Buying a new laptop - which component is the most important?

[Adem67]

Hi Guys,
I am getting a new laptop for Live, but I am now sure what specs would be sufficient to run Live perfect. Is it a powerful CPU, a high amount of RAM or an external sound card, which I'd have to buy. Can you make any recommendations for me? Thanks

greetz

[Quantize]

Most likely all of the above. I run a Sony Vaio with 2gb of RAM, 2.4ghz core duo centrino and an echo indigo cardbus. This is more than sufficient.

[Adem67]

What does the sound card improve exactly? Is it the sound quality or the ability to use ASIO for lower latency?

[Bleep Blop Ima Robot]

id still no matter what get more ram, 4 is good enough, im sadly only running 2 and i mean it runs well, decent...but i know i need and want more. so you should start out with 4 to save your self some trouble later on.

also whats your price range on the laptop your buying? and what platform pc or mac?

[Tone Deft]

it's mostly for low latency. do you record external instruments? if so then the card's pre-amps matter for their sound.


good thread, good question.

I'd say to NOT buy RAM, it's MUCH cheaper to buy it separately and install it yourself. same can be said of the hard drive. get a laptop with a small one, buy a HUGE one yourself and install it.

I'd look for a box where RAM isn't shared with the video driver.

I guess I'd say microprocessor speed and bus speed inside the box. definitely get a dual core machine, Live only supports single and dual cores. I'd look at the weight and size of what you can live with. my laptop (HP DV8000) can hold TWO drives which is a GREAT feature. OS/apps on one, data on the other. then I only have to back up the data drive every once in a while. if I want to redo the OS install the data isn't affected. make sure the screen is comfortable to look at. battery life should be good.

[ethios4]

Live only supports single and dual cores.

You sure about that? I have a quad-core 8-thread machine and I get activity on all 8 threads when using Live.

[Tone Deft]

Live only supports single and dual cores.

You sure about that? I have a quad-core 8-thread machine and I get activity on all 8 threads when using Live.

sweet.

I thought it was only dual core, I'd love to be wrong.

[julienb]

processor + amount of RAM

I just bought a HP dv7 3080ef (core i7 720QM + 4Go RAM expandable to 8Go) with Windows7 premium 64bit ... Live+M4L+Max are just smoothy

[d-track]

worth mention the processors L2 cache size.
2+ is good/core

[Maco]

LOTS OF USBS AND FIREWIRE

[vicz]

The nut that holds the mouse

[re.mark]

The operating system

[3dot...]

CPU/RAM/Cache/Soundcard(==one with good A/D D/A convertors)

[leedsquietman]

Forget about firewire, all PC laptops nowadays come with super cheap integrated FW chipsets which perform badly in comparison to the older (better and more expensive) TI chipsets. Unless you get a bespoke system made by someone like ADK. This applies to HP, Sony, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, Acer and all of them. They all cheap out on firewire because they believe it to be a legacy product barely worth supporting and are ignorant of the niche DAW market - unfortunately, the amount of available and excellent firewire interfaces means this decision sucks for DAW work.

The Echo Indigo Cardbus interfaces are superb on latency and s/n ratios, but they do not include mic preamps, meaning you have to get a seperate preamp or run it via a mixer first.

You should definately get 4GB minimum RAM. In most cases, this is pretty much the standard cut off point these days, especially for a 64 bit system running W7. Often it costs virtually nothing anyway, I remember a year ago when my wife got her laptop, to upgrade from 2 to 4GB ram with Dell cost $20, so it's not worth the hassle of trawling around looking for cheaper ram at that pricing differential. If your graphics card has it's own memory, Live can access up to 3.6GB in a 64 bit o/s, even though it's a 32 bit application - a big improvement from less than 2GB memory addressable in Win XP (without a dodgy hack which often caused as many problems as it solved using the /3GB switch).

If you intend on recording any vocals, or micing up guitars etc, you will want to upgrade the internal sound card. Some of these have gotten better and run OK with asio4all if all you're doing is processing samples or using softsynths, otherwise budget in a better soundcard as essential.

[Adem67]

Wow, many thanks for all the helpful replies!

We (me and a friend) want to make hip hop music using an MPD 24 and a small LPK25. It's very important to have a low latency between those devices, since timing is essential when drumming/sampling. In this case, an indigo card (which costs about 110€ here in Germany) would be enough, right?