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What laptop do you use for personal development?

DefinitelyMarc

Hey folks,

My old Sony Vaio (4 years old now) is in need of retirement, so I'm looking around to see what people here are using outside of work to work on their projects.

The Vaio cost me 750 quid in PC World back in mid-2013 and has been pretty reliable (6GB Ram, around 2.5Ghz I3/5 I think) and it worked great for Android studio and Rails, but I can definitely see that it runs slower than other peoples machines when performing the same tasks.

I'm not big on laptop gaming, so that's not an issue (I have a PS4), but if it runs development projects really well then great! I'm a bit wary of falling into the Apple ecosystem, but again if it works... :eek:

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DefinitelyMarc

The_B_Man wrote: »

Let us know the weight of it too.

2.5KG's :cool:

I'll update the original post.

The_B_Man

Let us know the weight of it too.

DefinitelyMarc

Okay, so I ended up ordering the following for €1,662.00:

Chassis & Display: Optimus Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)

Processor (CPU): Intel® Core™ i7 Quad Core Processor 7700HQ (2.8GHz, 3.8GHz Turbo)

Memory (RAM): 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE 2400MHz SODIMM DDR4 (1 x 16GB)

Graphics Card: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti - 4.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1

1st Hard Disk: 500GB Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)

M.2 SSD Drive: 512GB INTEL® 600p M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (upto 1775MB/sR | 560MB/sW)

Weight: 2.5KG

Ended up buying two intel 500GB SSD's instead of any hard drives, only one stick of 16GB RAM (I can get another later), and an extra charger in case something happens to the first one. I maxed out on everything but the RAM and storage, since I can buy more RAM later if I really need 32GB's of it and I can't see myself using more than 500GB for anything (And I already have an external hard drive. Might buy another one though). I also paid for the 5 working day delivery and better thermal paste.

I'll let you all know what it's like when it arrives! :pac:

DefinitelyMarc

Dubba wrote: »

There's a lot of value in the Lenovo I posted:

i7-5600U
512gb M.2 SSD
WQHD screen

Not being able to upgrade the ram, could be an issue for you tho.

It's a good price, but I'm looking to spend more than 600. I tend to buy more expensive stuff that'll last longer/I can use for longer.

Thanks for the link though, I'll keep it in mind.

srsly78 wrote: »

UK is still part the EU, so why would customs matter?

OP - if weight is no issue for you then get a desktop >.<

I don't think costa would appreciate me lugging one in :pac:

srsly78

UK is still part the EU, so why would customs matter?

OP - if weight is no issue for you then get a desktop >.<

threein99

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

Folks, after much deliberation I'm strongly thinking about going for the 15.6" Optimus 8 from PC Specialist.

My reason for not going for the 17.3" is because it doesn't come with the 4K screen.
Processor: I7 2.8GHz that can be turbo'd to 3.8GHz

RAM: 32GB (DDR4 for some corsair brand. There are two, and the 2400MHz one is cheaper. I have no idea what this means if I'm honest.)

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 1050Ti 4GB

Hard Drive:At the moment I'm looking at a 960GB Kingston SSD. It's 540MB to read, 500MB to write (A second I think?). It mention 6GB in there somewhere too, but I've no idea what that refers to. Probably a cache or something.

The hard drive is where it gets tricky. There's a load of options and the SSD's get expensive VERY quickly. In total, the cost comes out at €1940, including vat. Does anyone here know if customs will wreck my **** financially when this thing is shipped over? Also, should I be getting a better SSD?

I'd also like to thank each and every one of you here for taking the time to post, I've read all of your posts and appreciate the help!

Would using Parcel Motel not get you over any customs issues?

Dubba

There's a lot of value in the Lenovo I posted:

i7-5600U
512gb M.2 SSD
WQHD screen

Not being able to upgrade the ram, could be an issue for you tho.

DefinitelyMarc

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

TBH I find the idea of a 17" laptop comical. You'll break your back carrying that around. It's way over specced for what you want the gfx will be wasted unless you game on it regularly enough

Yeah, but is it a better deal than the pcspecialist one I mentioned?

The weight wouldn't bother me one bit, it's more "How much value can I get for my money" that I'm trying to go for.

