Intel i5 520M CPU good enough ?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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beatz01
Posts: 361
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 4:09 pm

Intel i5 520M CPU good enough ?

Post by beatz01 » Tue Apr 01, 2014 8:30 pm

I'm thinking about buying a used Lenovo Thinkpad with an i5 520M Processor and the usual specs (4-8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD etc) solely for using with Live8/9.Music wise its a kind of glich hop with vocals, nothing too spectacular track count wise.

Would that processor be sufficient for running L9 smoothly or do i have to switch to a quadcore i7 model no matter what ?

Any experiences with i5 processors ?

Any hints are highly appreciated !

beatz01
Posts: 361
Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2009 4:09 pm

Re: Intel i5 520M CPU good enough ?

Post by beatz01 » Thu Apr 03, 2014 2:44 am

Anyone ? Am i the only one in this world to wonder what CPU is good enough for Live ? No i5 users here ?

Puleeeeaze...i need ANSWERS !

:)

clydesdale
Posts: 350
Joined: Mon Sep 09, 2013 3:28 am

Re: Intel i5 520M CPU good enough ?

Post by clydesdale » Thu Apr 03, 2014 3:54 am

The i5 540M CPU Benchmark is a little less than one-fourth that of a 4770K Haswell at standard clock speed. That doesn't seem too bad on paper.
http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Int ... 40+2.40GHz

I ran Live 9 on a ten year old single core Pentium III desktop that had a cpubenchmark 1/100th that of the 4770k. As long as you don't overload it I think it will work, but knowing where the overload is going to be is tough to say.
LIVE 9.1.7 x64, PUSH w/PXT, APC40, KEYSTATION PRO88, Radium61
Win8.1 Pro, 4820k(4.5GHz)/32GB/840ProSSD/RME Babyface

eyeknow
Posts: 5822
Joined: Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:16 am

Re: Intel i5 520M CPU good enough ?

Post by eyeknow » Thu Apr 03, 2014 4:54 am

It's tough to get really good processors in a lappy. What I'd do is some more research on power consumption vs actually calculations/performance. Then check and see if there are any other similar lappys with higher benchmarks at or around that price.

DataMusic
Posts: 30
Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2011 11:11 pm

Re: Intel i5 520M CPU good enough ?

Post by DataMusic » Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:14 pm

I´m using the i5 M540 with 4gb ram and a TC firewire interface.. totally happy with the system

Live runs really smooth and i´m using a lot of cpu heavy plugins like Diva, Reaktor etc

If i get to crazy on tracks and plugins i have to use the freeze funktion but that happens on a i7 16gb ram system aswell..

More power is always better computerwise but as i said i am happy with the system

I did projekts with 30+ tracks for theaters and media in red-book-standart without a problem

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