What hardware do I need in a music production laptop?

[NethioX]

Hey guys,
I'm about to buy a laptop that's supposed to fill all my music creating needs.

About my needs:

1. I want a PC, not a Mac
2. I run Ableton Live as a DAW
3. I sometimes use ram-heavy sample based synths
4. I want to be able to be able to plug my electric guitar into my pc (I'm guessing this effects the soundcard)

My questions can be narrowed down to :
1. How many cores at what GHZ will I need?
2. Which soundcard do I pick? How do I even approach this issue?
3. How much RAM will I need?
4. Does the video card matter at all for my needs?

Thanks a lot guys!

[Megiddo]

It all depends on how much money you wanna spend.

1. An Intel i5 would be good (that's what I have) but if you can afford it, get an i7.
2. You'll need an external (USB) soundcard. I currently have a rather old Digidesign MBox 2 and I like it, right now you could probably get a better one for a lower price. (all you need is a big jack input, and most external sound cards have it)
3. More than 4 GB. Get 8 GB or even more if you afford it.
4. Not really. You won't be able to find a laptop with i7 with a video card that's going to affect your producing process in any way. An Intel HD is more than enough.

You'll probably want someone who knows more about sound cards to answer your second question, I'm not that good at those.

[K-Bee]

I've been running on a multi core 4GB system since 2008 and had no problems handling cpu heavy plugins.....until I downloaded the Diva demo
Anything else works like a charm. I have a EM-U tracker pre soundcard which a budget thing obviously but it does the job well.
Oh, remember to ALWAYS use the ASIO driver

[A1AWI]

Focus on your Hard drive and Ram, These are two most important things for music production, 7200 Rpm H.D.D is good but if you can get the S.S.D (Solid State Drive) Hard drives it would load all your VST's instantly after your click, Also S.S.D is going to replace all H.D.D's soon.

As of RAM, Get a 1666 or more MHZ RAM with any capacity (4GB is more than enough)

You don't need the Video Card Much, Intel HD is more than enough.

However you also need a good CPU to run your ASIO driver on 128 ms smoothly, But nothing more than i5 is needed for that, And if your buying i7 instead of i5, don't do it, Just buy the same i5 but with more Cache. What I mean is that CPU cache is much more important for what you need than it's cores.
BTW, you don't need to run your ASIO on 128 ms, I'm running it on 256 and it's fine, And I even run it on 512 ms sometimes not much of a difference, It may be a difference for those really professional producers.

About the soundcard, Laptops usually doesn't come with soundcards for producers, It's really rare. You need an external USB soundcard, I use M-Audio Fasttrack Pro, and it's good, But if you need some really good soundcards buy Soundcards with USB 2.0 Technology. Or if you want to make your equipment to the top you can buy a Firewire soundcard, But that's really an overbuy, And it costs around 700$ for Just a 2 XLR 1 MIDI slot soundcard, And the price goes up for more slots that you need.

There is one other thing I'd like to tell you. Don't buy one expensive equipment while your other equipments are cheap, Because Music Equipments work with eachother. For example if you buy a Firewire Soundcard while having a simple cheap Monitors you won't get much of your Firewire Soundcard. You got to buy only cheap equipments or only the expensive ones.

Oh oh and one other thing, Try to look for Firewire slot on your laptop, Who knows what the future holds, Maybe Firewire soundcards became cheap and USB soundcards get replaced. However 99% of today's laptops have firewire slot on'em but I saw some that didn't had, it's not bad to make sure, also it doesn't have any impact on the laptop's price.

[Smoking_Gnu]

Oh oh and one other thing, Try to look for Firewire slot on your laptop, Who knows what the future holds, Maybe Firewire soundcards became cheap and USB soundcards get replaced. However 99% of today's laptops have firewire slot on'em but I saw some that didn't had, it's not bad to make sure, also it doesn't have any impact on the laptop's price.

Can't you also just buy a USB to firewire adapter? I think I've seen some for only $5 or so.

[A1AWI]

Can't you also just buy a USB to firewire adapter? I think I've seen some for only $5 or so.

Yeah but it doesn't give the same speed that Firewire slot gives, and that's why it's not compatible with most of the Firewire Soundcards.

Firewire slot can have a data transferring speed of more than 6 GB/s!!

While USB 2.0 slots have only 480 Mb/s.


Really that's not a big issue, Most of the laptops if not all this days have the firwire slot.

[Kaine]

Oh oh and one other thing, Try to look for Firewire slot on your laptop, Who knows what the future holds, Maybe Firewire soundcards became cheap and USB soundcards get replaced. However 99% of today's laptops have firewire slot on'em but I saw some that didn't had, it's not bad to make sure, also it doesn't have any impact on the laptop's price.

