

Xeon E5-1660 + 16GB RAM = $359 (add your own SSD)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/351956704259

i7-6700 + 16GB DDR4 + 4TB HDD + Radeon R5 340X = $650

http://www.ebay.com/itm/172487064618

Xeon E5-2690 + 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD = $996

http://www.ebay.com/itm/302054600901

These are just examples. There are tons of options. You can even build your own system.

I personally love having both a desktop and a laptop. To me the advantages of the desktop are that it is in a fixed location within my house, with multiple large monitors and is part of psychologically getting into "work mode". The laptop is great for a change of pace at coffee shops, client sites, and the general goodness that comes with mobility. There are a variety of ways to keep pertinent information sync'd (google drive, github, evernote, etc.)

Also, the personal pleasure of looking at your desktop and saying "I built this" is nice. As others mentioned, there are some one time purchases like case, power supply, etc. Otherwise, you can piecemeal upgrade. I've been doing that for 10 years now. The case is the same black aluminum, just as shiny, but the innards have changed over time.

Remember, the fun can be lost in striving always for "the best". Strive instead for knowledge gained and personal goals. Good luck!

I suspect your main motivator is to want to build a PC. Chances are that the extra computational power or cores won't actually make your work faster for day to day use.

Building a PC is fun and you will be able to do piece-meal upgrades as you want instead of having to replace an entire laptop because it becomes outdated. Financially it might make sense since you have one time expenses like case, power supply, peripherals and then things you can upgrade at will like motherboard, cpu, ram, and drives. If you future-proof the motherboard purchase (buying best or high-end now) then future CPU updates would just require a new CPU.

The downside of building a PC is that new stuff is coming out every year without much actual progress regarding speed. And mobility is a downside if you need something in class (you mentioned you were in school) or to go somewhere to work on a project collaboratively or if you move a lot.

If you can, keep the laptop and build a PC. Then you can connect to more compute power if you need it, assuming you setup a way to connect to it from the internet.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I had been thinking about this for so long that I've forgetten the actual reason I even wanted to build a desktop. It was to get the experience selecting and putting the pieces together, having control over the hardware.

As for remote connection, I can setup a way to connect to it from the internet as I manage my own VPN on a cheap server.

I definitely want to build a PC and my laptop is going nowhere.

> If you future-proof the motherboard purchase (buying best or high-end now) then future CPU updates would just require a new CPU.

Unless the CPU socket changes.

That's why 2017 is not a bad year for a motherboard purchase: AMD will come out with their new AM4 socket pretty soon, and Intel will probably retain the LGA 1151 socket introduced with Skylake in 2015/16 for a few more years.

Yeah that'll get you. My builds tend to be years apart so it's more of a replace everything scenario.

It is fun to look at the new tech coming out and day-dream of pimp-my-pc scenarios. I still think daily work doesn't improve much with CPU/mobo changes for most developers though. Especially if it is web related development since you will likely be running on virtualized servers anyhow.

> I suspect your main motivator is to want to build a PC. Chances are that the extra computational power or cores won't actually make your work faster for day to day use.

Another potential factor - If you play games or develop 3d applications, high end GPUs are much more affordable in desktop form factors than in laptop ones and generally have more horsepower than their laptop equivalents. If you do a lot of video encoding for live streaming or media creation you may also benefit from this (seriously a GTX 1080 can encode 1080p HEVC at 300 FPS).

The cost is also generally lower for comparable hardware if you do a DIY desktop than a laptop.

While this might not be relevant to OP, it may be relevant to other people in a similar situation.

This may not be relevant to the OP, but I'm interested in machine learning, and having a graphics card with a big GPU is important. Serious machine learning computers have sky high prices, but for learning, you can get a graphics card with 640 or more gpu cores for $250 or less. I don't know of any laptops in the requested price range that have that kind of gpu power.

Of course, a big graphics card can also be used for graphics work, including video encoding, not just video games.

Yeah, there's a quite broad spectrum of GPGPU applications these days, Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive list to consider:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...

If you're interested in any of these and don't need the mobility for another reason, a desktop may be a very good consideration indeed.

