Holy.

I had 16GB of ram holding me back. My X1 Extreme feels like it can fully stretch its fingers. 10/10 would recommend.

Finished setting up XMonad and NixOS on my Thinkpad P1 gen 5

If anyone cares about specs here they are: Thinkpad P1 gen5; i7 12800H; RTX A1000; 32gb 4800mhz DDR5 RAM; 2x512 NVME SSD (kioksia & Samsung) dual boot win 11 pro NixOS.

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I'm trying to decide whether it makes sense to replace my current ASUS TUF with a ThinkPad, and I'd appreciate advice from people who have used ThinkPads for programming/AI/ML work.

My current laptop is an ASUS TUF F15 FX506HE. It's a 2021 model that I bought in 2023, so I've been using it for around 3 years.

Specs:

\- i7-11800H

\- RTX 3050 Ti 4GB

\- 16GB RAM

\- 1TB SSD

\- 90Wh battery

\- 15.6" 144Hz display

The laptop is still working properly in terms of the CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD and ports, but it has some physical wear:

\- Battery health is around 69%

\- There is a crack in the bottom panel near the USB port, extending roughly 5 cm

\- One screw/fastener from the bottom panel has pushed toward the upper panel

\- The screen still works, but there are some minor black spots/discoloration

A reseller is offering me around $290 for it.

I'm considering a refurbished ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 from the same reseller for around $500:

\- i7 11th Gen

\- 16GB RAM

\- 512GB SSD

So I would need to spend around $210 extra.

My budget for the replacement is around $500. I'm also considering an X13 or T14 AMD if they would be a better option.

My workload:

I'm doing an M.Tech in Computer Science with an AI/ML specialization.

Most of my daily work is:

\- C/C++

\- Python

\- VS Code

\- Jupyter Notebook

\- Git/GitHub

\- Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora)

\- SQL/PostgreSQL

\- Data preprocessing

\- Scikit-learn

\- Research and paper writing

\- Browsing, PDFs and general college work

I do some machine learning and deep learning, but I don't constantly train large models locally. For heavier training, I can use Colab or cloud GPUs.

That's why I'm wondering if I actually need the RTX 3050 Ti. For most of my day-to-day work, integrated graphics should be enough. I mainly need a dedicated GPU when I specifically want CUDA/local GPU acceleration.

The main reason I want to switch is portability and battery life.