Hello all,
I have the responsibility to buy a laptop for fMRI stimulation in my lab, and I am a little lost between various options. The first option would be to get a Linux laptop, such as the ones built by System76, that come with AMD graphics, but they are pretty rare and not many options are left to the customer (for example in this case I could get a Ryzen 7 4700U with integrated Radeon graphics, which has not been specifically tested with PTB). The other solution would be to get a Windows laptop with an Intel CPU and a dedicated AMD GPU, and install Linux on it, but I have had bad experiences doing that with a couple DELL laptops. So my question is which laptop would you recommend me to get, given that we’re using PTB for image, audio, and video displays.
Thank you!
There are no officially tested Laptops for PTB, only recommendations of what not to buy if avoidable, e.g., all things Apple, hybrid-graphics dual-gpu laptops, NVidia graphics, exotic or very new machines, anything that can’t run Linux well, because generally you want Linux for best results.
My current test laptops are MacBookPro 2010 and 2017, and Microsoft Surface Pro 6. The MBP 2010 works splendid, but is falling apart slowly due to old age. The 2017 MBP works pretty well for my needs, substantially better on Linux than on macOS for my needs, but took multiple days of expert setup work from myself, so that’s certainly not for beginners. All future Apple machines are worse. The MS Surface Pro6 was easier to set up, but still needs various customizations for things like battery reporting and touch screen, cameras don’t work atm.
We don’t have the funding to buy any specific hardware for testing with PTB. If more labs would buy the community memberships with priority support, that would be different, but so far most don’t.
The Ryzen 7 4700U seems to be a good choice on Ubuntu 20.04-LTS Linux for typical bread and butter tasks which don’t require the high gpu performance of a discrete gpu, and it seems to be quite competitive - as in superior - to Intel’s Gen 11 graphics offering (Icelake),
according to
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-7-4700U-Daily-Driver
and
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-renoir-icelake&num=5
If you need more customized advice, your lab needs to buy priority support. Something most labs should do anyway if they can afford it at all and value their research tools still working in the future.
Best,
-mario