laptop Laptop for Visual Studio development

[Jakezayak]

Alright guys, I am about to finish up my degree and will be looking for work here soon. I am looking for a new laptop to replace my old, terrible Lenovo. I currently can afford around the $700 to $1k range. This will be used mostly for Visual Studio and other various IDE's. I am very comfortable with pc components and specs, but I'm looking for other people's experiences with laptops and development. I do game on my desktop, so it doesn't have to have a discrete gpu , but I would complain about it either. 

 

I'll be buying sometime in the next month. Please share your recommendations. 

 

Thanks!

[SCHISCHKA]

get an i7. get the fastest cpu you can but it will still be a lot slower than a desktop cpu. a high resolution screen like a UHD makes up for the lack of multiple monitors

[Nuluvius]

A good SSD is a must.

[Mooshe]

IDEs are not that resource intensive. I used to have an old Dell Dimension 4550 which ran a Pentium III processor with 768 MB of memory, which handled Visual Studio 2012 just fine.

 

In terms of productivity for a budget of $700-1K, I would recommend the Dell XPS 13. You won't be able to run any intense games at 60 FPS, but you should be able to run most games released this past decade. Personally, I think this is a great choice for a developer who wants a laptop which works for both professional and home use.

 

May I ask which Lenovo laptop you have? I have a Lenovo Flex 14 and I use it every day for development and occasional gaming; personally, I'm a fan of Lenovo products.

[Nuluvius]

2 hours ago, Mooshe said:

IDEs are not that resource intensive.

Until one works on any kind of sizable project and is running lots of nice plugins such as ReSharper....

2 hours ago, Mooshe said:

Pentium III processor with 768 MB of memory

Yeah... Nope.

[Dat Guy]

To be adequately fair, ReSharper is not as important as earlier thanks to VS improvements. I also object to the thought that an SSD would be required. Depending on the size of your project, you wouldn't even save enough time to rectify the additional cost.

 

If I - being a full-time hobby developer and music addict - had to buy a new laptop today, I'd probably buy a ProBook 470. 17 inches, SSD and HDD, perfectly affordable while still not cheaply built.

[Nuluvius]

26 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

I also object to the thought that an SSD would be required. Depending on the size of your project, you wouldn't even save enough time to rectify the additional cost.

I agree that it's of course not a requirement but have you ever tried to do any kind of serious work on a 5200rpm or even a 7200rpm HDD? Which are generally what one finds inside a laptop, former more so than latter. Because I can tell you that it's quite painful indeed and makes for a significantly frustrating development experience, to the point where one may be tempted to claw their own eyes out. Having a frustrated developer will cost far more than an SSD a great many times over.

 

Source control is not a requirement...

[Dat Guy]

8 minutes ago, Nuluvius said:

have you ever tried to do any kind of serious work on a 5200rpm or even a 7200rpm HDD?

I'm actually paid for that.

 

Also, source control is just blown-up when you're working on hobby one-man projects.

[Nuluvius]

1 minute ago, Dat Guy said:

I'm actually paid for that.

They couldn't pay me enough for that kind of abuse 

2 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

Also, source control is just blown-up when you're working on hobby one-man projects.

I fundamentally don't agree but then... perhaps it's all relative to mindset or the level of complexity. Perhaps I should rephrase the statement to: condoms are not a requirement...

[Dat Guy]

Backups are important, source control is not. I usually have my reasons to change my code in my projects.

[Clechay]

FHD is enough, the most important is for laptop to have an SSD, not only for boot but also for workspace, 4+ cores (i5 is enough) and as big screen as possible. Seriously, if you buy laptop with screen smaller tan 16" you gonna hate yourself 

[Mooshe]

9 hours ago, Nuluvius said:

Until one works on any kind of sizable project and is running lots of nice plugins such as ReSharper....

Yeah... Nope.

 

This was about 4 years ago, and it handled VS2012 just fine. I'm not saying it was ideal, I'm just saying it worked.

 

Also, I disagree on an SSD being "required". Not that it really matters though, a ton of laptops intended for business have SSDs anyway.

 

1 hour ago, Clechay said:

Seriously, if you buy laptop with screen smaller tan 16" you gonna hate yourself 

 

I agree with the this. Nothing is more annoying than having a very small workspace.

