programming Student building PC for the 1st time for programming

[sheenigami]

Hi to all! This is my first post, I hope someone of members will help me. I plan to build a deep learning workstation for my school (I am a student) but I have no idea about current hardware and have never build a PC before. What parts should I pick that wouldn't completely destroy my bank. I know for deep learning I require a good GPU, however I do not know any good budget GPU options for deep learning.

 

[DailyProcrastinator]

Budget and location?

[SansVarnic]

-= Topic Moved to New Builds and Planning =-

[igormp]

4 hours ago, sheenigami said:

Hi to all! This is my first post, I hope someone of members will help me. I plan to build a deep learning workstation for my school (I am a student) but I have no idea about current hardware and have never build a PC before. What parts should I pick that wouldn't completely destroy my bank. I know for deep learning I require a good GPU, however I do not know any good budget GPU options for deep learning.

 

First of all, since you're just starting and you don't seem to have much money to spare, I'd say not to build anything expensive. Since you're still in school, get a cheap laptop and make use of Colab or Kaggle, this way you'll have a powerful GPU for free on the cloud that you're able to use anywhere, this will help you to take your first steps and learn a bit better about ML. When you get acquainted enough to this stuff, you'll probably now what you really need (you don't always need a powerful gpu, sometimes your workloads are CPU-only, or require insane amounts of RAM).

[Sauron]

4 hours ago, sheenigami said:

budget GPU

 

4 hours ago, sheenigami said:

deep learning

Pick one.

 

How much is your school willing to spend and what will you be using for deep learning?

[MoVo]

If you're on a Budget, there is no way you can get started with deep learning on your local GPU. The majority of DeepLearning frameworks, especially the more popular ones, only support CUDA for GPU acceleration, which means you'd have to get a NVIDIA card. NVIDIA cards tend to be more expensive than AMD cards.

 

I'd recommend buying a notebook or a budget friendly PC without paying too much attention to the GPU, since budget friendly GPUs won't help you a lot with deep learning. Small deep learning models will train just fine if you get a decent CPU, for larger models you can use Cloud offerings like Google's Colab. If you make progress and have more money to spend, you can still opt for higher end NVIDIA Cards or Cloud instances with GPUs for trainings.

 

[sheenigami]

Sorry for the late reply, I am new this form and thought replies would get sent to my email.

On 2/11/2020 at 2:07 PM, JM21 said:

Budget and location?

Anyways, I live in Singapore and for budget I am looking at around $2k SGD which translates to about 1,442.57
USD and 1,914.92 CAD.

17 hours ago, MoVo said:

Small deep learning models will train just fine if you get a decent CPU, for larger models you can use Cloud offerings like Google's Colab. If you make progress and have more money to spend, you can still opt for higher end NVIDIA Cards or Cloud instances with GPUs for trainings.

 

 I have used google collab in the past before, but i did not know it could be used for deep learning, maybe i should just stick with google collab, depending on what kind of computer i am able to build with my budget.

22 hours ago, igormp said:

When you get acquainted enough to this stuff, you'll probably now what you really need (you don't always need a powerful gpu, sometimes your workloads are CPU-only, or require insane amounts of RAM).

Currently I already own a laptop for school (Asus Ux331UN Ram: 8GB, CPU: i7-8550U, GPU: MX150, SSD: 256 GB), however, my lecturer in school told me that I would need a decent computer for deep learning if not I would not be able to do my assignment or it will take my laptop very long in to run.

 

Sorry again for the late reply,

[igormp]

1 hour ago, sheenigami said:

Sorry for the late reply, I am new this form and thought replies would get sent to my email.

Anyways, I live in Singapore and for budget I am looking at around $2k SGD which translates to about 1,442.57
USD and 1,914.92 CAD.

 I have used google collab in the past before, but i did not know it could be used for deep learning, maybe i should just stick with google collab, depending on what kind of computer i am able to build with my budget.

Currently I already own a laptop for school (Asus Ux331UN Ram: 8GB, CPU: i7-8550U, GPU: MX150, SSD: 256 GB), however, my lecturer in school told me that I would need a decent computer for deep learning if not I would not be able to do my assignment or it will take my laptop very long in to run.

 

Sorry again for the late reply,

Your lecturer is an asshole tbh. Colab sure is more than enough for most starter tasks in deep learning (heck, it has tons of vram), and even your laptop would be good enough to do so. I've trained some models using my laptop's 840m without much trouble (took around 4 hours to train stuff), and it already was many times faster than doing so with a CPU. 

 

Again, I would only recommend you to buy new stuff when you actually feel hindered by your current setup, and by then you'd already know what you specifically need. Also, by then new GPUs would be released with way better ML performance, so it's a win win anyway.

[sheenigami]

22 hours ago, igormp said:

Your lecturer is an asshole tbh. Colab sure is more than enough for most starter tasks in deep learning (heck, it has tons of vram), and even your laptop would be good enough to do so. I've trained some models using my laptop's 840m without much trouble (took around 4 hours to train stuff), and it already was many times faster than doing so with a CPU. 

 

Again, I would only recommend you to buy new stuff when you actually feel hindered by your current setup, and by then you'd already know what you specifically need. Also, by then new GPUs would be released with way better ML performance, so it's a win win anyway.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh ok. Thanks for your help, i think i would put off building a pc right now