Laptop advice - data analysis

[Tacet]

I've been asked to give someone advice on laptop buying. While I know more than her, I'd love to get some inputs from here, where there are plenty of people knowing more than me.

The request:

My mom says core i5. I need high processing power for data analyses, and lots of storage...she says max price 12k...

The laptop won't be used for gaming, but I do know that her data analyses concern is valid. I don't know what kind of data analyses, so I'm leaning towards I5 as a good trade-off between processing power and cost. I'd prefer to go with HP/Dell business laptops - I've been pretty happy with their durability and warranties before. She'll be happy with a demo model, as long as there is still ~20 months or more warranty period left.

Basic specs I'm thinking of at the moment:

1. i5 CPU
2. 8 GB RAM or more (16 preferred)
3. 256 GB SSD or larger
4. 1 TB HDD in the ODD slot (no optical drive required)
5. At least a 2 year warranty

Any thoughts, inputs, current specials that may work, etc.?

 

[Hobo Joe]

I've been asked to give someone advice on laptop buying. While I know more than her, I'd love to get some inputs from here, where there are plenty of people knowing more than me.

The request:


The laptop won't be used for gaming, but I do know that her data analyses concern is valid. I don't know what kind of data analyses, so I'm leaning towards I5 as a good trade-off between processing power and cost. I'd prefer to go with HP/Dell business laptops - I've been pretty happy with their durability and warranties before. She'll be happy with a demo model, as long as there is still ~20 months or more warranty period left.

Basic specs I'm thinking of at the moment:

1. i5 CPU
2. 8 GB RAM or more (16 preferred)
3. 256 GB SSD or larger
4. 1 TB HDD in the ODD slot (no optical drive required)
5. At least a 2 year warranty

Any thoughts, inputs, current specials that may work, etc.?

"Data Analysis" can be an extremely broad spectrum depending on who specifically is answering the question.

Is Data Analysis running some excel spreadsheets, maybe some macros is as far as it goes? What kind of data is being utilized? SQL Db's, BigQuery, are large amounts of data being actively computed on the machine or through a server/virtual machine like AWS etc? Are you planning on running any specific data analysis software or planning on using python or R? Your use-case will determine your hardware needs.

If the machine itself is not doing much raw computing then you can get away with less daunting specs, but from experience i'd recommend at least 16Gb of RAM. I'd also recommend an i7... while gamers can get away with an i5 and a good GPU; any data related tasks are going to put a strain on memory and CPU usage primarily.

For context, I had a machine with 32Gb of RAM and an i9 CPU... granted I used to run some machine learning models and a data science tool called Knime, apart from other resource demanding apps... but even that machine would get bogged down when computing large datasets.

 

[goldfritter]

Also remember a laptop i7 is closer to a desktop i5 (e.g. the desktop i5 11400 outperforms the mobile i7 11850H). And machine learning type analysis will also benefit from a discrete GPU. But in both cases, the 12k budget is going to hamstring you.

I wouldn't settle for less than 16Gb of RAM and an SSD as the boot drive, at least.

 

[mradovan]

To make it even more confusing, some older i7 are much slower than newer i5, and some older i5 are much slower than newer i3, so don't get sucked in an refurbished deal with an older CPU just because it has i5 inside

Take this one, looks great on paper and it has i5 CPU. Except it's a dog-slow one (3255 Passmark multi-threaded score).

In comparison, this one also has an i5, but with 10184 Passmark score. I know it's 2K over the budget, but I couldn't see anything decent for 12K that has 16GB RAM...

And it depends a lot on the software used - to what extent it uses multi-threading.

Passmark multi-threaded scores here, single-thread here.

 

[Tacet]

Thanks for all the replies!

I agree, the 12k budget is not ideal. But then, budgets never are. 🙈 i7 seems to be totally out of it based on the 12k limit. So are 12th generation i5 processors, and even 11th gens are a bit of a reach.

Re the data analysis part - she is a botany student at Tuks. I know that the data analysis is on the local machine, but I don't know what kind of processing it is. So I'm aiming at getting the best CPU/RAM/SDD combination that I can find in HP/Dell within the 12k limit. It may not be the perfect tool for the job, but it will be the best I could get within the funding constraints.