Local or google colab? PLZ HELP

[ohecker-logicalredstone]

I know u need google Collab because of the gpu and other fancy-shmancy things but i also have a gpu (Rtx 4070 super) and PyCharm with my conda environment for PyTorch setup already. DO I REALLY NEED GOOGLE COLAB!?

[Ra4ster]

Not using Colab is totally fine. Since you already have everything set up locally, you can just run PyTorch straight from your Conda environment and it’ll probably be faster than Colab anyway. If you still want a notebook, Jupyter is an alternative and comes with Anaconda Navigator. As long as you’re caching or saving your data locally you'll be good.

Create/activate an Anaconda environment compatible with PyTorch, and make the directory. Then you can run:

conda install pytorch torchvision torchaudio pytorch-cuda=11.8 -c pytorch -c nvidia

Afterwards, use python and try checking the version and CUDA compatibility to see if it worked!

[AndyBodnar]

You can definitely use your RTX 4070 Super locally - no need for Colab!

The course recommends Colab mainly for accessibility since not everyone has a GPU. With your setup:

1. Install CUDA toolkit (match your driver version)
2. Install PyTorch with CUDA:

pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121

3. Verify: python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())"

Your 4070 Super (12GB VRAM) will actually outperform free Colab T4s. Plus you get:

• No session timeouts
• No upload/download overhead
• Faster iteration cycles
• Full control over your environment

Only use Colab if you need 40GB+ VRAM for massive models or want to work from multiple machines without syncing.

[ohecker-logicalredstone]

Yes, I used python 3.12.12 and cu121 (like you) for stability and it excels.