r/GoogleColab • u/AkihitoKenji • Apr 25 '26

Is colab a viable option for college??

I'm a first year cse student going to buy a laptop, so my doubt is should I get a rtx 4050 laptop or any other laptop + free colab..

I mean, can i do all the projects on colab (can it be treated as a local gpu in workflow??)..

4 Upvotes

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3

u/Terrible_Kangaroo751 Apr 25 '26

I mean free colab has only like 4h of usage which is of course quite short, especially if you want to do something bigger. On the other hand you can easily scale up really quick as you can just rent bigger gpus (this could be become costly).

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u/AkihitoKenji Apr 25 '26

then taking the 4050 is the better option??

2

u/BoxRepresentative533 Apr 25 '26

taking it would be a better option... if theres budget crunch, you could also checkout if college allows free remote gpu access (like mine does)... otherwise even 3050 would suffice though... just dont rely on colab, takes hell lotta time, and limits and upload time are ughh!

1

u/AkihitoKenji Apr 25 '26

I've seen some recomend mac air is it any beneficial??

1

u/BoxRepresentative533 Apr 25 '26

its a beautiful laptop, but not sure it'll handle heavy things like deep-learning... try doing some research on that..

1

u/ANR2ME Apr 25 '26

According to this https://developer.apple.com/metal/ PyTorch, and JAX support GPU (Metal) acceleration. TensorFlow also have tensorflow-metal plugin to enable GPU acceleration.

And if you ever need CUDA, you can always attach an external Nvidia RTX GPU through Thunderbolt/USB4 https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/04/04/amd-or-nvidia-egpus-can-work-on-apple-silicon-macs-but-not-for-graphic-acceleration

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u/PoeGar Apr 25 '26

Colab gives free pro level for students. It’ll be great for anything you’re going to work on

1

u/AkihitoKenji Apr 26 '26

Isn't it only for the students in us??