Dubba

This Lenovo looks good for ~€600 (note you can't upgrade the ram)

http://touch.adverts.ie/laptops/lenovo-x1-carbon-3rd-gen-512gb-ssd-8gb-touchscreen/12785002

I got a similar model second hand and had no issues at all. Obviously your millage may vary.

srsly78

Yeah gaming laptops are a load of rubbish. Too big to be portable, too power-hungry to operate without mains, too weak compared to desktop. Double cost of desktop!

Creamy Goodness

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

Anything wrong with this one actually?

http://www.adverts.ie/laptops/alienware-17-r4-i7-6700hq-gtx1060-16gb-ram-128gb-ssd-1tb-hdd-pny-gtx-1070-alienware-graphics-amp/12696698?notification=5a4f2ea435451f6fdde22f024db8057e-1494587527#comment_85383147

Seems like i can get it for €1750. Is that a good price for the hardware?

TBH I find the idea of a 17" laptop comical. You'll break your back carrying that around. It's way over specced for what you want the gfx will be wasted unless you game on it regularly enough

DefinitelyMarc

Anything wrong with this one actually?

http://www.adverts.ie/laptops/alienware-17-r4-i7-6700hq-gtx1060-16gb-ram-128gb-ssd-1tb-hdd-pny-gtx-1070-alienware-graphics-amp/12696698?notification=5a4f2ea435451f6fdde22f024db8057e-1494587527#comment_85383147

Seems like i can get it for €1750. Is that a good price for the hardware?

14ned

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

[*]Hard Drive:At the moment I'm looking at a 960GB Kingston SSD. It's 540MB to read, 500MB to write (A second I think?). It mention 6GB in there somewhere too, but I've no idea what that refers to. Probably a cache or something.

I wouldn't touch a Kingston SSD. Remember when SSDs fail, they go immediately, not like HDs which usually warn you beforehand with enough time to get your data off.

Any SSDs by Samsung are safe. Failure rate is below 0.5% per annum. Any Intel developed (not rebranded) Intel SSD is safe. The rest I'd leave off, though I have a Crucial M4 SSD here used for temporary build storage and which receives many gigabytes written per day which has been very reliable over the past three years, and it takes a battering.

As the other poster mentioned, SATA SSDs are inferior to NVM SSDs, if you can afford the latter (Samsung or Intel only) then they are great. But SATA SSDs are far better than a HD.

BTW ignore throughput benchmarks. Look into random 4Kb i/o, that's where quality SSDs shine over the cheap ****e SSDs and it's what you'll notice in terms of daily use latency.

Niall

deconduo

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

Does anyone here know if customs will wreck my **** financially when this thing is shipped over?

You should be fine as they're based in the UK. You may end up paying a slightly higher rate of VAT when you checkout (23% vs 20%) but that would be the only thing.

The_B_Man

The most expensive part there is probably your hard drive.
If it was me, I'd skimp on things that are easily replaceable/upgraded, like RAM and HDD/SSD and then get them myself after for cheaper.

Also, looking at that Optimus, it supports M.2 drives. Maybe get one of them instead and install your OS on that. I reckon 250GB would be plenty. Then afterwards, get yourself a second hard drive for storage. Something like a 2TB HDD. Similar with the RAM, price it elsewhere yourself. It might be cheaper to get 4GB and replace it with 32GB you bought on your own. Or even get the one stick of 16GB and install another 16GB yourself after. Whichever is less hassle.
Doing this, you'll probably get that €1900 down to about €1300.

Also, consider getting a second power adapter or battery. They were the first things to go with my laptop, after a few years, so having them already there will save you a lot of hassle.

DefinitelyMarc

Folks, after much deliberation I'm strongly thinking about going for the 15.6" Optimus 8 from PC Specialist.

My reason for not going for the 17.3" is because it doesn't come with the 4K screen.

Processor: I7 2.8GHz that can be turbo'd to 3.8GHz
RAM: 32GB (DDR4 for some corsair brand. There are two, and the 2400MHz one is cheaper. I have no idea what this means if I'm honest.)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 1050Ti 4GB
Hard Drive:At the moment I'm looking at a 960GB Kingston SSD. It's 540MB to read, 500MB to write (A second I think?). It mention 6GB in there somewhere too, but I've no idea what that refers to. Probably a cache or something.

The hard drive is where it gets tricky. There's a load of options and the SSD's get expensive VERY quickly. In total, the cost comes out at €1940, including vat. Does anyone here know if customs will wreck my **** financially when this thing is shipped over? Also, should I be getting a better SSD?