[Jakezayak]

Thanks for all the responses, what I've gathered:

 

i7 with a nice clock speed (quad core)

ssd is nice ( I'm aware of the performance gains of an ssd vs mechanical)

nice size display, UHD gives extra screen real estate

 

What about RAM? Should I shoot for 12 gigs? Is that overkill? I'd assume 8 gigs at least. DDR4 vs DDR3. 

 

I appreciate the inspight guys. 

 

@Mooshe it's some old Lenovo with an AMD A6 apu, hardly anything to write home about. I don't remember the exact model right now, and I don't have it near by.

[Clechay]

8 minutes ago, Jakezayak said:

Thanks for all the responses, what I've gathered:

 

i7 with a nice clock speed (quad core)

ssd is nice ( I'm aware of the performance gains of an ssd vs mechanical)

nice size display, UHD gives extra screen real estate

 

What about RAM? Should I shoot for 12 gigs? Is that overkill? I'd assume 8 gigs at least. DDR4 vs DDR3. 

 

I appreciate the inspight guys. 

 

@Mooshe it's some old Lenovo with an AMD A6 apu, hardly anything to write home about. I don't remember the exact model right now, and I don't have it near by.

I have 16gigs of DDR3 and I don't think I've ever exceeded 12, however your use case may by very different 

[Mooshe]

2 minutes ago, Jakezayak said:

Thanks for all the responses, what I've gathered:

 

i7 with a nice clock speed (quad core)

ssd is nice ( I'm aware of the performance gains of an ssd vs mechanical)

nice size display, UHD gives extra screen real estate

 

What about RAM? Should I shoot for 12 gigs? Is that overkill? I'd assume 8 gigs at least. DDR4 vs DDR3. 

 

I appreciate the inspight guys. 

 

@Mooshe it's some old Lenovo with an AMD A6 apu, hardly anything to write home about. I don't remember the exact model right now, and I don't have it near by.

 

Anything more than 8 GB won't be necessary for business user for a few more years, so it's completely fine. In the case that you do require more memory, it's not that expensive to upgrade your memory yourself (assuming it's not soldered or inaccessible; which this usually isn't the case).

 

If you're still willing to use Lenovo, I would recommend checking out the Lenovo Thinkpad P50s; they are very durable and well designed, have a large 15.6" IPS display, 256 GB SSD, a Dedicated NVIDIA Quadro M500M 2GB Graphics Card, and an i7-6500U processor (or i5 if you get the base model).

[Jakezayak]

The thinkpad p50 starts at 1,299, which is more then I can spend right now. Like I posted early 700-1k is goal, and I'd prefer around $8. I've been eyeing this

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-15-6-Inch-Quad-Core-i5-6300HQ-Processor/dp/B015PYZ0J6?th=1&psc=1

whatcha guys think? 

[Clechay]

21 hours ago, Erik Sieghart said:

Good keyboard, good screen, I like 1440p for sharpness.
 

SSD is a must. it speeds up large operations you may do on data sets and loading.

As for RAM I prefer 16 GB, I run into issues with some things with less.

Anybody who says SSD is not a must is not a serious programmer  

[Nuluvius]

28 minutes ago, Clechay said:

Anybody who says SSD is not a must is not a serious programmer  

Totally. It's kinda been by subtle point all along 

[Geit]

On 1/14/2017 at 1:37 AM, Jakezayak said:

Thanks for all the responses, what I've gathered:

 

i7 with a nice clock speed (quad core)

ssd is nice ( I'm aware of the performance gains of an ssd vs mechanical)

nice size display, UHD gives extra screen real estate

 

What about RAM? Should I shoot for 12 gigs? Is that overkill? I'd assume 8 gigs at least. DDR4 vs DDR3. 

 

I appreciate the inspight guys. 

 

@Mooshe it's some old Lenovo with an AMD A6 apu, hardly anything to write home about. I don't remember the exact model right now, and I don't have it near by.

The screen size (UHD) I find to have no use for me on a laptop. You gotta scale up everything on laptop monitor anyways, as you do not want to have your face glued to the screen to see stuff, so for my opinion 1080p is enough.

 

The ram depends on what you are working with. If you got multiple dockers or vagrants running, you might be even lacking when having 16gigs of ram. I've hit that 16gb mark with my work laptop, but if you aren't running any virtual machines, then you should not worry for this