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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1602 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

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Can any of the tech nerds on this site recommend a reasonably high-powered computer? My laptop died two weeks ago, and my 10-year-old desktop just isn’t working out for me. Despite commenting on a Rationalist-diaspora forum, I’ll admit to my shame that I know almost nothing about computers, and I’ve pretty quickly become overwhelmed by the staggering number of options for each and every component part.

What I’m looking for is a machine that can ideally simultaneously handle several open Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, image files, and PDFs, one or two PowerPoint presentations, an ungodly number of open tabs spread throughout multiple windows and likely across several browsers (including several active windows that are absolute memory hogs), a CAD program, SoundCloud, and a couple of other minor programs on a rotation basis. My budget is roughly $1,500–$2,500, though I’m open to being told that I need to increase it. I basically want a machine that will handle everything I throw at it and won’t die or get completely bogged down at any point in the next 15 years.

I don’t mind buying either a desktop (in which case I’d supplement with a cheap laptop for those few occasions when I’d need one) or a laptop. In either case, I’ll be hooking up several monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse. Also, I know it’s a bad time to be buying a lot of memory, but that unfortunately can’t be helped. Finally, without any additional information, I was planning on just picking one of the recommended gaming desktops on a review site, but I’m hoping someone here can tell me if that’s a good idea or not.

Can you say what the CAD program is? SolidWorks has drastically greater requirements than FreeCAD which has greater requirements than OnShape, and the closer you get to (or above) the first side of things, the more it's going to control your requirements.

For RAM, I'd suggest a minimum of 16GB and ideally 32GB for your use case, with a minimum of two sticks (because of how DDR works, there's a significant performance penalty to 1x32GB vs 2x16GB). Given current RAM prices, I'd personally want to wait for later and upgrade when RAM prices drop - it is the single easiest component to upgrade - but I recognize that may not be possible for your use case. Still, be aware of things like how many slots your motherboard has and what max memory the CPU supports: a motherboard with support for four sticks of RAM gives you a lot more options even if you think your starting value is good.

I'd recommend the desktop-and-disposable-laptop combo, unless you have strong business requirements for CAD-on-the-go. You can get a well-refurbed ThinkPad T480 or E15 around 300 USD; getting a powerful desktop's equivalent specs on a laptop will cost you much than that, and will be a much worse use experience at the desktop, and be harder to maintain.

I'd also consider whether you want a pre-build, or want to build your own. Most prebuilt gaming machines are going to optimize for a use case that isn't yours: gaming generally favors more GPU and less RAM than even the SolidWorks use case will want, and many CAD programs are (still) extremely single-thread-heavy in ways that gaming has largely moved away from. That said, there's not a massive price penalty compared to the same CAD performance in new workstation machines. Building your own can save more money (though it will probably take some careful looking at mobo-cpu-ram combos right now), but it does mean following the instructions or video guides carefully, and using a tool like PCPartPicker to keep an eye on compatibility problems.

I'll... also caution that trying to future-proof for five years is doable and probably easy, ten years is plausible, and fifteen years is an exercise in frustration. The Computer Of The Future in 2011 would have involved a 80GB-256GB SSD for your operating system drive, a first-generation Core i7, and 8-16GB RAM. I actually managed a handful of these for office work, and even without the CAD requirements, they bogged down bad by 2020, and that's with repasting, cleaning, dusting, drive upgrades, and psu replacements.

Thanks for the detailed response!

I have previously been using an old non-subscription version of AutoCAD, but I’m not sure the budget will support paying for a subscription moving forward, so I’ll need to switch to something free/cheaper. I was thinking most likely FreeCAD.

Also, I’ve never built a PC before, but the actual process doesn’t seem very difficult; rather, it seems that the difficulty is in knowing what parts to pick. Between your and others’ advice, netstack’s link, and PCPartPicker, that aspect seems to largely be covered. I’m open to either buying a prebuilt or building from parts though.

I have previously been using an old non-subscription version of AutoCAD, but I’m not sure the budget will support paying for a subscription moving forward, so I’ll need to switch to something free/cheaper. I was thinking most likely FreeCAD.

This sounds like light hobbyist use, like for some 3D printing? Any laptop from the last 5-7 years will have no trouble running that. Unless you're designing large assemblies or planning on doing simulation work on your designs, I'd just get >16GB of RAM and call it good.

