CS student, £1,000 total including a screen, and my current laptop is seven years old and takes eleven minutes to build a project that should take three. I move rooms every academic year and I work in the library maybe twice a week. Everyone says desktop for the money, but nobody who says that has carried one up three flights of stairs in September.
Third option nobody mentions: cheap thin laptop plus a desktop you leave at home and connect into remotely. I did this for two years and it was excellent for compiles and terminal work and genuinely bad for anything graphical, because even on a good connection the lag in an editor window annoys you daily. If your work is command line, it is the best value in this thread. If you need to see things, it isn't.
The gap is not really in benchmark numbers, it is in sustained load. My desktop holds its all-core clock indefinitely; the laptop that matched it for the first ninety seconds of a compile settled about a third lower once the fans caught up, and that lower number is the one you live with. Buying a laptop that genuinely holds a desktop-class compile cost me roughly double what the desktop did. If your actual pain is an eleven minute build, the desktop fixes that far more cheaply.
Worth adding that the sustained gap has narrowed a lot on the better-cooled 14 inch chassis and on the Apple side. Still real, but a third lower is the bad case rather than the average case, and plenty of people would take that trade for something they can carry.
I bought the desktop and regretted it, but not for the reason you would guess. It was fine to move. The problem was that I stopped doing coursework anywhere except that one desk, and when my housemates were loud I had nowhere else to go. The laptop I replaced it with is slower and I get more done.
I have moved a mid tower four times now, including one third floor with no lift. Keep any box that fits, put the tower in a bin bag first so the polystyrene doesn't shed everywhere, and take the GPU out and carry it separately. It is twenty minutes of work per move, not a lifestyle problem. The bigger annoyance is the two days your stuff is in the back of a car and you cannot work at all.
A small case makes this much less dramatic too. An ITX build in a 15 litre case genuinely goes in a rucksack with the panels on.
The GPU out thing is not optional advice, it is the whole tip. Mine sagged in transit and cracked the PCIe slot latch. Cheap lesson, but avoidable.
At £1,000 including a screen, a new laptop that handles two VMs comfortably is a stretch and a desktop is not. Compare what 32GB of RAM costs in each and the argument mostly settles itself. Whichever way you go, buy the RAM you need up front on the laptop, because you usually cannot add it later.
@flakey_test · 2mo ago
Disagreeing with the desktop crowd here. You said you work in the library twice a week, which is sixty sessions a year where a desktop is useless to you. Buy a boring, well-cooled 14 inch laptop with as much RAM as you can afford soldered in, then add a second-hand 27 inch monitor and a keyboard for the desk at home. You will be slower on the compiles and happier every single day.
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