3 ms·

I have a 3090 for serious (hobby) work and a 1070 from 4ish years back next to my bed. I think getting anything 1070 or better is good enough at the beginner le

I have a 3090 for serious (hobby) work and a 1070 from 4ish years back next to my bed. I think getting anything 1070 or better is good enough at the beginner level (training baby datasets/models from scratch such as MNIST/CIFAR, transfer learning the big models). I just don't understand the cost argument .. you can get this stuff used. Main thing is you need CUDA. The 3090 machine gets about the same use as the 1070 in my case. While it is nice to have more GPU memory to have huge batches and train things faster, this is a quality of life improvement/bragging to be honest. Serious work in some sub-areas needs multi-GPUs or enterprise grade hardware (e.g. A100s). Software-wise, I just use Pytorch/Pytorch lignting/keras, and anaconda. Edit: I used to build my own machines in my younger days. The two machines I spoke of above are alienware. Got them on black friday sales. Cost-wise, they were ridiculously cheap for the power they give/impact on my career.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
The problem is that even a 1070 is ridiculously expensive these days (About $400 on Newegg, that was the cost of a RTX 2070 a few years ago!) If you can get an used GPU from a friend that would be great, but other than that you’re going to have to shell hundreds of dollars for an old GPU that you will probably have to upgrade soon. I don’t know the OP’s financial situation, but if you’re a poor student than these things certainly matter.
- throwawaybbq1 5y ago
  Good points .. however, my advice for the cash strapped students on HN: Buying 1 good machine will last you 4+ years easily these days. Buying a system like Alienware with a 3070-3080 was under 2K Canadian over the recent Black Friday shopping event. Over 4 years, that is $500. If you are studying CS, it is absolutely worth buying a decent machine. You don't need a top of the line machine but you need to be able to study your craft on something more powerful than a rasperry pi or junky old machine. I was quite poor growing up, and I recall buying a 3K machine when I started undergrad (that was crap hardware by today's standard). And i have no doubt that having this machine helped me get my first job, and things got better from then. If you are in CS, think of it as an investment, and make it pay off! Btw, I am trying to be positive .. pls don't construe anything here as negative. I appreciate that money is tight for a lot of folks. Paying 10% interest to buy a 3K machine is not a good idea!! I just skimped a lot as a student, and some of it was quite pointless. I wish someone explained this to me, and hence my comment. If you are in a situation where you'd have to take a loan to buy a system, pls don't feel like you need a GPU to do anything useful. I am certain one can make do with just colab and a web browser. Good luck to all the students out there!! Life is hard at that stage .. it gets far easier once you have a paying job in the field.

cyber_kinetist 5y ago

The problem is that even a 1070 is ridiculously expensive these days (About $400 on Newegg, that was the cost of a RTX 2070 a few years ago!) If you can get an used GPU from a friend that would be great, but other than that you’re going to have to shell hundreds of dollars for an old GPU that you will probably have to upgrade soon. I don’t know the OP’s financial situation, but if you’re a poor student than these things certainly matter.

throwawaybbq1 5y ago
Good points .. however, my advice for the cash strapped students on HN: Buying 1 good machine will last you 4+ years easily these days. Buying a system like Alienware with a 3070-3080 was under 2K Canadian over the recent Black Friday shopping event. Over 4 years, that is $500. If you are studying CS, it is absolutely worth buying a decent machine. You don't need a top of the line machine but you need to be able to study your craft on something more powerful than a rasperry pi or junky old machine. I was quite poor growing up, and I recall buying a 3K machine when I started undergrad (that was crap hardware by today's standard). And i have no doubt that having this machine helped me get my first job, and things got better from then. If you are in CS, think of it as an investment, and make it pay off! Btw, I am trying to be positive .. pls don't construe anything here as negative. I appreciate that money is tight for a lot of folks. Paying 10% interest to buy a 3K machine is not a good idea!! I just skimped a lot as a student, and some of it was quite pointless. I wish someone explained this to me, and hence my comment. If you are in a situation where you'd have to take a loan to buy a system, pls don't feel like you need a GPU to do anything useful. I am certain one can make do with just colab and a web browser. Good luck to all the students out there!! Life is hard at that stage .. it gets far easier once you have a paying job in the field.