Laptop for school - Computer Science

[MousTea]

Hey all,

I am looking for a good laptop for school work regarding Computer Science,

It should be able to do: run vm(s), program/code, game development, ...

I have looked at some laptops and this one has great specs (https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1786178/asus-tuf-gaming-a17-fa707rr-hx006w-be-azerty-toetsenbord.html), battery is 90Wh, but still wouldn't last very long I think,

Its specs:
RTX  3070
AMD Ryzen 7 6800H
16GB ram
90Wh battery


What do you guys think, is it good are there better alternatives or laptop with better battery?

After all battery is very important, portability. I don't really care about, I need to bring it every day but I am used to bringing like 100 of books, now I don't need books anymore just the laptop so weight will be fine.

(Btw I am in belgium)

Thanks in advance!

[TylerD321]

In my experience, any laptop with a dedicated GPU is going to be significantly heavier than other laptops and have worse battery life. Are you certain you need a GPU? Intel Iris XE or AMD iGPU should be fine to my understanding. For alot of code you should only need a beefy CPU with decent ram.

[nieblas008]

29 minutes ago, TylerD321 said:

In my experience, any laptop with a dedicated GPU is going to be significantly heavier than other laptops and have worse battery life. Are you certain you need a GPU? Intel Iris XE or AMD iGPU should be fine to my understanding. For alot of code you should only need a beefy CPU with decent ram.

I agree with this. In Computer Science you will not carry many books, and a thin and light laptop will feel great. I personally use an M1 MacBook Air (base model) and have never had an issue, even with my 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. However, you might prefer to go at least for double of both, just to future-proof your purchase.

 

I could recommend you look at a Mac since they are great at software development, but there could be some drawbacks depending on what to do, specially if you game. The only game I can comfortably run is Minecraft.

 

For Windows laptops, names that come to mind are Microsoft Surface Laptop, Dell XPS, and HP Envy. Dell and HP have tons of models, so as long as you match the specs you want and it has that name, you are getting good machines.

 

From my point of view, thin and light laptops have a lot more benefits. However, that is my opinion since I don't really game much. But I'd be happy to further help you if you'd like.

[TylerD321]

37 minutes ago, nieblas008 said:

I agree with this. In Computer Science you will not carry many books, and a thin and light laptop will feel great. I personally use an M1 MacBook Air (base model) and have never had an issue, even with my 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. However, you might prefer to go at least for double of both, just to future-proof your purchase.

 

I could recommend you look at a Mac since they are great at software development, but there could be some drawbacks depending on what to do, specially if you game. The only game I can comfortably run is Minecraft.

 

For Windows laptops, names that come to mind are Microsoft Surface Laptop, Dell XPS, and HP Envy. Dell and HP have tons of models, so as long as you match the specs you want and it has that name, you are getting good machines.

 

From my point of view, thin and light laptops have a lot more benefits. However, that is my opinion since I don't really game much. But I'd be happy to further help you if you'd like.

Lenovo Enterprise laptops are also pretty killer for stuff like this. I am not sure what the availability is in Belgium however. We use Lenovo ThinkPad X1s at my work.