Sarah Teehee's Laptop recommendation thread

Sarah Teehee's Laptop recommendation thread

Budget
More than £1000

Subject being studied
Computer Science (Data Science)

Software that will be used
Noy sure

Screen size
15.6 inches

Operating system preference
Windows

Minimum amount of RAM
More than 16GB

Minimum storage requirement
256

Weight limit
500g

Used for playing games?
No

If yes, what games?

Touchscreen needed?
Don't mind

Are there any specific ports you need?

What devices do you have currently?
chrome book, dell inspiron 1525, 2016 ipad pro, iphone 8

Laptops researched:
Laptop 1 -

Laptop 2 -

Laptop 3 -

Additional Comments:

Reply 1

SyedN

Can't go wrong with a Dell XPS 15 then. With £1,899.00 you get an i7-10750H, 512gb NVMe SSD, dual channel 16GB RAM running at 2999mhz and a GTX 1650ti. It also has 2 thunderbolt 3 ports, 1 USB 3.1 port, SD card reader and a headphone jack

If you want an alternative you can get a HP Envy for £1,300.00 from:
https://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=30B00EA&opt=ABU&sel=NTB

This comes with i7-11370H, 1TB SSD, dual channel 16gb RAM running at 3200mhz and a GTX 1650ti. It also has 1 thunderbolt 4 port, 2 USB 3.1, HDMI, 1 micro SD card reder and a headphone jack. This laptop also has a touchscreen

Both laptops come with dual band WiFi 6, backlit keyboards and fingerprint readers.

Personally, I would go with a HP Envy, as it is cheaper with better specs in some aspects such as having an 11th gen i7 compared to the XPS 15 which has a 10th gen i7. The Envy is also touchscreen with double the storage and ram that is clocked slightly faster.

Hope this helped!

Reply 2

username5770391

Original post by Sarah Teehee

Budget
More than £1000

Can you clarify how much more than £1000? What you can get for say £1100 and £2000 are very different.

Original post by Sarah Teehee

Minimum amount of RAM
More than 16GB

Do you absolutely know that you need more than 16GB of RAM? If so, do you know exactly how much? Or would you be happy with less and the option to upgrade later if required?

If you're unsure what software you'll need to use, you may well be wasting your money trying to get more than 16GB today. Odds are if you need high performance computing, your uni will have labs available. It's absolutely fine if you want your own powerful device, but it's unlikely to be an absolute requirement.

Original post by Sarah Teehee

Weight limit
500g

This will be impossible I'm afraid. Even the lightest of ultrabooks tend to come in around double this weight. And even premium 15.6 inch laptops will be pushing closer to 2Kg.

If you want something lighter and more portable, dropping down to 14 inches might be a good middle ground, but there's a good chance you'll also have to compromise on specs.

Reply 3

Coderanj

Original post by Sarah Teehee

I've just bought a Dell XPS 15 9500 straight from Dell's website for around £2.3k after student discount.
**Disclaimer: I am not a data science specific student, just comp sci in general
I got the specs as follows:

15.6" UHD+ Touch InfinityEdge
16GB RAM
i7-10750H processor
1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 1650 Ti 4GB GDDR6

Those are the main specs and part of the £2.3k was also the 4 year Premium Support Plus plan which was £439 I think.
I find this laptop spec to be sufficient for coding in Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Eclipse and using Atom for web development as a text editor.
I am also running Windows. I think for data science this spec is more than enough. I have used matplotlib, numpy and scipy in Python to make charts and graphs without any issues. Excel also looks amazing on this screen as there is so much space.

Hope this helps