Workstation vs surface book2, which is better for Unity 2019 and 2020

Which is better for Unity 2019.4 and 2020

Dual Processor Workstation
Dell Precision T7810

Specs:
• 2x Intel Xeon E5-2680 V3 (24 core)
• 32GB 2133MHz Registered ECC Memory
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 Super 6GB
• 480GB Solid-State Device
• Western Digital 2TB Blue
.......
Or
.....
Microsoft Surface book 2

i7 8650U
4k Screen
512 ssd
GTX 1060 ( 6GB )
16 GB RAM
surface pen

I want a stationary device which is capable of running unity and building mobile and VR games and lasts for 3 to 5 years.
What do you recommend?

 

Don't get a surface book, they're not reliable.

I've used my surface book 2 for the last year and half, and overwhelmingly it's a pain in the ass.

The monitor detach-becomes-a-tablet gimmick is cute, but it's also super irritating, because it means sometimes opening and closing the lid causes it to go into tablet mode, and you have to screw around with it to get it to go back into 'laptop' mode where, eg. the keyboard works. Sometimes just adjusting the angle of the screen causes this to happen... it's intensely annoying.

The graphics card on the surface seems ok, until you start using it, at which point you will realise that the surface uses more power from the GPU than it can charge while plugged in. Tangibly, this means if you sit there with you surface plugged into the wall, and do heavy GPU work (CUDA or shader stuff), your battery slowly drains and eventually your surface will simply turn off... despite being physically connected to the power socket.

I can't speak in general about laptops vs. desktop; they are different things with different trade offs.... but generally a workstation would be the better choice. If you really want to go the surface, please, pick a surface laptop, not the surface book.

 

Wow, that's backwards compared to usual! Most laptops only run their GPUs at full power when plugged in because the battery can't keep up on its own.

Is that because it uses USB charging and has limited wattage or something like that?

 

Are those the only options you have? Or do you have a budget? If you can build one which country are you in for pricing?

 

I am in Egypt. I was about to get a used surface book 2, when a Facebook Ad appeared with some cheaper workstations with high CPU performance. so I wanted to ask people about their opinions in both configurations.

 

4k on a 13-15" laptop screen [& gpu]. Nah not for 3d work
Desktop will be cheaper faster upgradeable

 

Laptops are great if you're going to actually use their portability. Otherwise you're paying a premium for a less flexible machine.

Based on specs alone I'd happily work on either of those. If it were my only machine I'd want at least one decent monitor, keyboard and mouse to go with it.

I've no experience with Surface Books, but keep in mind power and GPU considerations. My laptop with a 1070 does not run at full speed without being plugged into a wall socket because the battery can't feed the GTX 1070. Someone earlier was mentioning that the Surface has the opposite issue. So I'd read up on that to see which (if either) apply to the model you're looking at, in case it bothers you.

 

Great, but what's your budget?

You're neglecting to provide us with two of the most important details. What do they cost? What is your budget? Anything can be a good deal for the right price.

 

My Budget is 1.5k$. Surface book 2 is 1.7k$. The workstation is like 1.3k$ and comes with dual xeon 12 core processor and good GPU "Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 Super 6GB"

 

I just spent some time with the following retailer and have come to the conclusion that finding anything in Egypt is a nightmare with some of the worst store interfaces I have ever seen. Below is the computer that I was able to find that had acceptable parts for the price. It's a little beyond your budget but it's far superior to the systems you listed earlier.

https://www.ubuy.com.eg/en/search/i...0-home-64-bit-gma6600wst-gaming-pc/store/mart

Since you listed a laptop though I'm going to list a laptop too. The Acer Predator Helios 300 is one of the most affordable laptops out there for gaming and game development and it's a fantastic balance of hardware with no one component being way ahead of the others.

https://www.ubuy.com.eg/en/search/i...gb-backlit-keyboard-ph315-52-710b/store/store

Speaking of which we need to talk about this system you originally found. Please don't pay any attention to any machines with used Xeons. While it might look appealing because of the high core count the actual truth is they are very old and intended for server workloads which are very different from gaming and game development.

Single-threaded performance is important with games and game development but the Intel Xeon E5-2680 V3 is far behind just about every modern processor in single-threaded performance. Each core scores an 1,800 in PassMark but a modern processor should be scoring at least 2,500 with the top tier ones scoring around 3,000.

The Ryzen 7 3700X in the top link above only has 8 cores/16 threads but each core is easily 33% faster and the combined performance of the processor is 50% faster than the combined performance of the 24 cores/48 threads of the Xeon CPUs.

 

So ... @Ryiah do you take PC Build requests?!?

 

Yes. If I'm provided with the basic goals of the system I can create a parts list with the following website which will link to the best prices across a handful of distributors. It's not just limited to the US either. If a country isn't supported I'm typically limited to recommending prebuilt systems.

https://pcpartpicker.com/

 

Thanks @Ryiah . I appreciate your help.