Ableton Forum

I remember in the past Lenovo Thinkpads being praised for there performance in regards to Ableton, and I was wondering if this was still the case?

I'd be using it for DJ sets and don't really have the cash to spring for a MBP, but for £480 an i3 processor, 7200rpm hard drive and 4gb ddr3 ram it seems like a great deal, and I'd be bouncing everything with large effects on down on my main rig before playing it live, so nothing to strenuous interms of processing should be taking place during a live set.

Does anyone have any info or suggestions as to alternatives? For £480 it almost seems too good to be true...

It'd be being used with a saffire 6 as the interface so firewire ports and such wouldnt be needed.

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/cont ... ction=init

actually now looking at the thinkpad edge's since they dont run off intergrated graphics, hmm, so confused!

Hey magic_joel,

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T510 laptop (i7 CPU, 4GB RAM, SSD, Windows XP) and I love it. I use it to run Live and Max/MSP as part of a live Dubstep / Drum & Bass act, and it does some pretty heavy computation. It's rock solid, and it has lots of nice design features as, I imagine, do Lenovo's other laptops. The latency through my Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 Firewire interface is 80 samples (~5ms), which is great. The internal Firewire chipset is by Ricoh, but I play it safe and use a TI-chipset based ExpressCard.

If your Saffire 6 interface connects via USB, be aware that Intel i-Series CPUs have a known issue with some USB1 devices. (USB2 devices work fine, though.) The issue is something to do with how the i-Series CPUs handle data transmission on the USB bus. If your interface is a USB1 device, check with Focusrite whether this bug may cause a problem. You can sometimes get around this problem by plugging USB1 devices into a USB2 hub, but I've never been able to get Serato working - it won't recognise the Serato box - so be aware that this might be a problem if that's the software you use for DJing. Serato are working to resolve this issue, by the way.

The only thing negative thing I will say about my T510 is that the nVidia NVS3100 graphics card gave me no end of grief when I was trying to minimise the latency. It was causing latency spikes left, right & centre. I had to install a specific & relatively old graphics driver to get the thing working without huge latency spikes. Lenovo know about this issue, many people have reported the same thing, but it hasn't been fixed yet after months of asking... In any case, it looks like the Intel chipset is the only option on the L412 so you should have no problems there.

As far as I can see, the laptop you mention should be just fine for DJing with If you can find someone who's got one, ask them if you can run the DPC latency checker on it to check for latency spikes: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml - that'll inform your choice about whether it'll be suitable for uninterrupted audio playback.

I had no end of trouble configuring Windows 7 for low-latency playback, so I ended up having to shell out £35 for a set of Windows XP installation media from Lenovo.

Sorry to babble on a bit, I hope the above helps.

Good luck!
Monty