Laptop for Working (and Hopefully Gaming)

Vortus · November 13, 2018

Hey there!

Because of my work I tend to use a lot of VMs, containers, and do some work with CUDA/OpenCL. This is manage-able through Windows, but Linux has better tools available. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't have excellent game support though. The dream would be a Linux laptop running a Windows VM for gaming, and whatever other VMs/Containers I need, but then there's the problem with VM GPU performance. Level1Techs recently put out a video where they showed off IOMMU/GPU Passthrough working well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLeWg11ZBn0), and that got me thinking about a laptop with the same capabilities, which would suite those wants. Since I travel a fair bit though lugging around a monster isn't ideal, so if I could have an external GPU it would be fantastic (this would also let me upgrade the GPU separate from the laptop). Throw in a big/high-resolution screen for productivity and it would be perfect. Putting together my wants list:

GPU Passthrough Support
External GPU Support > Discrete GPU
Screen Resolution > 1080p
Screen Size > 15"

I've tried a fair bit to find something like this, but most online descriptions don't have enough detail for me to check the IOMMU/GPU Passthrough support. If someone knows a product that fits this description that would be great :)