I'd also like to thank each and every one of you here for taking the time to post, I've read all of your posts and appreciate the help!

Colonel Panic

In work, we use desktops. Mine's a Dell workstation of okay spec.

At home, I do a lot of stuff with graphics and GPU compute, so it's desktop again, but prior to that, I used my 2011 MBP for development.

The_B_Man

Ye I know what you're talking about. I once got OSX running on an old AMD machine!! :P
When I got this laptop, I consciously tried to get specs similar to a MBP in order to dual boot. I never got it working though. I think it's related to the BIOS, as opposed to UEFI. I do have a working VM but the performance isn't great. I might revisit the native booting actually.

If this laptop dies, then I'll google other laptops that work perfect out of the box, but like I said, this laptop is working too well to replace it.

14ned

The_B_Man wrote: »

However, similar to a poster above, I might need to get a pre-tax Macbook Pro. This is mostly so I can learn iPhone dev at home but it'll make me sick giving them that money. €3300 is shocking for a laptop!!! I've a MBP in work and its grand, but jaysus its not worth anywhere near €3k. The other kicker is, like I said, this PCS laptop is still going perfect and I don't need to replace it. The one thing it can't do though, is run MacOSX and XCode, which is why I'm even entertaining the idea of the MBP. :mad:

I won't link to it here, but there are websites near the top of Google search results which list PC laptops known to work perfectly with OS X. If you possess a legal licence for OS X, under EU law you can install it onto whatever hardware you like. There is a program available by a guy called Tony which converts your OS X install DVD into a bootable USB stick which will install on any PC. You simply install it, your PC laptop now runs OS X.

Apple could crack down on those guys, but for fifteen years now they have chosen not to, even when Steve Jobs was in charge. I would assume that they see it as a path for really keen, but broke, developers to develop for Apple products. For similar reasons Microsoft gives away Visual Studio for free in recent years.

Edit: A completely legal copy of OS X costs €22 from the Apple store.

Niall

The_B_Man

Dermo wrote: »

The Optimus IV? I got one of those nearly 4 years ago now and it's still in perfect working order, especially for development. Normally hooked up to another monitor and separate keyboard & mouse if I'm doing extensive development.

Ye, thats the one. It's a bit heavy, but otherwise grand. In the same period, I know people who've gone through about 3 laptops at about €500 each so that justifies the €1200 to me. But they don't do dev, I suppose. Either way, I'd defo go the PCS route again.
However, similar to a poster above, I might need to get a pre-tax Macbook Pro. This is mostly so I can learn iPhone dev at home but it'll make me sick giving them that money. €3300 is shocking for a laptop!!! I've a MBP in work and its grand, but jaysus its not worth anywhere near €3k. The other kicker is, like I said, this PCS laptop is still going perfect and I don't need to replace it. The one thing it can't do though, is run MacOSX and XCode, which is why I'm even entertaining the idea of the MBP. :mad:

L.Jenkins

After my HP Pavillion G6 went t?ts up, all I could afford was an Acer Aspire ES1-533. No trouble running Eclipse, Android Studio, Visual Studio, Net Beans and IntelliJ.

It's powerful to run a single VM at a time, as long as I'm not using any resource heavy applications at the same time.

billyduk

For me it's a Macbook Pro with an external Mouse, Keyboard and twin 25" ultrawide infinity edge monitors (with one 27" monitor at home). This allows me the real-estate and comfort of a desktop, but also the portability of a laptop.

14ned

John_Mc wrote: »

It's a Geforce GT 750M with 2GB of memory. Probably not enough to run a UHD screen?

Oh far more than plenty. A 4K screen is only 40Mb of VRAM or so.

I bought it back in September 2015 - not sure if this is a Skylake chipset? Regardless, I'm not pushing it hard to get this type of performance.

I was incorrect about the price though, it was 1800 ex. VAT, which is still not cheap.

2015 XPS 15 was Haswell. To be honest you'd barely notice the difference to Skylake, it's at best 10%.

I'll tell you something odd, all the reviewers for that particular model keep mentioning it felt a bit underpowered somehow and it was weird given the spec. Some say there is a thermal throttling problem. It's been fixed in XPS 15's since.

Are you running a laptop Niall? If so, which make/model?

