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I am a novice when it comes to hardware world. If this is not the appropriate site, I request the moderators to redirect me to the correct one and close this question :).

My objectives pertaining to the laptop:

Only ONE os - RHEL(enterprise or developer, I haven't decided). Dell laptops come loaded with Ubuntu and are 'RHEL certified'. I didn't understand what they meant, also, I want only RHEL, to begin with.

What would save a 'considerable' amount - buying from the provider with above features preconfigured or simply buy the hardware without OS(bare metal) and then install RHEL by myself? If there isn't much difference, I would prefer to buy from the provider.

Configuration to suit development needs:

  1. 16-32 GB RAM
  2. 1+TB SSD
  3. i7/AMD equivalent
  4. Motherboard that can handle all the above
  5. Possibility to add RAM, in the future
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  • Hi welcome to Hardware Recs! Would you happen to have an upper price limit in mind for this build? Also, I noticed you marked your location as Stockholm, Sweden in your Stack-exchange profile. Are you planning on purchasing this laptop there?
    – Bennett Yeo
    Aug 9, 2018 at 13:17
  • As of now, I haven't thought about the price. Would avoid buying in Sweden as it's expensive here, even the basis config.!
    – Kaliyug Antagonist
    Aug 9, 2018 at 13:19

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It seems you were correct about laptops being more expensive in Sweden. As far as I could surmise it appears it will be cheaper to order a laptop from the USA and pay for international shipping. I seems that Sweden doesn't charge any import fees or VAT as far as I can tell. You also ask:

What would save a 'considerable' amount - buying from the provider with above features preconfigured or simply buy the hardware without OS(bare metal) and then install RHEL by myself?

There's a third option, buy hardware that already comes with an OS (most system do) and then install RHEL yourself. The procedure is identical even if it came without an OS.

MSI GL62M 11,944.84 kr + 306.50 kr international shipping

GL62M

Comes right out of the box with 32 gb of RAM. Unfortunately, this laptop is not capable of an upgrade up to 64 gb of RAM, despite the i7-7700 HQ being capable supporting 64 GB of ram over 2 slots. Also if you're wondering about the powerful discrete graphics card, laptop manufacturers catering to this level of RAM capacity usually end up being gaming capable laptop purveyors where this is standard. This just so happened to be the cheapest laptop I could find. Perhaps if you use your Red Hat linux system for video rendering this may be more useful. MSI doesn't sell laptops directly.

  • i7-7700 HQ
  • 32 GB 2400 DDR4
  • 250 GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe + 1 TB HDD
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2 GB

Lenovo ThinkPad P51 Workstation 20,580.26 kr + 395.77 kr international shipping

P51 High Performance Mobile Workstation

This option explicitly supports 64 GB of RAM. Most mobile systems don't really support 64 GB RAM upgrades because there isn't really a market for gratuitously expansive memory in laptops, as most people would purchase a non-mobile desktop/server system for the average user case scenario (hosting, servers, etc.). If you are thinking about 64 GB of RAM in the future, I would advise explicitly buying a 64 GB supported laptop out of the box as it is likely most laptops will only have 2 slots for memory meaning an upgrade will be a full replacement, as you won't be able to add to your existing memory infrastructure. Effectively, you will need to buy 2 32 GB memory sticks which will cost you in the ballpark of 1793.59 - 3587.18 kr. If you try and skimp on RAM costs, it is also likely you will buy poor latency (Higher CAS latency values) RAM, which will have inferior timings and therefore more delay. If you want to purchase a configurable system from the manufacturer here's a link.

  • i7-7700 HQ
  • 64 GB 2400 DDR4
  • 128 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD
  • NVIDIA Quadro M1200M

Edit: Dell precision series response (link was too long to fit in a comment). This is the cheapest (purchasing directly from manufacturer) precision series laptop configuration that supports 64 GB of RAM. It will cost you 38,076.75 Kr, and isn't a very good deal.

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"RHEL certified" means that the hardware has been tested by Dell and will work as expected with RHEL.

If you want to have a laptop, then it's going to be easier in the long run to purchase this from a vendor. Dell provides (sorry for the US links and prices) an XPS 13 Developer Edition that you can upgrade to support most of your requirements. The highest end version can have the hard drive upgraded to 1 or 2TB. The others can only be upgraded to 512GB. The highest amount of RAM that any of them support is 16GB.

The total cost for the high end XPS with 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB drive is $2,350 plus whatever taxes and shipping comes out to be.

The downside of this is that you probably won't be able to add any components in the future since it's a laptop.

That said, I have a year old version of the XPS 13 Developer Edition running Ubuntu. I'm happy with it. It handles my development work without any issues. It came with Ubuntu 16.04 and upgraded to 18.04 without any problems a couple weeks ago.

If you really want to expand your components and resources in the future, you'll want to build something but I suspect it's not going to be a laptop.

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