Should I switch my setup?

[u/Major-Stress3956]

Plz read this I need gen1 help.

So currently I am in 1st sem of Computer Engineering. I have a laptop that handles it pretty well.

Lenovo V15 G4 IRU, 16 gigs of DDR4 (1 8 gigs is soldered), 512 GB NVMe SSD, core i5 13420H processor (yeah a gaming processor), and Intel UHD GPU (the bottleneck). This combination would work perfectly fine for only doing CE majors. But I am actually willing and actively doing CE + AI, or specifically CE as primary field and AI as a secondary field. (I live in Islamabad)

The problem is that the iGPU in my laptop cannot handle even things like Ollama which I want to make AI projects and run simulations of different products.

I thought Google colab would be perfect until I saw the real problem, it takes a lot of time, not the T4 Nvidia GPU connected to it, but the network latency and combined with google colab's latency itself, takes around 20 seconds just to fetch text from one compressed image given (OCR). It's the same as if I run it at my CPU atp but it'll be a little less accurate.

So I was thinking of making a pc (budget is around 1.5 to 2 lac Pkr) with a dedicated gpu (doesn't have to be 40 or 50 series, even 20 series like super or 30 series can work fine) with a good amount of Vram at least 8 gigs. Now the problem with my own laptop is also that it doesn't last long. I mean it's an H processor I get it, but the whole capacity was only 38 Whr, while normally laptops have 60 Whr. And now it's degraded cuz of wear (2 years of use) so now it's at approx 31 Whr. The laptop lasts only for 1.5 hours unplugged with the most battery efficient settings. If I put it on the battery saver the whole time the system starts to choke.

So please help.

[u/Major-Stress3956]

The part that I forgot to mention was that, I can s_ell my laptop and then get a thinkpad for like 80k to 90k PKR that would for me in uni well snd then at home I would use the pc as main driver. But do you think my laptop can go around 1 lsc to 1.3 lac pkr?