Recommendations for a Laptop for music production?

[MessiaenRound]

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Hello all,
I am thinking of updating from my Macbook Pro 13" 2015 to a Windows Laptop (financial reasons).
I'm thinking of buying the Nova 15 from PC Specialist
https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/nova-15/ (https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/nova-15/)
and getting the:
AMD Ryzen 9 12 Core
64GB RAM
500GB Samsung 860 EVO 2.5" SSD
and then installing a Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB M.2-2280 NVMe PCIe SSD

Do you think this would be adequate for mainly VI music production? Orchestral samples/Synths (Spitfire, 8Dio, Zebra) - thinking of very big projects here. Full orchestra patches with lots of synths. Or do you have any recommendations?

[leeleema]

I may be wrong but it can be quite hard to tell how a comp handles audio from it's on paper specs, which is why some people default to Macs. There's been a few people who pimp cheap laptops and get a lot of mileage out of them though - there's been a few entries in this very forum. I've also read Dell XPS', which on paper should be great for running DAWs, are actually terrible.

[MessiaenRound]

I may be wrong but it can be quite hard to tell how a comp handles audio from it's on paper specs, which is why some people default to Macs.

Hmm but can this not be handled by an Audio Interface? I can't really get a mac just because it is so expensive.

[leeleema]

I may be wrong but it can be quite hard to tell how a comp handles audio from it's on paper specs, which is why some people default to Macs.

Hmm but can this not be handled by an Audio Interface? I can't really get a mac just because it is so expensive.

if you're getting a laptop, I think you would want it to be able to handle audio without having to plug in a separate interface. Otherwise, it kind of defeats the point of it being portable. For example, making music on the couch ... You'd connect an interface when you're actually mixing and need speakers or to record audio using a microphone. Also, I wasn't recommending a mac, just giving one reason why so many people have them. I'd actually advise avoiding them despite owning one myself

[jancivil]

I may be wrong but it can be quite hard to tell how a comp handles audio from it's on paper specs, which is why some people default to Macs.

Hmm but can this not be handled by an Audio Interface? I can't really get a mac just because it is so expensive.

it may well be that the audio interface is the key to the puzzle. If you're using Logic, mac OS and hardware is integrated in a way that not everything is. If you're using Cubase, it's difficult to impossible to get as low a latency as is often expected of it - with an audio interface with good drivers - under Windows, on a Mac. I finally solved it with a certain interface just this June.

It's very difficult to make a good assumption about a computer's performance with a DAW and so forth. The problem is that it could spec out like the strongest machine on earth but the realtime performance doesn't care, there can be a bottleneck and it may not be the most obvious thing in the world.

[mgw38]

The main problem is that real time performance and processing performance are not the same. You can have the most powerful PC, CPU-wise, and its real time performance still sucks making audio production an issue. Because Macs are so standardized their real time performance is very predictable (and generally very good). With Windows laptops it is a bit hit and miss.

And the same time, if you are not doing live performances, a little crackle here and there is not going to kill you. With that in mind any reasonably new Windows laptop will be fine. People tend to have good experiences with gaming laptops. Although, in my experience, some graphics card drivers have quite negative impact on real time performance. Whenever my Windows laptop crackles, it is usually the NVidia driver causing latency issues.

[e@rs]

I'm no IT expert by any means, but I got an Acer gaming laptop with Optimus technology, which means the audio software runs on Intel's integrated GPU, keeping the discrete nVidia one turned off. Less heat and no audio issues here.

[cleverr1]

Last year I asked www.pcspecialist.co.uk for details of DPC Latency and thermal throttling characteristics of a laptop they were offering as an audio PC. They replied saying they don't test DPC latency and gave some undetailed comment about all laptops throttling.
I went elsewhere!
I seriously hope they've upped their game if they're still offering audio laptops.

[cleverr1]

And the same time, if you are not doing live performances, a little crackle here and there is not going to kill you.

Each to their own but this is the antithesis of what is considered acceptable for an audio laptop. If I'd spent £2k on a laptop for audio the essential criterion would be that that didn't crackle when playing VSTIs at low latencies or arranging projects with many tracks. This is why specialist audio system builders spend so much time and effort selecting machines that work properly in this area.

I know this is KVR, but who were the two people that liked this post?

[excuse me please]

I went to pcspecialist nl and they don't have thunderbolt laptops.
Also I could not find AMD Ryzen 7 4800H thunderbolt laptops.
So I'll probably go for Acer Nitro 5 (AN517-52-7311), i7-10750H - 16GB DDR4, €1249.

