Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

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ShredderTown
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Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2015 8:58 pm

Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by ShredderTown » Sat Apr 30, 2016 5:19 pm

Basically i'm going to buy a new laptop. Main reason is for Ableton Live. The Dell XPS 13 seems to get lots of good reviews. Do you think it's a good laptop for Ableton?

A problem I noticed in the shop was that the 13" was pretty small, so thought it might make using Ableton difficult/less user friendly..


I'm looking to spend under £1000, if anyone has any other recommendations?


Thanks in advance

BigTea
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Joined: Sat Oct 04, 2014 9:29 am

Re: Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by BigTea » Sat May 07, 2016 8:45 pm

I use a sell xps 15 and I find the screens a bit small. It's fine performance wise, but you'll probably want a larger screen then a 13"

andrewmackers
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Re: Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by andrewmackers » Sun Jul 24, 2016 7:55 pm

Hi,

I've recently bought a high spec Dell XPS 13, for a number of uses, one of them being to carry on the Ableton work I was doing on a very old 13" Macbook Pro.

So - processing power wise - this machine is killing it - fantastic performance, CPU running at below 20% for a live set that was running at 60-70% on the old Mac.

Graphics, however are a problem - the Dell has a beautiful QHD display, greater than that of the old Mac, but the Ableton Live experience on this device looks terrible. You can fiddle with the zoom but its not really a slick solution.

Also, view is not nearly as sharp as it should be.

Anyway, as others have suggested, a 13" screen on any device is probably a bit small to have high expectations from music production software - so what I will be doing is getting a Dell TB15 Docking station - this will plug into the USB C port, charge the computer, connect to a 24" screen, and connect the peripherals like Audio interface and midi keyboard.

gmayc
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Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 3:56 pm

Re: Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by gmayc » Mon Dec 19, 2016 7:47 pm

[quote="andrewmackers"]Hi,

I've recently bought a high spec Dell XPS 13, for a number of uses, one of them being to carry on the Ableton work I was doing on a very old 13" Macbook Pro.

So - processing power wise - this machine is killing it - fantastic performance, CPU running at below 20% for a live set that was running at 60-70% on the old Mac.

Hi, what processor your xps have? and are you experiencing track-pad 2 finger scrolling problems? Im having a little too high cpu load with my new xps 15, cant scroll vertically smoothly, and no horizontal scroll. Are you having similar problems?

awoodsent
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Joined: Tue Jul 11, 2017 9:06 am

Re: Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by awoodsent » Tue Jul 11, 2017 9:09 am

gmayc wrote:Hi, what processor your xps have? and are you experiencing track-pad 2 finger scrolling problems? Im having a little too high cpu load with my new xps 15, cant scroll vertically smoothly, and no horizontal scroll. Are you having similar problems?
Hi, I've recently brought the top spec XPS 13 and I'm having problems with high CPU and scrolling. Did you ever find a solution for the problems? It's been driving me mad, my machine is pretty much useless because of Abletons CPU issue

yur2die4
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Re: Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by yur2die4 » Tue Jul 11, 2017 5:44 pm

Most 13" laptops have kind of average CPU performance when it comes to Ableton Live. you should still be able to do work on an i7-u, but make sure to optimize your computer and if you use any heavy plugins you might have to bounce them down if there are too many instances.

As for the scrolling, there might be improvements in Live's behavior if you change Windows' zoom settings to 100% (there are a lot of search results on Google or the forum for Ableton Live and Windows zoom). Also, make sure you're using the latest update of Live. There have been some improvements in mouse support in the most recent update.

But I haven't verified if scrolling of all types are fully supported in the Live interface.

badfornat
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Re: Laptop for Ableton live - Dell XPS 13?

Post by badfornat » Wed Jul 12, 2017 5:28 am

BigTea wrote:I use a sell xps 15 and I find the screens a bit small. It's fine performance wise, but you'll probably want a larger screen then a 13"
Hi, do you have any problem with coil whine on that model?

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