Intel vs. AMD

[Passing Bye]

Based on my own personal experience, for real time audio, one should generally avoid laptops designed for low power usage in mind for the purpose of prioritising battery runtime usage over raw performance.
The less 'exotic' functionality in a unit the better. Less special drivers usually translates to lower latency.
I've encountered much better results with AMD's 4000H/5000H chipsets than team blue's offerings when it comes to DPC latency.
But with all of that said, one should do their own due diligence in the way of research... Reading reviews and scouring the internets for relevant comments made by people who've already had first hand experiences with any particular unit that may have caught your interest.

Cheers,
vstDOG

Great info, thanks!

[cleverr1]

That's not what I meant...
Disabling the NICs while testing latency is a measure that would provide a base result which eliminates otherwise unreliable ones due to the OS performing networking related activities in the background hence throwing that measurement sample totally out of whack and by that potentially disqualifying a perfectly good, low latency machine all for the wrong reasons.
If a test comes out good with NICs disabled you could then conclude you may potentially have a perfectly worthy real time audio PC candidate in your hands.
And from there certain optimisation tunings can be implemented in taming down the OS's networking related background activities, as well as tweaking the NIC drivers themselves (disabling power saving features for example), then retesting with LAN/WLAN enabled to reliably determine actual real world working scenarios.

With a laptop you're stuck with the built in NIC/WLAN unless you find a port replicator/USB C hub with low DPC latency networking. As these commonly cause DPC latency issues I'd want to see it warts and all at least to start with. However, if there isn't anything decent available OTB then stripping things out and minimally building back is of course a valid approach. But then if it's a core network driver issue you're stuck.
The problem I had in selecting a laptop was a lack of info about DPC latency and thermal throttling for the bigger brands. I went to Scan who were between generations of laptops. It took them a few weeks before they identified one out of many models tested which they were happy to provide as a laptop DAW.

[kingozrecords]

I think intel graphics could be great, if they were to ever really take it to the next level, but they never stay focused on the subject and that is a shame. I dislike I have to choose between Nvidia (Efficiency, fps and poor quality video and rendering, good for games) and AMD (Reliable, ok fps and high quality video and rendering, decent for games).

I say this because that a bundled gpu is big news these days and intel's attempts have been few and far between. The 17 sucked though, had a few of those. Misleading statistics; they screw up doing many jobs. Rather an older intel or AMD 90% of the times I work on various things.

[vstDOG]

With a laptop you're stuck with the built in NIC/WLAN unless you find a port replicator/USB C hub with low DPC latency networking. As these commonly cause DPC latency issues I'd want to see it warts and all at least to start with. However, if there isn't anything decent available OTB then stripping things out and minimally building back is of course a valid approach. But then if it's a core network driver issue you're stuck.

Generally speaking buying a laptop equipped with LAN/WLAN adapters made by intel and/or wired LAN by Realtek (not WLAN) is what you should aim for as a matter of high priority.
Driver support is the best in the industry...
And in the event that the latest drivers aren't playing nicely you could always test previous versions for a better match.
Always opt for drivers only when installing as some 'premium' adapter models offer additional bundled software aimed at QOS prioritisation etc... That installs extra background services which is exactly what we're trying to avoid.
Use TCP Optimizer to optimise your TCP/IP stack. That should disable the adapter/s power saving features too but be sure to double check in the driver's advanced settings.
Disable power saving features on your USB root hubs from device manager.
Use Bitsum ParkControl to disable core parking and install the Bitsum Highest Performance windows power plan.
Extra latency tightening can be achieved by setting your drivers to MSI mode using MSI tool.
Note: create a restore point just in case prior to using this tool as some drivers don't like being run in that mode and can BSOD after reboot.
Use something like O&O ShutUp10 to disable all the crap telemetry stuff and the rest of the MS call home services/scheduled tasks as well as Cortana.
Favourably consider disabling Windows Update and Defender (anti malware, not firewall) if using said machine as a dedicated DAW.
My choice of tools for that are Sordum's Defender Control and Windows Update Blocker.
Use another computer for non DAW stuff if poss or dual boot in case another computer is not an option.
Disabling Windows search indexing can further smooth things out and prevent unwanted DPC spikes when the indexer kicks in.
SSDs nowadays are plenty fast for the occasional search task without having to constantly index in the background.
There's other bits and pieces in my arsenal but I'm starting to feel the formation of typing blisters on my fingertips by now
I'll gladly continue later if there's a demand...

[Passing Bye]

I'll gladly continue later if there's a demand...

Please do so.

[cleverr1]

I'll gladly continue later if there's a demand...

Please do so.

+1 - please do!

This is great info. However, it wouldn't have helped me choose a laptop without some basic DPC latency/thermal throttling benchmarks from what was available at the time unless I'd got really lucky guessing which model to buy. ACPI.sys DPC latency in particular appears to be a bit of a rabbit hole. For avoiding all that you can't beat empirical evidence, but once you have a good base then this level of tuning could make it even better.

After 2 years my laptop still just works great as a DAW, and also for general purpose tasks. I don't think I'd be saying that if I'd bought, for example, a Dell XPS at the time, regardless of how finely tuned it was as a DAW.

[LeVzi]

Im not upgrading the system for a few years, so whatever is the best AMD CPU around then, i'll get, since I swapped from Intel to AMD ive had consistently better performance.

Threadripper is the choice but not at 4 grand lol

[hitherepeople]

Forgive me, old crusty man with low IQ here, but is this about laptops? That seems to be referenced quite a bit here so I don't want to be a bother if it is.

If not, then I have no horse in this race. I've heard much of what has been said and the more I dig, the deeper it gets w/o any real clarification or reward for my efforts. But since I'm looking into a real serious upgrade, I'm very curious about all the details.

[Passing Bye]

Yes, it’s about laptops, as already mentioned, buying from pro audio builder like SCAN, ADK and etc. will save you from all this headaches.

[hitherepeople]

I remember back in the days it was all about Intel for Music Production. Is that still a thing?

Well, I'm going to get out of here, but this quote or the title thread doesn't specify laptops.

Sorry.

[Passing Bye]

I remember back in the days it was all about Intel for Music Production. Is that still a thing?

Well, I'm going to get out of here, but this quote or the title thread doesn't specify laptops.

Sorry.

I saw his other thread where he was looking for a laptop and he indeed opened this thread to investigate his purchase decision, look at this thread if you want to get into whole CPU preference wars
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=564776