For my current involvement of taking the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree, I'm currently using a 750 Ti SC card - which was what I had in my current workstation at home. I've found that it performs adequately (so far) for what I am doing. I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and I installed CUDA and CUDANN (and other junk) to run Python/TensorFlow with GPU support.

That said, I'm currently working on the behavioral cloning project (teach a virtual car to drive using what we've learned so far), and given the amount of data we'll gather (10s of thousands of frames we have to process) to train our models - I tend to wonder if I will need to upgrade.

Fortunately, that won't be too difficult for me - I have both a 960 and 970 waiting in the wings; they were cards originally destined for a mini-itx gaming machine build that I've never gotten around to (hmm - maybe I should just build it for my next workstation instead).

Also - 960s and 970s are dropping in price like a rock, since the hardcore gamers are moving to the 10xx line; while they may not have as many cores or as much speed, they are still very capable cards for ML purposes.

I've also been considering getting a multi-pcie slot server motherboard (maybe with dual xeons or such - these mobo combos are actually pretty cheap on ebay), and dropping in one of those cards, then later adding on more GPU cards - strictly for an ML box...

AMD's Ryzen architecture may offer some good value for what you're looking for, at least versus Intel's offerings. It launches at the end of February.

Buying used like others have suggested is a great idea too, especially since Moore's law is completely and utterly dead. CPUs have seen single digit percentage improvement YoY for a while a now.

I would second waiting for Ryzen. So far the demos we've seen look promising.

Best case scenario: Ryzen matches or beats Intel at a lower price point. Ryzen processors are cheap and Intel has to come down in price to compete.

Worst case scenario: Ryzen flops completely and Intel's prices are unaffected.

The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but either way, it's worth waiting at least until then to find out.

For 550€ I personally wouldn't buy a new laptop, I'd either buy a used/refurbished laptop or build a desktop PC, cheap new laptops tend to be not so great.

If your existing laptop is still usable, you'd at least have a laptop even if you went for the desktop PC.

For normal use the experience isn't much different, but a desktop is nicer for tinkering and somewhat better upgradeable (RAM, large disks, adding a GPU if it becomes necessary), and if you do calculation-intensive things most laptops run into their thermal limits pretty quickly, a desktop can maintain its top speed.

My existing laptop is still very usable. I had a lot of trouble with overheating in the past in compiling packages.

As for CPU intensive task, I do video conversion from HEVC to x264 to watch movies on my TV via chromecast. I suspect that would happen really fast.

Like you said, I could tinker more, install couple of disk drives and run multiple OS's without hitting the MBR limit.

Sidenote: If your laptop is overheating it might be related to dust accumulating over the years inside the laptop in the area of the CPU, CPU fan, air inlets and outlets. You could probably get it cleaned in a local laptop repair shop or do it yourself (with the risk of damaging something).

Of course it's relevant. You can get much more power/$ once portability isn't a concern and you can have a huge display instead of a small one (or two huge displays instead of one huge and one small).

If you're running a full-blown IDE or a lot of tests, it's a significant work improvement to have a desktop (even comparing a high end MBP vs iMac).

The main argument for me is noise. It's very easy to build a desktop PC that remains silent under heavy load.

If you're going to get a desktop, get an Intel NUC. The hardware is Linux friendly and the format factor can't be beat. There's just about every range of $ vs CPU so whatever you want to spend you'll find one. Not sure how much the € exchange would impact things but in $ it'd be about $3-400 for a nice setup and $5-600 for a very nice setup (great CPU, 32GB ram, m.2 SSD etc).

they are all m.2 now, but they are also NVMe

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-NUC-Kit-NUC6i7KYK-Mini/dp/B01DJ...

After six year, I recently built myself a new desktop computer. My budget was a little higher, but I think it's worth sharing.

Hardware: Asrock EP2C602-4L-D16, 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670, 8x 8GB Hynix PC3-10600R DDR3 ECC, 2x Noctua NH-U12DX i4, Corsair RM850i, Phanteks Enthoo Pro

Because I bought the CPUs and the RAM second hand, they only cost me 390 euros. Even when buying all the other stuff brand new, the total was still less than a 1000 euros. To be fair that's without an SSD and Graphics card, because I kept those from my previous set-up. With 32 logical cores it's perfect for compiling, which is what I use it for. If you're interested, you might want to have a look at this techspot article and see how a similar build compares to recent i7's: http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

> is desktop still relevant for dev-work in 2017?

