Submitted 3 months ago by Werewolf@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.world
I want to buy a laptop for a few purposes, not my main laptop:
Use it to run !localllama@sh.itjust.works stuff and Stable Diffusion
Use it for games downloaded from repack sites
I would like to pull out the WiFi card. I have offline computers and online computers
I would probably dual-boot Windows and Linux, or else have it boot Windows and use a live USB when I want Linux
Thank you all.
Use it to run !localllama@sh.itjust.works stuff and Stable Diffusion
You’ve may have already considered this, but if you can do so, I would not use a laptop for this. Laptops are built to be power-efficient, space-efficient, and generate and deal with a limited amount of heat. Hardware that is good at running latent diffusion software is bad at these.
What you might give serious consideration to doing, if you have not already considered doing so and specifically want to have this running on hardware you control, is building a desktop and then simply accessing it remotely from a laptop. I have a beefy desktop that I have used Stable Diffusion and KoboldAI on remotely, either via WiFi or cell phone data link. The software is designed to run in that kind of environment, run by a remote Web browser. You don’t need a whole ton of bandwidth. It has some other benefits:
You won’t be sitting at a laptop with the fans spooled up and sounding like a jet engine.
Power use is minimal. Gaming laptops have very limited battery life when actually using their GPUs (and even those don’t compete with desktop GPUs on performance). If were going to be doing the computations on a laptop, I’d either need it to be plugged in, have only very short sessions, or have some kind of large powerstation. Even a 100Wh laptop battery, the most you’re going to be able to get, won’t last long on a laptop GPU running all-out. Here’s a comparison between the desktop and laptop RTX 4090. If your GPU is drawing 80W to 150W – what the laptop variants there are set up for – even disregarding the rest of your laptop’s hardware use, it’s going to go through a laptop battery that’s 100Wh at most very rapidly.
You’ll have better performance on a desktop.
Now, that won’t give you a gaming laptop for running games on the go, and I don’t know if that means that it won’t cut the mustard for you. My personal take is that for really fancy 3D games, I’d rather game on a desktop for similar reasons, though 3D games are less-problematic in my book than latent diffusion software. There are plenty of games that one can perfectly reasonably use on a laptop.
If you want something that lets you physically remove a WiFi card check out the frameworks laptop. Other than them there is no such thing as a “WiFi card” in laptops, it’s all fully integrated now and I’d be surprised to see a new laptop from factory without some version of WiFi built in.
Other than them there is no such thing as a “WiFi card” in laptops, it’s all fully integrated now
Um, what? That’s simply not true, unless you look at a small subset of Laptops.
Whatever laptop you do choose, make sure it has a fully featured USBC port. So you have the option to use an eGPU.
That’s a ThunderBolt port :)
Thanks to the people responsible for the USB standards, this is a popular misconception.
For example there is PCIe Tunneling support in USB.
Gaming laptops (especially 17 inch devices) tend to have removable wireless networking cards.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
What is an offline GPU?
TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee 3 months ago
An online GPU, but off. Duh.