people keep asking what my main driver is, and the answer is not light an asus rog strix scar 18 with an rtx 5090 inside, 3.3 kg, i call it beast and it runs my local models and my video studio, the best laptop i've ever used > rtx 5090 laptop gpu, 24gb gddr7 > 896 gb/s memory, 175w max > 8gb more vram than a desktop 5080 > core ultra 9 275hx, 24 cores > 64gb ddr5 system ram > 2tb nvme, 18 inch 240hz mini led > ubuntu 24.04 and sometimes it encodes models, when both my dgx sparks were busy building deepseek v4.1 flash, beast quantized the drafter's 384 experts and checked the kernels bit for bit before the sparks timed them for local ai that fits in 24gb no other laptop beats it, no mobile gpu ships with more than 24gb of vram and none reads it faster than 896 gb/s the weak side is size, past 24gb a model spills into system ram and slows down, a 128gb mac or strix halo holds gpt-oss 120b in one pool, so my big models live on 2x dgx sparks and if your rtx laptop feels slow on linux, check nvidia-powerd first, mine was disabled and the gpu sat at 94w of its 175w, qwen 3.6 27b q4 went from 17.97 to 35.28 tok/s after systemctl enable --now nvidia-powerd