I'm a bit unusual

Between 2008 and 2013 I made heavy use of a MSI Wind Atom 220 netbook running XP with a SSD fitted. Indeed I wrote a 200k word book on its excellent keyboard, and ran hefty C++ metaprogramming Visual Studio runs on it where the slow CPU was really great for finding performance bugs. Great little thing. I only gave it up because it ran Windows 8 very poorly due to the Atom's tiny L2 cache. Its battery was still going very strong after five years, it lasted far longer than I could sit on the toilet.

Between 2013 and 2016 I ran an ex-corporate Dell E6410 which was top of its range in 2008. As I mentioned, assembled as if new for under €500. Big brick of a thing, very heavy, but my two year old can and did dance all over it and it made not a jot of difference to it. I also dropped it down the stairs once, whilst open and running, again it didn't even remotely care. Superb build quality.

Just before Christmas 2016 my Accountant was nagging me to spend some pre-tax money on anything, so I bought a max specced MBP 13 and gave the Dell to my sister which she's delighted with, it's roads faster than any other computer she has access to, 2008 top end technology is still very good today. I don't care much for OS X, so I've ended up running Windows 10 on the MBP almost exclusively and I'm typing to you now on it.

The new generation MBP is a pretty good laptop, but it would want to be for 3k. It's not worth 3k, or even 2k by any measure, and if it weren't bought out of pre-tax no-VAT money I'd never have bought it because Macbook's are a waste of money. My favourite feature by far is the battery life, you get six to eight hours in Windows, and its NVM SSD pushes 3Gb/sec without much effort which is important for me non-work open source hobby coding. My least favourite feature is the USB-C sockets, they're already quite worn from constant use, and cables are getting loose, but thanks to Apple you get zero alternative choice on that. In terms of performance, the CPU is okay, it's a dual core unit, but my four year old desktop is noticeably quicker despite being Ivy Bridge era technology and having a SATA SSD instead of this fancy NVM SSD stuff.

If I were buying out of post-tax money, I'd buy another ex-corporate and retrofit it to as new without question. Whatever €500 gets me all in, it's the most anyone should spend on a laptop.

Niall

John_Mc

14ned wrote: »

Did you get yours with a discrete graphics card? If it's using system memory for the VRAM for such a high resolution display, you'll notice general system lag.

It's a Geforce GT 750M with 2GB of memory. Probably not enough to run a UHD screen?

14ned wrote: »

Those Skylake CPUs don't run well with DDR3 RAM, they prefer DDR4. If you had an older XPS 15 it would be DDR3, for that Lenovo it has to be DDR4 because laptops top out at 16Gb with DDR3.

Latest XPS 13 or 15 shouldn't have that problem. And I think the very latest CPUs come with 128Mb VRAM now, so even non-discrete GPUs don't cause a hefty performance hit with ultra hires screens. Though a real GPU is still better, obviously.

All that said, you're right they're not worth 2k, not by a long shot. You can pick up a used XPS 13 or 15 for a fraction of the money and similar performance. Laptops have become very similar to cars in recent years, a five year old car is only a very little worse than a new car, but there is an amazing price drop.

Niall

I bought it back in September 2015 - not sure if this is a Skylake chipset? Regardless, I'm not pushing it hard to get this type of performance.

I was incorrect about the price though, it was 1800 ex. VAT, which is still not cheap.

Are you running a laptop Niall? If so, which make/model?

14ned

John_Mc wrote: »

I only recently upgraded my laptop from a Dell XPS 13 to a Dell XPS 15. It's the flagship laptop model with an i7 chip with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD etc.

It's got a nice build quality feel off and looks nice enough it but it's not particularly fast - I actually find it sluggish running a single instance of Visual Studio 2017 with Resharper.

Did you get yours with a discrete graphics card? If it's using system memory for the VRAM for such a high resolution display, you'll notice general system lag.

The UHD screen looks good when you're using applications designed to scale but most Windows application haven't been so a lot of stuff was a 1/4 of the size it should be on a normal screen resolution. It was really annoying up until the Creators Update of Windows 10.

For an expensive Laptop, over 2k ex. VAT I haven't felt it's been worth the money. I was using a Lenovo at work up until recently which had 32GB RAM and it was a beast. I was running 6 or 7 instances of Visual Studio without any problems at all. It's not the difference in RAM either as my Dell is only running ~60% RAM when running slow

Those Skylake CPUs don't run well with DDR3 RAM, they prefer DDR4. If you had an older XPS 15 it would be DDR3, for that Lenovo it has to be DDR4 because laptops top out at 16Gb with DDR3.

