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My "least powerful" laptop that I still use for development is ASUS TUF A15. With Ryzen 7 4800H CPU. 8 Cores 16 threads. I bought it recently dirt cheap for $79

by FpUser 4y ago

My "least powerful" laptop that I still use for development is ASUS TUF A15. With Ryzen 7 4800H CPU. 8 Cores 16 threads. I bought it recently dirt cheap for $799 Canadian (translates to $586US approximately). Stuffed it with 64GB RAM (I had it lying around but it is cheap anyways). I run CLion from JetBrains on it for my C++ development. When doing full rebuild of the project and libs (all cores at 100%) the fan comes on but not really loud and goes back to sleep for the rest of the development. Building itself is really fast. Not sure why you have such poor experience. Maybe those thin laptops can't really handle CPU loads without overheating.

schipplock 4y ago
We still have many Thinkpad T490 with Intel Core i7 and 40GB Ram. They overheat and throttle gpu and cpu to the point you can't work anymore. Even the mouse comes to a halt. The fan barely spins up. Absolutely rubbish. Then we have Thinkpad P15v2 Gen2, also with Core i7, the moment you fire up your compiler, the fans spin up immediately (also very loud). No throttling, you can compile all day. At home I have a Thinkpad Ryzen laptop, no fan noise, no throttling, full power. It's just a different kind.
- FpUser 4y ago
  I guess the recipe is - do your homework and do not buy crap but that is what many corporations do for their employees. Their laptops cost way more than the one I mentioned and are still slow.
  - schipplock 4y ago
    T470 was fine :). $Company thought that a "T490 must be better and good enough" :). In fact, if you cool down a T490 good enough, it _is_ faster than a T470, but in the end the T490 is useless for a developer that needs processing power.
ColonelPhantom 4y ago
That's some crazy powerful hardware, and would be a significant upgrade for most people. My main and only laptop (apart from some ancient ones) has a quadcore i5-8350U and 8GB RAM. (I kind of want to upgrade its RAM though) I also have a PC, that I upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5800 and 32GB RAM recently, but a few months ago it was an i7-4790K with 8GB RAM. Sure, 8GB RAM is quite little, but it's still within the mainstream. In laptops quad-core CPUs also only became mainstream in the last few years, let alone more than that. FWIW, I don't have any real performance issues with Jetbrains IDEs on either of my machines, but I don't use them much either as I don't like the convoluted user interface.
- FpUser 4y ago
  >"That's some crazy powerful hardware, and would be a significant upgrade for most people." I have my own company. Cost of this laptop goes as a business expense and is peanuts comparatively to revenue. >"Sure, 8GB RAM is quite little, but it's still within the mainstream." I've never cared about mainstream. Not in the industry and neither in private life. I do what works for me / my company and could not care less about what others do.
  - ColonelPhantom 4y ago
    Congratulations? I'm not saying you need to care or whatever, I'm just saying you shouldn't dismiss people who do need to care for whatever reason. Great that you always have access to a computer with 64+ GB RAM, but not everyone is quite so lucky.
    - FpUser 4y ago
      Sorry for sounding cocky. I was responding to a "mainstream" part assuming you meant it as an usual industry norm that had nothing to do with what people can usually afford. I developed products for many orgs and had interacted with many of their programmers and from my experience they all had very decent salaries and absolutely shitty computers. Their orgs could definitely "splurge" for what I spent on that laptop without noticing much. As a matter of fact they spent more on their crappy hardware than I spent on mine due to their purchasing policies. From this point of view yes: I do not give a flying fuck about the norm. If it is about individual trying to make ends meet I have nothing but respect.

by FpUser 4y ago

schipplock 4y ago

We still have many Thinkpad T490 with Intel Core i7 and 40GB Ram. They overheat and throttle gpu and cpu to the point you can't work anymore. Even the mouse comes to a halt. The fan barely spins up. Absolutely rubbish. Then we have Thinkpad P15v2 Gen2, also with Core i7, the moment you fire up your compiler, the fans spin up immediately (also very loud). No throttling, you can compile all day. At home I have a Thinkpad Ryzen laptop, no fan noise, no throttling, full power. It's just a different kind.

FpUser 4y ago
I guess the recipe is - do your homework and do not buy crap but that is what many corporations do for their employees. Their laptops cost way more than the one I mentioned and are still slow.
- schipplock 4y ago
  T470 was fine :). $Company thought that a "T490 must be better and good enough" :). In fact, if you cool down a T490 good enough, it _is_ faster than a T470, but in the end the T490 is useless for a developer that needs processing power.

ColonelPhantom 4y ago

That's some crazy powerful hardware, and would be a significant upgrade for most people. My main and only laptop (apart from some ancient ones) has a quadcore i5-8350U and 8GB RAM. (I kind of want to upgrade its RAM though) I also have a PC, that I upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5800 and 32GB RAM recently, but a few months ago it was an i7-4790K with 8GB RAM. Sure, 8GB RAM is quite little, but it's still within the mainstream. In laptops quad-core CPUs also only became mainstream in the last few years, let alone more than that. FWIW, I don't have any real performance issues with Jetbrains IDEs on either of my machines, but I don't use them much either as I don't like the convoluted user interface.

FpUser 4y ago
>"That's some crazy powerful hardware, and would be a significant upgrade for most people." I have my own company. Cost of this laptop goes as a business expense and is peanuts comparatively to revenue. >"Sure, 8GB RAM is quite little, but it's still within the mainstream." I've never cared about mainstream. Not in the industry and neither in private life. I do what works for me / my company and could not care less about what others do.
- ColonelPhantom 4y ago
  Congratulations? I'm not saying you need to care or whatever, I'm just saying you shouldn't dismiss people who do need to care for whatever reason. Great that you always have access to a computer with 64+ GB RAM, but not everyone is quite so lucky.
  - FpUser 4y ago
    Sorry for sounding cocky. I was responding to a "mainstream" part assuming you meant it as an usual industry norm that had nothing to do with what people can usually afford. I developed products for many orgs and had interacted with many of their programmers and from my experience they all had very decent salaries and absolutely shitty computers. Their orgs could definitely "splurge" for what I spent on that laptop without noticing much. As a matter of fact they spent more on their crappy hardware than I spent on mine due to their purchasing policies. From this point of view yes: I do not give a flying fuck about the norm. If it is about individual trying to make ends meet I have nothing but respect.