Good laptop for music production ?

Envato Authors AudioJungle
1

Hi friends,
I need to buy a new laptop soon, currently I have a pretty modest Dell Studio 1735 laptop (17 inch screen / 4gb ram / core 2 duo intel cpu).
I can’t afford a super mighty laptop, my budget it’s just around $800 to $900 USD so with that in mind I have looked some good ones (HP, Toshiba, etc), but I would love to hear any suggestions.

My goal it’s to find a 17 inch laptop with at least 8GB RAM and an intel i7 core - I don’t mind too much about the size of the HD due I use mainly Reason 7 / sample libraries and I don’t record a lot of audio tracks at once (also I have an external drive with tons of space).

Any brand or specific model should I try ? Any suggestions ?

Thanks a lot !

2

Since you’ll be doing mostly sample-based work, I’d suggest focusing on ram. 16 or 32gig would be ideal. Also do you neeeeed a laptop? For that price you could build a pretty solid desktop that would perform way better.

But back to your post… check out MSI. My younger brothesr have MSI gaming laptops and they are absolute monsters.

3

Cool I will…

I need to be a laptop because my brother will bring it by plane to Argentina :slight_smile: so a desktop could be a problem… Thanks !

4

I have an ASUS Pentium at 2 GHZ, 8 GB of RAM, Win7 and works fine for me. Sometimes “hiccups” on big libraries but that’s mostly because I use the 32 bit version of my DAW and Kontakt.

5

For the price you have mentioned you can pretty much buy any brand with enough of power to create music. Here in USA you can get a good HP with that money and it sure will have power. I have had HP laptops before. The Pavilion line by them is not that good, avoid it, Envy line on the other hand is a good one. I have one and it works really good.
Dell inspiron laptops are very durable in my experience, mine lasted me for a very very long time. And the only reason I have changed it, is because it got so old that all the new software that came out would not run on it. ASUS laptops like Mihai mentioned are good too, probably one of the best you can find when it comes to quality. And one last thing, You can buy AMD 10 and they are really damn good and run as good as I7, but they are way cheaper :). And generally they come with built in Radeon graphic cards ( that is if you do not want to pay a lot of money for the laptop ). And Radeon runs better than built in Intel video cards.

6

Thanks for the answers !

@Kurlykovs The processor brand was another good questio, so you think that series of AMD are in the same level than i7 ? If so, I will check em

Thanks !

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Sonicbyte said

Thanks for the answers !

@Kurlykovs The processor brand was another good questio, so you think that series of AMD are in the same level than i7 ? If so, I will check em

Thanks !

Discussion about AMD vs Intel is an ever-ongoing thing. Some of the main differences are within the CPU instruction set implementations, that slightly differ from eachother. There’s alot to say about that, but to keep it short and simple: as it stands TODAY, for professional usage I’d recommend Intel, for gamers I’d recommend AMD. In the end it shouldn’t matter much. If you’re unsure, I’d say: go with Intel - the Core i7 is rocksolid - using it myself too in all my machines.

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Sonicbyte said

Thanks for the answers !

@Kurlykovs The processor brand was another good questio, so you think that series of AMD are in the same level than i7 ? If so, I will check em

Thanks !

The top top top of the line is Intel no doubt. The medium lvl of processors, when it comes to your budget, really doesn’t make a difference. And you just get the same thing with AMD as you would get with Intel, but for a cheaper price.
But wait and see what others tell you, and compare the prices too.

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any of them with pristine processor (intel i7) and ssd are good for music production.

10

I think, MacPro.

11

Asus K56C will fit your needs :slight_smile:

12

macpro is a little out of you price, so I would look at an ASUS and def get an I7 with at least 16gigs ram.

13

I just bought a second hand Acer with windows 7 as a second computer to have at home for edits and mixdowns. Trouble straight away! Windows not booting, having power issues. Oh well it was cheap and seems to be working now. A few more sales until I can upgrade!

14

RAM, CPU & Cooling will be your main needs.

A desktop will be ideal due to you having a huge selection of motherboards.
If you need to go with a laptop you are going to find that having a laptop that supports 16GB+ of RAM will be very expensive as Laptop RAM is a totally different size compared to a desktop.

But please remember this, RAM is extremely important if you are going to be working with samples. Here is my priorities:

1: RAM - 16GB+ (32/64GB preferred) 1600MHz with low timings.

2: SSD - Not HDD, if you are using samples get a Solid State Drive with good READ times.

3: CPU - 4 or 6 Core i7 with hyper-threading will see you well, these will give you 8-12 virtual cores.

4: Cooling - If you are using a laptop then you need to keep it cool while note generating too much noise. I suggest a riser stand with fans powered by the laptops USBs.

15

Thanks to all you’r suggestions, I bet this tips will be useful for lots of musicians here…