What? I'm just thinking on buying _another_ 4K display to fit all the windows nicely. Also, my 1 year-old box has 5x more CPU cores than a top-the-line laptop. And 4x more memory than a top-of-the-line MBP.

And I'm sitting 10 hrs a day at least, so I need proper posture, chair, split mechanical keyboard, whatever.

If I was thinking about a desktop in terms of compute power, I'd buy a(nother) used Dell Precision 7000 series workstation because for a few hundred dollars I can get an older generation Xeon (or two), a monster power supply, a fantastically engineered case, ECC RAM support, and gobs of PCI expansion capacity (see 'power supply' above).

The one I bought for the boy last summer had a Xeon hexacore (12 threads and big L3 cache), 12gigs of ECC, 500GB of spinning rust, and a Windows 7 license for <$300 with shipping. Adding in a small SSD and a 2GB 0.7 teraflop GPU added about another $100. Nothing I could build with a similar budget would even come close in terms of compute or hardware quality (just a similar case and power supply would be $400 new).

I'd add that for *nix, a big honking desktop can be an Xclient for the Xserver on your laptop and run the heavy compute tasks.

Good luck.

550 euros is around $583 which is not quite enough to build a performant desktop with new components, especially when you factor in things like a monitor.

So I would save up until you have more like 850-950 euros or more.

Also, if you build a PC, eventually you may be sorry that you can't even _try_ any PC game or virtual reality headset or anything since you don't have a graphics card. I guess you could put off buying the graphics card until later if you really want to. But you may want to consider that when you select your motherboard.

Personally I would like to have one (or maybe two) M.2 (NVMe) slots for that type of SSD which can be 2, 5, or even 10 times as fast as the regular SATA SSD since it uses PCI Express and bypasses the SATA overhead. I believe they sort of look like RAM sticks/slots but are called M.2 and have flash on them. So look for a motherboard with that. Also I would like to have 2-3 2TB HDDs in RAID for extra storage. And a nice monitor. You could spend half of your budget on a nice monitor..

If you want to experiment with deep learning or something, you will want a newer Nvidia card because things like Tensorflow and Keras don't (yet) work with AMD graphics as far as I know. And if you get a nice graphics card, wouldn't you want to at least try out GTA 5 or whatever new game a few times? You can dual boot to Linux or use Virtual Box.

Anyway I say yes but you should save up more so you can get make a nicer desktop.

Maybe you can go here https://pcpartpicker.com/ and make a careful plan and then when you are sure buy a decent chassis. When you are getting close to having enough saved then buy a motherboard that will work with all of the other components you plan. Then you can buy a CPU. I mean if you don't want to wait until you have everything saved up. But I would just want to buy nice stuff so don't try to fit it into a tiny budget.

I feel like a workstation--even a cheap one--is a grand luxury. Lugging a laptop to and from work is a pain, and utterly expected at many companies these days. Leaving a desktop at work means leaving work at work. Add a mechanical keyboard and trackball, and laugh at comparisons of laptop chiclets and trackpads.

Since you mentioned school work, I'm guessing you might be a full time (university?) student? Leaving work at work might be less exciting for you. Still, a desktop can help you enjoy college more. There have been some recent-ish studies showing how you retain info better when taking notes by hand. Also, campuses are lovely places best experienced out from behind the glow of a screen. Finally, walking around without a weight strapped to your back is nice.

I recently went from a i5-2500K at 4.4Ghz to a i7-6700K at 4.4GHz for my desktop, and my Webpack w/ Babel compile step (entirely single-threaded) for a larger project dropped from 24 -> 12 seconds changing just the CPU (same SSD).

For comparison, my 2015 Macbook Pro i5 runs the same compile task in around 50 seconds. So there is definitely still benefits to having a powerful desktop around, and in my experience developing is more pleasant with quick turnaround times. The incremental compile times dropped accordingly, and having a sub-second vs 4 second delay between a change and seeing the result does impact your workflow.

