What components should I pay attention to when buying a new laptop for Stata?

[Adam Sadi]

Hello Statalisters,

I don't know if I'm allowed to post this thread as it is not related to Stata per se but to the best ways to use Stata. For the next years I might have to spend my days using Stata and my laptop is currently dying, so I need to replace it. At this moment, my laptop struggles with large datasets or regressions using a lot of iterations (it can take several hours to run, and with a noise that is very worrying and uncomfortable).

Sadly, I don't know anything about computers. So I wanted to know if there was any tech fan among this forum to tell me what are the main components I should pay attention to when looking for a new laptop. I'm not interested in brands, mainly about the components!

Thank you in advance,

Adam

[Hong Il Yoo]

You can focus on RAM and CPU. Stata uses RAM to load your data and perform calculations, so you'll benefit from having a large memory size, especially when you're working with large datasets and heavily parameterised non-linear regression models that require numerical optimisation. With a better CPU, your numerical optimisation routines will run faster. If your plan is to use Stata MP, you may want to double-check that your CPU has at least as many physical cores as what your version of MP allows you to use. Most CPUs these days have two logical cores per one physical core and advertised as a K-core CPU where K is the number of logical cores; so a natural rule of thumb to apply is that if your MP allows you to use X cores, look for what retailers advertise as 2*X cores or more.

[Joro Kolev]

The RAM is the real bottle neck with Stata, if you do not have the RAM you cannot load your data and you have to be very clever with your programming. So buy a computer with as much RAM as you can afford.

Another thing which speed things up for reasons I do not completely understand is having a Solid State Drive.

And if that is a choice, desktops are a lot more powerful than laptops. The reason here is clear -- desktops have processors which work mightily and heat up like ovens; desktops resolve the overheating problem by having huge fans that can cool the processor down. With laptops it is always a game of putting the processor in small space and having processors which do not heat up much because one cannot install a huge fan to cool it down; then there is the problem with the battery so again the processor needs to use as little energy as possible. So at the end the processors on laptops end up being fairly miserable computational devices.

I have had some fairly expensive Dell laptops. Right now I am on a Latitude 3420 i7 with 32gb of RAM. Before I had Dell XPS 15 i7 with 16gb of RAM. They are fine machines with plenty of cores, but I am not impressed by their performance.

On the other hand when I was a Ph.D. student I was working on a cheap desktop with some Celeron one core 1bg RAM, and this thing was a monster. I could literally smell the Stata as the processor was heating up, and the fan was working so hard that one would think the desktop will take off and fly away. But it was computing pretty fast. With 1bg of RAM I of course had to be pretty clever with my programming to be within limits.

And this is the last observation, the programmer and the hardware are substitutes. With a programmer who is willing to think through what he/she is typing down, one might get away with fairly cheap hardware. If the programmer does not really think through what he/she is doing, the hardware requirements grow exponentially.