I'm a data scientist that is looking for a better personal laptop - something to use for personal experiments with machine learning, neural networks, and computer science / math stuff in general. I know that, for the most part, I will eventually focus on training machine learning models in the cloud (like Google Cloud or AWS). For cloud computing, it doesn't matter which computer I use. Still, I want a modern, capable laptop where I can do some smaller prototyping and testing.
Current laptops: Up until 2 weeks ago, these were my only laptops.
- ThinkPad T420. I've owned this since 2015. It has served me well, but it's quite heavy, barely holds a charge, only has a screen resolution of 1600 x 900, and is getting old.
- Acer Swift 1. I've owned this for a few months. It's nice and light, but it has a dim screen, and its weak Pentium processor isn't compatible with TensorFlow past version 1.5.
- ThinkPad X260. This is actually my work laptop. It's decent, but I don't own it, and I associate it with work (unfortunately).
Last week, I bought a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 from the Dell outlet store online. I originally wanted the regular XPS 13, but the 2-in-1 was on sale at a great discount. It's small, has a great looking screen, and I managed to dual-boot it with Windows 10 and Fedora (someone on a forum warned against Ubuntu on this machine). The main issue with the Dell: core temperature. I would routinely see the core temps spike up to 91 C while doing trivial tasks like downloading large files. And if I tried to train a simple neural network on the MNIST data set, the temperature would stay between 80-90 C the entire time.
I know that the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 is passively cooled (no fan), but these core temps seem unacceptable. I'm planning on sending this laptop back, but I wanted advice on what to get next.
I've been debating between:
- ThinkPad X1 Carbon
- ThinkPad T470
- Any other laptop you might suggest?