I'm a firm believer that nothing important has happened in the PC space for the last 15 years (Apple Silicon is another matter, but it didn't sound like you're interested in that). We did everything you want to do 15 years ago on Windows 7, and it was fine. Because we suck at software design, doing the same thing now needs more RAM, so we gotta buy that. Done.

If my current PC dies, I'm getting another Thinkpad X1 Carbon, probably 8th Gen (those are from 2020 and go for around $500 when getting a good condition business lease return, and sold for >$2000 6 years ago). Matte full HD screen, good keyboard, solid build. X series Thinkpads have lasted more than 10 years of hard use under my care historically, and I would expect this one to continue the legacy.

But really, any PC from that era will do fine at your workload. I'd choose on price or other secondary features. If you get a desktop tower, spend your money on a nice display/mouse/mechanical keyboard and maybe passive cooling instead of compute.

I'm a firm believer that nothing important has happened in the PC space for the last 15 years

There is one exception to this: A gpu that can run local AI models. Not LLMs or image generators but the sorts of custom neural networks that have become quite common for eg. photo noise reduction, audio stem separation etc. In those cases even a fairly low end "good gpu" will do fine (such as this ancient NVidia Quadro P2000 Mobile aka Gefore GTX 1050) but the difference between "have" and "have not" is massive.

Interesting, does the software integrating those non-LLM AI functionalities offer to run this in the cloud for you? My experience with both image generation/manipulation and local LLMs has been that its almost always better to run those loads in the cloud - either directly from the big AI labs, through a vendor like openrouter.ai or on a rented GPU like runpod.io.

You can very well do it all locally, but it's a pointless toy with 8GB of VRAM, semi-interesting with 16GB and you're finally cloud-independent with 24 GB of VRAM. And you can get many hours of GPU time on runpod.io for the price you'd have to pay for this much VRAM.

But yeah, I haven't worked with audio models and the things Photoshop can throw at a GPU.

LLMs and other generation AIs are much more HW intensive than domain specific neural networks. 500M - 1B parameters is plenty when the model doesn't have to understand instructions or global context (hell, there are some task specific audio models in wide use that can fit in just a couple of megabytes while performing well). Sure, a more powerful gpu will run the models faster but when you're doing noise reduction on a dozen culled and selected photos it doesn't really matter if it takes 15 seconds or a minute to run the process when on cpu it would take half an hour. Likewise stem separation taking a few minutes is a non-issue when you only need to run it once or at most a few times for a song (such as when remixing or isolating instruments for practising the lines).

There are apps that can run in the cloud but they're (expensive) subscription or credit based and having to pay $30-$50 per month per app gets really expensive. Not to mention they tend to have ridiculous censorship (think photos of people on a beach where you want to remove some distractions and the cloud version complains that your content breaks the terms of use).

OK, all good arguments. Maybe I'll have to take a deep dive on what's possible in open source land on that front (I refuse to touch Adobe/Abelton et al.). Do you use commercial models/implementations or do you have a recommendation where to start if I want to set it up myself?

Not to mention they tend to have ridiculous censorship

That's the nice thing about just renting a VM on expensive hardware from runpod. They don't care at all what you do, because you provide all the software yourself.

Do you use commercial models/implementations or do you have a recommendation where to start if I want to set it up myself?

For photo noise reduction I've used Lightroom and (free but specific to Olympus / OM cameras) OM Workspace. I don't think there are good open source models as the models are camera specific due to different sensor and bayer filter characteristics (and why they can produce really impressive results - check the OM-1 original vs denoised comparison here where the original is far from what I'd consider usable while the Lightroom one is perfectly fine).

For audio stem separation Ultimate Vocal Remove is my tool of choice (you can download the models from the settings page). I start by removing vocals with MDX-Net / Kim Vocal 2, take the residual and remove drums with Demucs and then possibly remove the bass from the residual of that. Be aware that if you just split the stems from the original they will not sum to 100% and thus you want to go the recursive route. I'm sure there are some newer models that you can install manually but I haven't used those as the existing ones work well enough for my purpose (removing distracting vocals or emphasizing instrumental part to better hear what's happening).

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