For gaming, the new CPU did absolutely nothing, except smoothing out the minimum FPS a bit. Pour all your money into the GPU if that's your interest.

So here are the reasons why I personally like having a desktop.

  * Quiet under full load. Can actually run jobs overnight in my bedroom (e.g. rendering, machine learning).
  * Frees up space from the desk. Better for ergonomics if you set things up right.
  * Can have more memory for memory-intensive things (VMs, rendering, machine learning, etc).
  * Slightly cheaper for the performance.

In return, you sacrifice portability. If you try to solve that by having a desktop and a laptop simultaneously, it will probably be painful synchronization-wise. E.g. on your laptop, you're comparing some products - you have excel open as well as a few tabs in Chrome. How do you automatically shift everything over?

> How do you automatically shift everything over?

I use a combination of a home NAS and Syncthing, both of which play nicely with the Windows/macOS/Debian systems I have deployed.

> How do you automatically shift everything over?

I'd like to know if there's an easy solution for this as well. I have a laptop and a desktop that I snagged at a university auction [1], both with Ubuntu. I keep a portion of my work in Dropbox, but I'd really like to build a "local network dropbox equivalent" for large directories. I don't have the knowledge to do so.

[1]: http://www.publicsurplus.com/

This might be a useful tool for you to try: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

it's like rsync, but two-way.

You might also find this useful:

https://owncloud.org/

A tool I've the found to be the closest local network dropbox equivalent: https://syncthing.net/

While not a full solution for everyone, I'm a student who has a laptop and desktop. I use Bittorrent Sync (Resilio) to sync my files. Chrome if forced a bit can sync your tabs. If you do work with laptop and desktop side by side, then use Synergy to use your keyboard and mouse across both computers. My workflow is seamless from when I close my laptop and go on my Desktop to work on the same project.

I went for many years without a desktop. I never found that I needed one for my development work. A MacBook Pro was always enough.

However, in 2015 I wanted to get back into gaming, which I'd basically stopped engaging in all throughout college. I decided to build a gaming PC. I ended up with a 6700k and two 980 Ti cards in SLI. It was the first time I'd ever had such a fast gaming PC, and being able to max out everything at 1440p and still get 70+ FPS, even in games like The Witcher 3, was nothing short of a revelation to me.

That machine can still max everything out at 1440p today. So, to me, it was totally worth the cost and effort of assembling.

Doubt there is much point unless you're doing something that hammers multiple cores, need high speed 3D or need CUDA compute power.

If you have something that can take advantage of those however it can completely change your workflow.

I'd almost say you might still want a GPU of some sort; you may not need the latest and greatest, but not something low-end, either. Nvidia 700 or 800 class, minimum.

Why?

Machine learning - specifically, I think we're likely to see more and more applications using GPUs for ML-based tasks. For instance, maybe Photoshop implements that relatively new Google super-resolution ML-based technique as a filter or something in their software. While it could run ok on a multi-core CPU - it would probably run much better and faster on a GPU.

I can see this becoming more of the norm on a lot of software as machine learning continues going "mainstream". Sooner than we think, we might all find ourselves purchasing high-end graphics cards for things other than graphics. At least until specialized ML optimized CPUs or other compute boards become the norm (right now, you can get GPU boards - mainly from NVidia - that incorporate a GPU specifically for compute acceleration needs - with no video output; you find them mainly used in workstation-class machines, and of course supercomputers).

If your question is about laptop vs desktop, the choice between the two has nothing to do with tech, it is purely a choice about where you work and then cost.

I'm freelance. It is a requirement that I am able to take my work to a client's site and work there sometimes. So I have a laptop.

At home (where I work the most) I have 4 monitors, a keyboard and a mouse, so no worries about screen space or laptop touchpads. Most clients are happy for me to borrow a monitor or two.

