Earbrass Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 (edited) Hi all, My old laptop is increasingly unhappy running my DAW, and so upgrade-time looms. Following the advice in a recent thread on here, I am thinking of buying a Lenovo. The laptop will be used only for running a DAW (initially some version of Sonar LE, but I'm hoping to uprgade to the full Sonar X package sometime later this year). I will be using it for multi-track recording, sequencing, virtual instruments and effects. (For the purposes of this thread, can we take it as read that I'm getting a laptop, not a macbook) There are lots of options within the Lenovo range, and each laptop is customizable to some extent...I'd be interested to know how people would rank the following choices. So, which of the following will give the greatest benefit: 1) Having an i3-380M processor instead of an Intel Core Duo T6670 (2.2GHz) 2) Having 8GB RAM instead of 4GB 3) Having a 7200 rpm disk instead of a 5400 rpm disk At the moment, the leading contender looks like this: ThinkPad SL510 £648.82 Intel Core 2 Duo processor T6670(2.2GHz) Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 8 GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz SODIMM Memory (2 DIMM) 320 GB Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm Any thoughts / comments? Thanks for your input. Edited February 21, 2011 by Earbrass Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lettsguitars Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 any modern lappy will cope just fine with 3gb ram or more. i'd go for the disk speed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigjohn Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 I've got a lenovo x61 2Ghz core duo that runs Sonar LE with ease. It's got 4Gb of RAM in it though, and a 320GB WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM disk in it. RAM and disk speed are the bottlenecks - not the CPU. I'd try with as much RAM as you can put in your current laptop (it's v, v cheap at the moment) and maybe with an SSD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Earbrass Posted February 22, 2011 Author Share Posted February 22, 2011 Thanks for your replies. My current laptop is about 10 years old, and is a maid-of-all-work, so I'm not going to try to upgrade that one. So is the consensus that 8GB RAM is overkill? I would have thought that it would more than compensate for a slightly slower disk spin speed by providing more buffering room. (??) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lowdown Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 [quote name='Earbrass' post='1136897' date='Feb 22 2011, 11:31 AM']Thanks for your replies. My current laptop is about 10 years old, and is a maid-of-all-work, so I'm not going to try to upgrade that one. So is the consensus that 8GB RAM is overkill? I would have thought that it would more than compensate for a slightly slower disk spin speed by providing more buffering room. (??)[/quote] 8 gig might not be overkill if you are using sample libs, or sample based Romplers. Another thing to remember is CPU is important. The cheaper/domestic ones do struggle with some heavy duty synth's. Its worth going around the DAW forums, Cakewalk/Sonar is particularly good. Lots of good advice on CPU's, Ram speed [DDR3 1600 etc] AMD.Intel - motherboards etc. It all helps. In the end i went Desktop W7 64 bit AMD Quadcore, 8 gig of Ram, dedicated graphics 1 gig card. All from taking advice from The Sonar forum. My system is very stable. Might be worth leaving SONAR X1 alone until all the updates are out - it seems they have been having big problems. One other thing with 64 bit [If you are going to run a 64 bit DAW] some of the older plugs won't run. But there is a small very cheap programme called [b]J-Bridge[/b], its a must. Bridges 32 bit plugs to 64 bit. Not all work but a big amount do. [url="http://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/"]http://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/[/url] Garry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigjohn Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 [quote name='lowdown' post='1136997' date='Feb 22 2011, 12:49 PM']8 gig might not be overkill if you are using sample libs, or sample based Romplers. Another thing to [b]remember is CPU is important[/b]. The cheaper/domestic ones do struggle with some heavy duty synth's. Its worth going around the DAW forums, Cakewalk/Sonar is particularly good. Lots of good advice on CPU's, Ram speed [DDR3 1600 etc] AMD.Intel - motherboards etc. It all helps. In the end i went Desktop W7 64 bit AMD Quadcore, 8 gig of Ram, dedicated graphics 1 gig card. All from taking advice from The Sonar forum. My system is very stable. Might be worth leaving SONAR X1 alone until all the updates are out - it seems they have been having big problems. One other thing with 64 bit [If you are going to run a 64 bit DAW] some of the older plugs won't run. But there is a small very cheap programme called [b]J-Bridge[/b], its a must. Bridges 32 bit plugs to 64 bit. Not all work but a big amount do. [url="http://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/"]http://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/[/url] Garry[/quote] I'm not sure CPU is that important for DAWs or similar. Video encoding... yes, audio, hmmm, maybe not so much. I'm pretty sure bottlenecks would be caused more by data throughput / cache rather than queues for lots of complex calculations. Something like an i5 would be absolutely fine, maybe even an i3. There's no DAWs on the market that utilise hyperthreading properly is there? Last time I looked about at that, people were being told to turn off hyperthreading in their BIOS to workaround latency issues. If I was buying a laptop specifically for this purpose, the key things for me would be FSB speed, lots of RAM that's capable of running at the FSB speed and a fast data disk. The Lenovo laptop wouldn't do it for me as the FSB is too slow. Might as well have 4GB@1600Mhz than 8GB@1080. Although 8GB might give you the chance to run a RAMDISK. Lenovo's 7200RPM disk is (was?) the excellent Western Digital Scorpio Black disk (Again, last time I looked) the 5200RPM is an Hitachi Travelstar, which is just about ok. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Earbrass Posted February 22, 2011 Author Share Posted February 22, 2011 Thanks for your further replies. I will definitely check out the Sonar forum. And now I've looked up FSB on google, I suppose I'll have to try to take that into account as well! D'oh! I bloody hate computers, me (IT programmer for 28 years ). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lowdown Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 (edited) [quote name='bigjohn' post='1137129' date='Feb 22 2011, 02:28 PM']I'm not sure CPU is that important for DAWs or similar. Video encoding... yes, audio, hmmm, maybe not so much.[/quote] I am not sure why you think CPU is not important. CPU is up there with motherboards, FSB, RAM speed, Disc speed , graphic cards etc. And always has been. Just one link from many available worth checking out. [url="http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/Build.aspx"]http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/Build.aspx[/url] [url="http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/article.aspx?Page=Intel-Core-i7-Processor"]http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/article...re-i7-Processor[/url] [url="http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/buy.aspx?Type=Laptop"]http://www.cakewalk.com/PCResource/buy.aspx?Type=Laptop[/url] Half of the problems people have with there DAW's is not the software, but budget under performing machines. Thats why for years Mac's were the way to go, there was no budget hard wear in the machines. Different story of course these days. Garry Edited February 23, 2011 by lowdown Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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