Can't you also just buy a USB to firewire adapter? I think I've seen some for only $5 or so.

If you have it's likely to be some kind of diagnostic cable rather than a converter, as those two are completely different protocols.

[Smoking_Gnu]

Oh oh and one other thing, Try to look for Firewire slot on your laptop, Who knows what the future holds, Maybe Firewire soundcards became cheap and USB soundcards get replaced. However 99% of today's laptops have firewire slot on'em but I saw some that didn't had, it's not bad to make sure, also it doesn't have any impact on the laptop's price.

Can't you also just buy a USB to firewire adapter? I think I've seen some for only $5 or so.

If you have it's likely to be some kind of diagnostic cable rather than a converter, as those two are completely different protocols.

What sort of adapter would you have to use then? Would this work?:

http://bit.ly/ULEZ8N

[roon]

I am working on a i3 2,2ghz with 4GB Ram (1666mhz i think) with 7200rpm HDD runing Studio One on it (before there was reason and fl) thru a Line6 PodUX interface and I need to say it's well enough for me. Even when working with 'live' audio, vstis and realtime processing of both on a lot of chanels it's working well. For my usual projects where I do limit my self under 16 tracks including drums and everything it's more than enough.

[tenshin111]

Firewire slot can have a data transferring speed of more than 6 GB/s!!

While USB 2.0 slots have only 480 Mb/s.

Firewire 400 (which is the most common FW connector you will see) offers 400Mb/s while Firewire 800 is...well 800Mb/s. Nowhere near 6GB/s...that is SATA III

[tenshin111]

Oh oh and one other thing, Try to look for Firewire slot on your laptop, Who knows what the future holds, Maybe Firewire soundcards became cheap and USB soundcards get replaced. However 99% of today's laptops have firewire slot on'em but I saw some that didn't had, it's not bad to make sure, also it doesn't have any impact on the laptop's price.

Can't you also just buy a USB to firewire adapter? I think I've seen some for only $5 or so.

If you have it's likely to be some kind of diagnostic cable rather than a converter, as those two are completely different protocols.

What sort of adapter would you have to use then? Would this work?:

http://bit.ly/ULEZ8N

This would work if you had an empty PCMCIA slot in your laptop...which is very old technology. You should look for ExpressCard FW adapters but then again, you need a laptop with an ExpressCard slot and a good quality onboard controller chip that will not cause issue with your firewire card and/or audio interface.

[tenshin111]

Oh oh and one other thing, Try to look for Firewire slot on your laptop, Who knows what the future holds, Maybe Firewire soundcards became cheap and USB soundcards get replaced. However 99% of today's laptops have firewire slot on'em but I saw some that didn't had, it's not bad to make sure, also it doesn't have any impact on the laptop's price.

Firewire connector is very uncommon on modern laptops. It is a dying standard - the future is already here, i.e. USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt (but it's gonna take time before we can see TB on non-Apple laptops... ).

[Kaine]

Indeed, the problem that Express card itself appears to be on the way out too these days. If you want to go the firewire card route then ensure it has a Texas Instruments based chipset, althrough that is going to be hard to tell unless the adaptor is sat in front of you.

Personally I'd bypass the Firewire as its a protocol that is on its way out these days. Everyone wants rid of it from a manufacture perspective it seems and usb 2 is good enough for audio unless your getting into track counts in the hundreds.

Grab a good USB device (Komplete Audio 6, Scarlet 2i2/2i4) and you'll be fine.

Also Cache over cores, I'm not sure how that would have a sizable impact once you get past a i3 level system. More cores the better be they real or virtual (hyperthreaded) these days as long as the software application can make use of them, which the vast majority do.

[tenshin111]

As of RAM, Get a 1666 or more MHZ RAM with any capacity (4GB is more than enough)

1666Mhz is all you need. Speed of RAM doesn't really affect overall performance of your PC. 4GB might be not enough though if you plan to work in 64bit environment and use lost of sample-heavy synths.

However you also need a good CPU to run your ASIO driver on 128 ms smoothly, But nothing more than i5 is needed for that, And if your buying i7 instead of i5, don't do it, Just buy the same i5 but with more Cache. What I mean is that CPU cache is much more important for what you need than it's cores.

You are wrong here because Core i5 laptop CPUs are only dual core. Higher-end mobile i7 offers 4 cores in addition to more cache plus hyperthreading.

BTW, you don't need to run your ASIO on 128 ms, I'm running it on 256 and it's fine, And I even run it on 512 ms sometimes not much of a difference, It may be a difference for those really professional producers.

128ms is a terrible lag... I think you meant 128 samples buffer. The overall latency is a sum of in/out latency plus any additional processing that happens along the way...you want it very low if you plan to record live (or MIDI) instruments. If you work totally in the box (or mixing) it doesn't really matter.