Ableton Forum

Hello

I've been making production and performance on OSX for three years & a half on my 2008 13" white macbook which always made me very happy, I never had the slightest problem and it still runs amazingly for such an old laptop. Well, it's still getting old, so I'm thinking of getting a new one. I can't really afford a new MacBook these days, and I want to take advantage of the big variety of plugins, software and freebies of Windows. Plus, my plan is to use Windows 7 ONLY for making music, the rest of my everyday geek life will be on a Ubuntu partition.

My question is: what kind of laptop can I buy ? It's been a while now I haven't really paid attention on what was good/bad on the PC market, so I don't really know. I am not a HUGE power maniac, I just want Live to run properly with a bunch of plugins (mostly Surge, Massive and Aalto).

I don't want to spend more than 800 euros, and for the moment my 2 main options are:

Dell Inspiron 14Z:

2nd generation Intel® Core™ i5-2430M processor (2.40 GHz, 3M cache)

6GB1 Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz

750GB2 SATA hard drive (7200RPM)

Graphics : Intel HD Graphics 3000


Dell Inspiron 15R:

2nd generation Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM (2.20 Ghz, 6MB, 4C)

6GB1 Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz

640GB2 SATA hard drive (5400RPM)

1 GB nVidia GeForce GT 525M (Quad Core)


I'm + thinking of the 15R, but I don't know if I will really need an i7 processor, and I kind of prefer the 7200 RPM hard drive on the 14z...

Do someone here uses a similar setup? What do you think of i7 power compared to i5? Is it really important for what I want to do? What about the Hard drive speed ?

Thank you for your help

...and sorry for posting another "what do you think of this gear?" thread, but there's no way I can test ableton live with my plugins and shit in a shop... !

I would go for the i7 over the i5 as the i7 is quad core. Hard drives are dirt cheap these days, so to install a 7200 RPM drive in place of the 5400 RPM one would cost you very little. You wouldn't really have the same option to upgrade the processor at such a low cost. I have the same i7 processor in my MBP and it's lightening fast.

I am mac user, but from what I hear in terms of PC laptops, Lenovo is the way to go. Read some reviews recently and in most, Lenovo comes second to MBP's and Dell's are generally quite far down the list, so may be worth looking to see if you could get a Lenovo of similar spec within your price range.

Neither - get a mac

Thanks trevox. I browsed the Live 8 performance thread a little but couldn't find someone with an i5 PC lapyop. I looked Lenovo PCs a little, it's true, they look really nice, but the pricing is way too high (averagely + expensive than Sony !).
I think I will go for the i7 Dell, but if someone can share his experience with an i5 on a PC laptop running live 8 it would be highly appreciated

Thanks!

Oh and Khazul: Thanks a lot for your useful response!

If you go to Intel's site, you can do a side by side comparison of the two processors. I had the same quandary when buying my MBP and after seeing the difference vs the price difference, it was a no brainer for me. I am sure the i5 will run Live really well and it still looks like a more than competent machine, but for me, having 8 cores and larger cache means you can more confident your machine will cope with whatever you throw at it and cheap upgrades like RAM and faster HDD will make it even better. Not sure if graphics makes any difference to you, but the 15R is ridiculously better when it comes to that too.

trevox wrote:Not sure if graphics makes any difference to you, but the 15R is ridiculously better when it comes to that too.

If comparing Live performance on my MBP between intel and the AMD GPUs is anything to go by - then it seems Live prefers a faster graphics card - I guess it helps for all the UI rendering, or maybe bus contention of better with the AMD GPU?

if you want to go PC you could do a lot worse than a Lenovo Thinkpad
my current production terminal is a Thinkpad T500. 3gb DDR3 ram / completely stripped down to the bone Windows 7 (i.e. only essential services and nothing else..not even networking capabilities as I have opted to disable them) and Casheman ( http://www.outertech.com/en/faster-computer )
Its a pretty rad set up. Its not the latest and greatest processor but I'm not having any problems.

My point being that I too have recently considered purchasing a new laptop. I opted to stick w/my current set up until Ableton goes 64bit.