A laptop can do everything a desktop can, it just might cost you a touch more. My laptop has a 4790K i7 and 32gb or RAM. Note that that's a desktop model CPU because I wanted the better perf, and it doesn't do any of that annoying low power throttling to save battery (as a side effect the battery life is about 90 minutes! But that's still more battery life than any desktop I've ever used). You can get laptops with desktop model GPUs these days too if that's what you need.

There is generally a difference between the CPU and GPU models on laptops and desktops. Don't assume that a nvidia 980m is the same as a 980, they are basically different GPUs. CPU model numbers are more confusing, but similarly, the laptop model CPUs are usually less cores and lower power, so make sure you are comparing like for like. It's possible to buy laptops with desktop components in them these days if you look around.

If you have no requirement to be mobile, buy a desktop, you'll get better performance for the price. If you have to be mobile, get a laptop, and work out the trade offs you can make based on what you can afford.

(Only point this perhaps breaks down is for the extreme top end where laptops might not be an option, but you don't seem to be talking about that)

If on the other hand your question was "should I buy a new computer". If you're working as a dev with that spec machine, I would say the answer is yes. You'll get a significant boost just by jumping to a modern CPU and a decent amount of RAM.

As long as heat/cooling/power is an issue, the desktop is relevant. The desktop is far superior for cooling with fans, adding accessories, cannibalizing parts, upgrades, graphics cards, etc. With a desktop you don't need to compromise for battery life.

If you're a serious developer you probably have a permanent work station. With big monitors, a nice chair, a proper keyboard, etc. Sure you can dock a laptop into that, but why not have your cake and eat it too? Use a laptop on the go, and a desktop for the fixed workstation.

This is the git age. It's trivial to share work across a fixed desktop and a laptop. No need to sacrifice power for portability. Go for the superior space/cooling potential of the desktop at your workstation.

As the owner of an X201 and a Macbook air I'd consider getting Macbook, probably pro in your case. The Macbook feels really snappy compared to the X201 even though it's the cheapest mid 2013 model. The 2015 pro with external monitors seems popular with devs.

In 2011 I built my own desktop with a 2nd gen i5, 16GB RAM, an MSI nighthawk twin frozr GPU, 6 TB storage (2 HDD, 1 SSD), and a nice amount of fans/heatsinks. It was more than 2x cheaper than buying a prebuilt one (low thousand).

Last year I spent $400 to upgrade the motherboard, got a 5th gen i7, 32GB RAM, a GTX 950, and 6 more TB of storage (2 HDD and 1 SSD). Yay Newegg and microcenter sales!

I've never had an issue with any of the hardware, my build times are miniscule (MBP chokes on some of the stuff I compile), and I could have 10+ projects open in Android Studio / Intellij, 20 tabs in chrome, a terminal emulator, docker, and Plex, and it doesn't break a sweat.

If you don't need to be mobile that often, I'd definitely go desktop.

Looking at your criteria, I think the most interesting features of a desktop are:

- easy & cheap RAM upgrades

- ability to swap & add/remove harddrives. Running multiple OSes, you can more easily share common data, and you can pull out your main hdd allowing you to experiment safely.

- ability to upgrade the graphics card later if you want to.

If you are constrained by your budget, getting a desktop allows you to upgrade over time more easily. It also allows you to use different and more hardware.

Personally my 1st priority is having a good laptop, but I also have two desktop workstations and I prefer using them over the laptop. But if you use an external monitor, keyboard and mouse you are already getting most of the benefit of a desktop.

I think it depends how much money you are willing to spend. Nowadays with the 10-series Nvidia GPU's there is no difference between the mobile and desktop GPU's (barring the slightly slower clocks on the 1060). I just picked myself up a razer blade 2016 w/a 1060 and threw Mint on there. When I get home I plug it into an ultrawide 3440x1440 display and everything is smooth as butter. It's nice having just one device that acts as both a desktop and a portable device imho. Price wise you definitely want to go with a desktop to save on $$ and get better performance (processor/ram wise + upgradability) though.

Like some of the other commenters, I also enjoy having both a desktop and a laptop. The laptop is of course nice to have to work on the go and in the living room/on trips, but sometimes for more intensive work and graphics (and games), you still can't beat a desktop.

