{"id":634,"date":"2025-09-02T12:58:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T12:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/?p=634"},"modified":"2025-09-02T13:10:48","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T13:10:48","slug":"asus-rog-laptops-for-ai-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/?p=634","title":{"rendered":"ASUS ROG Laptops for AI Development"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Say you want a laptop with decent power for local AI development.  If you don&#8217;t want to spend a lot of money, and you want a portable, sleek laptop (not a clunky &#8220;portable desktop&#8221;), consider the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14.  You can get one of these from BestBuy, on a deal, for under $2000.  It comes with 1TB of NVME &#8211; but for ~$200 you can upgrade this yourself to 4TB using a Samsung Pro NVME.  I did the same and ended up with a 5070ti, 32GB of ram, all in a fairly sleek laptop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hardware out of the way here are some tips:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>You can kick rocky 9.6<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>You should add in elrepo and upgrade the kernel using the kernel-ml repo. At the time of this article this pulled me to kernel version 6.16.4-1<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Unfortunately X11 doesn&#8217;t work &#8211; use Wayland.  <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I&#8217;ve found a lot of python libraries are not yet built with cuda 13 support &#8211; so stick with cuda 12.9. Also it seems to matter which version your driver targets, so i found <a href=\"https:\/\/download.nvidia.com\/XFree86\/Linux-x86_64\/575.64.05\/\">575.64.05<\/a> work well &#8211; still supports the 5070 ti, but targets cuda 12.9<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I was able to control the keyboard LEDs, screen brightness, and power profiles via KDE. I also tried the asusctl and supergfxctl &#8211; but ended up not needing these.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>As for screen control, for some reason the screen got VERY dark on bootup &#8211; so i ended up writing a screenbrightness systemd script that would set screenbrightness to max on bootup. Once in KDE i could control this via KDE&#8217;s controls<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I also found sddm works well, but could not get gdm to work &#8211; so stick with sddm\/wayland<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One downside to this platform &#8211; when not on wall power, the GPU halves the amount of power it is willing to source. In practice for AI inference tasks this only seems to make a small dent in performance.  <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Also on power modes: the Quiet mode is so pleasent &#8211; little to no fan noise, and the performance is stilll quite good. If you flip to Performance mode, the fans are so loud &#8211; you have to really need the extra performance. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Lastly, sddm seemed to crash on boot &#8211; so i wrote a timer based systemd script to restart it 7 seconds after boot, and this fixed that <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s a kickstart for rocky 96: <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/carsonfenimore\/kickstart\">https:\/\/github.com\/carsonfenimore\/kickstart<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Be sure to disable secure boot<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-code\"><code><\/code><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Say you want a laptop with decent power for local AI development. If you don&#8217;t want to spend a lot of money, and you want a portable, sleek laptop (not a clunky &#8220;portable desktop&#8221;), consider the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14. You can get one of these from BestBuy, on a deal, for under $2000. It &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/?p=634\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">ASUS ROG Laptops for AI Development<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":638,"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carson.fenimorefamily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}