[mgw38]

And the same time, if you are not doing live performances, a little crackle here and there is not going to kill you.

Each to their own but this is the antithesis of what is considered acceptable for an audio laptop. If I'd spent £2k on a laptop for audio the essential criterion would be that that didn't crackle when playing VSTIs at low latencies or arranging projects with many tracks. This is why specialist audio system builders spend so much time and effort selecting machines that work properly in this area.

I know this is KVR, but who were the two people that liked this post?

When you have realtime performance related audio dropouts, they are usually not consistent or regular and have little correlation with your CPU load. I sometimes get crackles when either the NVdidia or the network drivers decide to halt the system to wait for something and do that just a few milliseconds too long. Happens maybe once a week. Then I just wait for a minute and everything is back to normal. In a live performance that would be a completely different problem.

[mgw38]

I'm no IT expert by any means, but I got an Acer gaming laptop with Optimus technology, which means the audio software runs on Intel's integrated GPU, keeping the discrete nVidia one turned off. Less heat and no audio issues here.

The audio software itself would not run on the GPU, its just the rendering of the interface that would.

I need a high end GPU for my work which I run on a break out box through a thunderbolt 3 connection. If I can make any recommendation, if you are concerned with computational realtime performance, stay away from eGPUs. They will introduce additional DPC latency, at least in my experience. Has not bothered me yet, though.

Btw, all DPC latency issues I ever encountered were driver and not hardware related.

[cleverr1]

And the same time, if you are not doing live performances, a little crackle here and there is not going to kill you.

Each to their own but this is the antithesis of what is considered acceptable for an audio laptop. If I'd spent £2k on a laptop for audio the essential criterion would be that that didn't crackle when playing VSTIs at low latencies or arranging projects with many tracks. This is why specialist audio system builders spend so much time and effort selecting machines that work properly in this area.

I know this is KVR, but who were the two people that liked this post?

When you have realtime performance related audio dropouts, they are usually not consistent or regular and have little correlation with your CPU load. I sometimes get crackles when either the NVdidia or the network drivers decide to halt the system to wait for something and do that just a few milliseconds too long. Happens maybe once a week. Then I just wait for a minute and everything is back to normal. In a live performance that would be a completely different problem.

Correct and if it's not cores being unable to process high demand because of thermal throttling it's usually DPC latency spikes caused by bad drivers. The problem is that so many of today's laptops have this issue. DPC latency is not about milliseconds, rather microseconds. Before Scan 3XS built my laptop last year they tested and rejected many Clevo bare bones systems before finding one that was suitable for audio. At least one of the models they failed appeared on another site as an audio laptop. You wouldn't accept a keyboard or synth module that periodically crackled when being played, so why would you accept a laptop crackling if it was bought primarily to use for audio?

[jancivil]

I upvoted that post, because he's telling the truth and tends to know what he's posting to begin with.
If you live in a realm where there is never the least bit of breakup, ever, your load on a system is going to tend to be rather light in comparison to someone that has to have an orchestra up and a fully produced sound in real time.
'this is the antithesis of what is considered acceptable for an audio laptop' is rather over the top.
"an audio laptop" is not defined, there is only anecdote. It's a generalized term which is supposed to do something rather more specific, which isn't workable. There is no such thing, it's a laptop that's been optimized to perform better for the task than this "barebones" notion, it's not dedicated to doing virtual instruments in real time unless it's one of these boxes which use of is now pretty much deprecated, which were windows boxes with most everything superfluous to the task turned off.

"You wouldn't accept a keyboard or synth module that periodically crackled when being played, so why would you accept a laptop crackling if it was bought primarily to use for audio?" No one is ever going to do what I do on a computer live. These are two quite different things, which is incredibly obvious: the latter has to introduce latency by its nature, processes are waiting in line, the former has nothing to do with its time except be a hardware instrument.

I don't use mine 'primarily for audio'; I use it for virtual, soft instruments and FX plugins which playback as audio and finally render as audio files. It's not very different than saying we should have the same expectation of any setup with a DAW and vi + DSP plugins as we do of Winamp or iTunes or Quicktime playing audio back.
I can't recall dropouts in a project that was all audio files. I only remember one in late 2009 which had to be already rendered audio because there were 5 different setups for 5 sections and there was just no way to load all of them, so much will have to have been frozen it's time to render anyway. Obviously there is not a universal latency setting for two extremely different expectations.

[legendCNCD]

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ checks usually for DPC latencies