Comment by ryan-duve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan-duve | Hacker News Reader

As someone coming from the other direction of this "hack", I agree with the author's point to match needs to hardware.

Since being introduced to Linux in high school in the early 2000s, I have had a penchant for bringing old computers back from the dead. As a result, every laptop I have ever owned has been one that a friend or partner throws away when Windows gets slow. Every 3-5 year old laptop I have found can be brought back to life with a new Ubuntu/Mint install and Fluxbox. Case in point: I'm typing this on a 2011 Pavillion, my main workstation.

Finally, in the last few months, I realized my up-to-decade-old computers have been holding me back. Professionally, I do AI work on cloud resources and my personal projects have naturally ventured towards the same technologies. Docker, Scikit, NLP. My symmetric gigabit internet is bottlenecked by the ethernet card on my main workstation which maxes at 1% of that.

So I finally ordered a new laptop: 64 GB RAM, latest processor, dedicated graphics card to try my hand at CUDA locally, which is being assembled now. I'm not sure if this is the "start of buying new laptops" for me, or if this one is going to last 10+ years, but I think it underlines the author's point of identifying and aligning hardware with laptop requirements, especially as those things change.

Have you considered a desktop? They are much faster than laptops, who are constrained by thermal issues. It’s hard to dissipate 500W+ of heat from a laptop-sized thing, they simply don’t have enough available surface for air intakes and exhausts.

If you want a smaller one to be occasionally portable, there’s Mini-ITX. I currently use a PC I built in this case: https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-202/...

Second the Node, very portable, quiet. It is a bit difficult to assemble though. And you need to double check your parts will fit

Indeed, the case is good, but they should have written better documentation.

I have found out I needed to unscrew the small front I/O panel PCB when removing the back side of the case. Then reattach back once the panel is clipped in. http://const.me/tmp/node202-front-panel.jpg

A current favorite among beginner Mini-ITX builders is the CoolerMaster NR200.

It's a bit big compared to other small form factor options(still smaller than midtower cases) but the hardware compatibility is great!

I manage to fit in a 5950x CPU and 3080 GPU with just an air cooler and it's working without thermal issues.

500W? That's an absurd amount of heat. I suppose they don't make 75W GPUs anymore (I'll replace my 1050Ti when they do), but still...

500W is pretty average for a desktop PC.

In my particular computer, CPU, GPU and display are rated to 65W, 250W, and 80W respectively. That’s 400W just for these 3 most power-hungry components, under high load/maximum brightness.

Lower-end office PCs often ship with ~500W PSU. Gaming PCs typically include 700W PSU or even more. For instance, nVidia recommends 750W PSU for their released but unavailable RTX 3080, that GPU itself is rated to 320W. Display ain’t included as it has a separate power plug.

When viewed as a heater, computers are almost 100% efficient. Almost all electricity they consume becomes heat. The exceptions are light from display escaping through windows, and radio from WiFi carrying energy through walls, both negligible.

Pure electric isn't considered efficient when it comes to heating. Heat exchangers, somewhat counterintuitively, have a lot more than 100% efficiency. Especially when combined with other sources of heat such as the ground or the sun.

This is just considering the colder season of the year.

That paragraph explains why consumed electricity is ~equal to the heat that needs to be removed by coolers. I'm not advocating to heat space with computers.

You can get the 1650 that runs with 75W. There's even a passive model out there, the Palit KalmX.

I refuse to buy a GPU with extra power connectors.

> You can get the 1650 that runs with 75W

The difference between these two is rather small, despite 4 years difference. 1050Ti delivers about 2TFlops, 1650 about 2.6 TFlops. Other specs (VRAM bandwidth, fillrate) are pretty close as well.

Generally, I only upgrade components when I can get at least 2x improvement.

Yes that's fair. I did the upgrade from the 750 Ti and skipped the 1050 Ti for the same reason.

I"ll second that experience. I've actually started to come to love using the lowest spec computer capable of reasonably doing the job I need it too.

Right now I'm on a quest to actually break out of the computing models I"m used to (generally glorified ETL) and to break into other models of computation and process modelling. I've got a hunch there is a direct parallel of applicability between keeping disparate people effectively working together, and writing programs which can smoothly do the same. The trick is breaking out of old modes of thinking, which I think a radical discontinuity in hardware capability for me will help accomplish. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Totally applaud the effort of bringing old laptops to life and I would do it too but what am I to so with so many laptops? I do let mine rest in peace if they’re too behind and as a rule I try to not accumulate too much hardware as where i live space is expensive. If i had plenty of space I’d probably build more dedicated machines, perhaps airgapped to avoid distractions.

And then the lockdown happened, my kids are suddenly being home schooled in our tiny London flat. Thankfully my fleet of fun to refurb ancient ThinkPads find their reason for being, getting pressed into heavy everyday use. Overnight I've become a sys admin and in the months since migrated everybody to Arch Linux for ease of maintenance. Pretty happy with the setup. Icing on the cake my 9 year old brags to his friends about his kick ass Linux setup and the advantages of a tiling window manager. For the record the kids are running an X220, a T420 whilst I'm developing on a T440p. But sometimes I borrow one of the kids machines just because the keyboards are sooooo good to type on.

Doing ML on a laptop sounds like hell

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