What is the best laptop for crunching numbers with Matlab?

I deal with audio waves sampled at 44.1 KHz and with plotting using mesh. As a result I often cause my 5 year old Toshiba Satellite laptop to struggle and sometimes outright die. I am thinking of a Toshiba Quosmio 775 that has the I7 processor and the 7200 rpm hard disc and the 17" screen. Anyone have any experience using this laptop with Matlab. If not, then what laptop do you recommend? Thanks.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

The fastest, most powerful laptop I know of is the Alienware M18x

http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-m18x/pd.aspx

The fastest, most powerful desktops I know of are built by Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking

http://liquidnitrogenoverclocking.com/index.shtml#page_top

These may be overkill for your audio application though.

[William Davenport]

Image analyst was on this thread too. https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/286270-regarding-laptop-suggestion-for-matlab-programming

I would stick to your budget and follow the system recommendations for laptop. You should also stay away from Toshiba. Their hard drives don't last long compared to western Digital and Samsung, even crucial.

Answer 2

[owr]

I'd recommend a 64 bit OS as well. MATLAB will have memory limits on 32 bit imposed by the OS. You'll be able to load and process alot more data.

[David Koenig]

Thanks for your answer. The information is helpful.

Answer 3

[Nick]

I find Asus laptops to be fairly good. The company sells a range of mid to high end laptops with all the nice goodies: Core i7, 7200 rpm drive, 1 gig video cards, 64 bit OS etc etc...

You should be able to find a laptop with the specs you listed from 1000-1200 dollars. Alot cheaper than the Quosmio or Alienware.

[David Koenig]

Thanks, Nick, for your answer, too. It is also helpful.

Answer 4

[Jan]

Some benchmarks I've seen in the net show a substantial speed advantage for running Matlab under Linux. After reading the problems e.g. concerning Java updates and GUI appearences under Linux and MacOS, it seems to me, that the Windows version is more stable. It depends on your job, if the program should run 5 seconds faster or the debugging needs additional 3 weeks.

While you might get a speedup of factor 2, if you invest additional 1500$ in the hardware, you can get a factor of 10 if you hire a professional programmer who optimizes the memory usage. This is just a rough estimation - it could be the factors 1.2 and 95 also!

Answer 5

[David Koenig]

Thank you, Jan.

Answer 6

[Zilvanhisna Fitri]

how about core i5 with ram 4gb, that is enough or not for image processing?

[Image Analyst]

That will work. The CPU is okay, but the memory is a bit low, though it might be okay for apps where you don't have lots of images in memory at the same time. You should try for 8 GB at a min. My current laptop (Dell M6800) has an i7 with 32 GB or RAM and 1.9 Terabytes of solid state drives. I got it 3 months ago and it was the most powerful laptop Dell had at the time.