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by archit3cture 2077 days ago
I wonder what is a good hardware setup for following this kind of course and seriously play with deep learning in general (outside of an enterprise context where the enterprise would provide the hardware). What kind of budget should be considered ?
3 comments

I did a lot of my learning on a GTX 1060 about 2 years ago with 16gb of RAM and an i5-6400.

The issue with machine learning is that you need enough GPU VRAM to load your dataset and then have to wait for a result being trying something else.

If you have too little VRAM, you get nothing done, but if your GPU is slow (GTX 1070 is about 2x faster than a GTX 1060) you will have to wait before learning something after trying something. The feedback loop for learning is better if you're able to iterate quickly. This is why you sometimes see GPU rigs with up to 4 GPUs that are not being used on the same task (so you can do more than 1 thing at a time)

You can do very well with just Google Colab. If you prefer local compute, the higher-end NVIDIA gaming cards (GeForce series) will do pretty well.
This post[0] by Tim Dettmers should help. Reading through the article, it seems like he covers a lot of ground and lays out choices quite well. tl;dr is that only Nvidia is your best bet for local computing power, stay away from AMD & Intel for now.

[0] - https://timdettmers.com/2020/09/07/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...