Latest XPS 13 or 15 shouldn't have that problem. And I think the very latest CPUs come with 128Mb VRAM now, so even non-discrete GPUs don't cause a hefty performance hit with ultra hires screens. Though a real GPU is still better, obviously.

All that said, you're right they're not worth 2k, not by a long shot. You can pick up a used XPS 13 or 15 for a fraction of the money and similar performance. Laptops have become very similar to cars in recent years, a five year old car is only a very little worse than a new car, but there is an amazing price drop.

Niall

John_Mc

I only recently upgraded my laptop from a Dell XPS 13 to a Dell XPS 15. It's the flagship laptop model with an i7 chip with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD etc.

It's got a nice build quality feel off and looks nice enough it but it's not particularly fast - I actually find it sluggish running a single instance of Visual Studio 2017 with Resharper.

The UHD screen looks good when you're using applications designed to scale but most Windows application haven't been so a lot of stuff was a 1/4 of the size it should be on a normal screen resolution. It was really annoying up until the Creators Update of Windows 10.

For an expensive Laptop, over 2k ex. VAT I haven't felt it's been worth the money. I was using a Lenovo at work up until recently which had 32GB RAM and it was a beast. I was running 6 or 7 instances of Visual Studio without any problems at all. It's not the difference in RAM either as my Dell is only running ~60% RAM when running slow

14ned

DefinitelyMarc wrote: »

My old Sony Vaio (4 years old now) is in need of retirement, so I'm looking around to see what people here are using outside of work to work on their projects.

The Vaio cost me 750 quid in PC World back in mid-2013 and has been pretty reliable (6GB Ram, around 2.5Ghz I3/5 I think) and it worked great for Android studio and Rails, but I can definitely see that it runs slower than other peoples machines when performing the same tasks.

By far and away the best bang for the buck you can make is buy at least a 250Gb Samsung SSD and replace your hard drive. It'll be like a whole new machine, trust me.

Past that, any new laptop for less than €1000 isn't worth the money compared to buying a used laptop a few years old which used to be top of the line corporate build costing €3000 a few years ago. You'll get far better build quality and components than a new consumer build laptop. Fit it with a SSD, obviously. A few years ago I put together a five year old Dell E6410 bought for €160 from eBay imported from the US and upgraded it with new SSD, battery, charger etc and for less than €500 I had a superb laptop, easily beating anything new for under a grand.

Past that, a Dell XPS 13 is the laptop to get unless you really need a Mac. The thin bezel display, ultra high resolution with superb colour reproduction and high build quality plus PCIe NVM SSD are best in class and for a price far below a Mac.

Niall

matrim

threein99 wrote: »

Got my Laptop from them last year, not overly impressed considering what I paid. The build quality was not of the standard I was hoping.

The fan is constantly going off too and its annoyingly loud

Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte HD+ LED 16:9 Widescreen (1600x900)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB Kingston SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600

The case isn't the nicest but it is functional and bang for your buck they are great. I saved about €400 - €500 on what I would have paid for an equivalent Dell, Sony etc (if I could have even gotten it). I've also found it more robust than the dell laptops I had before it.

The only time I have noticed issues with the fan is when using the build in Nvidia graphics card instead of the intel one. But I think those are more related to Linux than the hardware.

threein99

BrokenArrows wrote: »

Check for some bios updates.
I had similar fan issues with another laptop years ago and it turned out the problem had been fixed in a bios update.

The fan was only either off or on 100% speed, laptop fan should never be running 100% unless you're doing something very intensive.

I generally play a lot of Football Manager which would be resource heavy but just generally browsing can have the fan at full speed

BrokenArrows

threein99 wrote: »

Got my Laptop from them last year, not overly impressed considering what I paid. The build quality was not of the standard I was hoping.

The fan is constantly going off too and its annoyingly loud

Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte HD+ LED 16:9 Widescreen (1600x900)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB Kingston SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card INTEL® HD GRAPHICS MEDIA ACCELERATOR 4600

Check for some bios updates.
I had similar fan issues with another laptop years ago and it turned out the problem had been fixed in a bios update.

The fan was only either off or on 100% speed, laptop fan should never be running 100% unless you're doing something very intensive.