Puppy Linux 4.20 in a pentium 3 laptop.

Current distro of choice is just bunsenlabs.

Xeon mobile is something else entirely. It’s a laptop chip. Something like this

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/213796/intel-xeon-w11955m-processor-24m-cache-2-60-ghz/specifications.html

Most modern laptops can do 64 gb of ddr4. It’s expensive but doable. Like most U series CPUs are limited at 64 gb. Something with a xeon mobile chip will probably see a lot more.

Since you do want to game, I’d recommend going with a computer with an amd DGPU. Nvidia is mostly fine from a driver standpoint. Also Nvidia does have cuda so you might actually want to get one with an Nvidia dgpu.

Get something with an Intel wireless card, that’d be the best case scenario. I’ve had weird issues with both realtek and Broadcom. Lots of amd laptops come with mediatek based wireless cards, idk if they work well in Linux.

Tbh I’d rec any laptop that fit your requirements and install your distro of choice. (bunsenlabs for me).

Define fast

a big piece of paper and some cool stickers is all you need. It’s more impressive when it’s tangible.

If you’re worried about stealing, put it a bit higher out of their reach and take photos of it after all the stickers are placed to keep track.