Dell studio 15 i7 720 or Macbook Pro 2.53gz

[gilesw]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice on buying a new laptop for using Ableton. I'm torn between what to get because I do like to use lots of virtual instruments so cpu is important but I'm going to have to run xp and dual boot linux if I don't go for osx. I've seen lots of messages about bad audio performance on the dell laptops here but they seem to relate to firewire, surely I can just get a usb2 soundcard these days with asio drivers like the m-audio transit?

Dell have a offer on at the moment £670 for the studio 15

http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/home/La ... &cs=ukdhs1

which is much better than the mbp's which when I'd swap the 5400 disk for a ssd would probably come out closer to £1500

thoughts?

g.

[esky]

Check this out...:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=128635

[Tarekith]

Save the money on the SSD, you don't need one of those for making music.

[gilesw]

Thanks for the links, I've been reading some benchmarks and I'm probably going to go for the dell. Portability isn't really an issue for me and it looks like windows 7 will run ableton fine so there's no need for a nasty xp partition.

g.

[leedsquietman]

If you are planning on using a Firewire audio interface then go for the Mac Book Pro. If you have the money go for a Mac Book Pro - as someone who has used both platforms. They give you core functionality with little setup issues. If you are a techie PC type, then you will probably feel that saving some coin is better as you can manage the tweaking to optimize the system and that is fair enough. Live runs great under both platforms.

Otherwise, the Dell is a good machine. I have bought 8 Dell computers and have no issues with them (and praise for their performance and customer service), the only caveat (and this applies to HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer and the rest) is the use of cheap crappy integrated O2 and ricoh firewire chipsets. FW is slowly becoming legacy IMHO, but not for a couple of years yet and there are not many great USB2 interfaces out there (USB3 should be awesome at 5GB/s transfer speeds but that won't be a viable option for another year or two either).

Macs use Agere which is also a cheap and crappy chipset, but most manufacturers have made allowances for it in their devices given that Mac has an edge over PC in the pro audio market (especially in pro studios), so even though it doesn't run as well as the old Texas Instruments chipset, it performs reasonably well on Mac.