Also, building a desktop is an enjoyable process, and can last you a long time, especially with upgrades. I have my 2500K build from 6 years ago, and it still runs everything including games perfectly (updated video card from a 560ti to a 1080 gtx).

Especially with the price of mid-level components being reasonable these days, I'd highly recommend a desktop in addition to your Thinkpad.

In my opinion you already have said so much about desktop and laptop comparison. I think you should definitely go for a desktop if portability is not an issue. I personally use a laptop (low end) just because of portability issue. Other than that I never felt that owning a laptop is better than owning a desktop. You can easily upgrade your desktop, custom build it to your own requirements, replace individual parts for maintenance etc. And I think you are right that desktop processors are better than mobile ones as there is also enough room for heat to dissipate in desktop due to their form factor.

It doesn't sound like you need a desktop. I have a Windows desktop (2016, Skylake) and a Macbook Pro (2013? Haswell) and really, it never comes down to what one is faster when I have to choose and when my usage is similar to yours.

If you want the experience of building a PC... well, just know there really isn't much to it. Maybe you'd enjoy playing with a Beaglebone and capes or, similarly, an Arduino and shields. You can get all sorts of fun ones. I got an CAN bus cape I can plug into the OBD II port in my car and talk to it, for example.

I would suggest going for an NUC (at least core i3). These are small, has enough computational power for the tasks you want to do, runs OK with Linux, and can run VM if you want to from time to time. You can likely reuse the SSD from the Thinkpad if it is of the right kind.

Personally, I purchased an NUC with i3 that is only marginally slower than a 2013 Dell XPS 13 with core i7 (noticable only in compile times of software). I used the SSD from the Dell laptop via an adapter, and run Linux on it.

Many people don't need to be portable. I work in office and used to have a desktop, but now I use a laptop that never moves from the desk.

You have a very old laptop - while still usable, a modern laptop would be much faster than what you are using now. So you could still get the performance you want without going to a desktop.

Not sure where you live, but in the USA we can get very cheap PC's on Slickdeals, lower end Dell servers for $250 or loaded Dell XPS desktops for $600

For deep learning:

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/nalply/saved/pXrD3C

This PC part list starts with about $2900 and only one GPU. Additional GPUs will cost about $1200 (unsure), so if it is maxed out with four GPUs we talk about $6500 and 1250 Watt.

I will wait till I understand deep learning well enough before investing this much money and power.

I'd say not only wait until you understand it, but to wait until it's your day-to-day job or business interest (or main hobby). Otherwise you'll be throwing money out the door (though you'll have one heck of reason to brag!)...

Yes, I agree. I would like to do something with Signed Languages. It would be both a business interest and main hobby.

Unless you have a specific reason you need the compute of a desktop, I'd go with a laptop for the mobility.

At 550 euro there aren't a lot of great laptops as far as I know. It's basically where the 15 inch full HD segment starts. I'd look into refurbished laptops (perhaps second hand) in that price range. Preferably get something with warranty (i.e. lenovo thinkpad, or buisness dell stuff, probably any buisness line).

Performance wise there should be no reason to build a desktop for 'dev-work'. But as far as I understand your situation you just want to build a desktop, not use one :D Just be aware, that you will probably end up with more than one PC when you use a desktop.

Btw. I love my desktop PC and use it more than my Laptop. But I love it, because it has a passive cooling system (0 db) on an i7 CPU ;-)

Ask your friend has a better setup to do the same compile task and compare the result. For me, the repetitive tasks, saving 5 secs still worth to buy a desktop for performance.

I can't tolerate extra 100ms (on my frontend work, compile SCSS.. JavaScript..etc)

If you want what you want component-wise then you have to build your own desktop workstation. You'll spend $2500 new. That's my current plan. Skylake Xeon, 32G ECC, 960 Pro, etc.

If you are willing to get used/prev-gen, then ebay is a good option, and you can probably get something <$1000 for a desktop workstation.

In my opinion ECC isn't something I want to be without. I run lots of VMs. Crashes will quickly eat up any potential savings from scrimping on that.

Look at laptops with M.2 SSD

Intel NUC

I'd do a desktop and keep an eye out for a Chromebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com