Asus laptop not suitable for producing?

[jonathan923_]

I recently bought a strix g15 gaming laptop for music production, and it doesn't stop making cracking and pops sounds during records or music playing. I tried 2 different sound cards and many different configurations like buffer size or sample rate, but nothing helped..
Is it possible that this laptop is just not suitable for music production? although it has a 16GB DDR5 memory, and a Ryzen 6800h processor?

[ajay_m]

The free dpc latency tool you can download will usually pinpoint the driver that is causing the problem and is a good place to start.
Usual culprits are WiFi and the GPU driver. Disabling WiFi when using as a daw usually resolves the first issue and updating to the latest vendor GPU driver is normally also wise.
Power management schemes can also sometimes cause issues. Make sure your power management scheme is running the CPU at full speed and that when on AC power it doesn't sleep.

[Drew Stephenson]

Clicks and pops can also be indicative of an earthing problem, specifically not having a solid earth. What else is connected to your kit and does any of it have a proper grounding?

[Wonks]

What were the sound cards you tried, were you using ASIO drivers and what were the buffer settings?

In terms of processor power, you've got more than enough to run a DAW. My music PC is an old i7 from 9-10 years ago and that's fine.

But if it's a gaming laptop, it may be full of countless gaming-based apps that load up in the background and hog the processor. e.g. ones that regularly go and check for updates from websites.

Ideally, if you also use it for gaming, you'd set up a dual boot arrangement so you can pick gaming or audio profiles, with the audio one only loading the programs and drivers required to run the audio, nothing else. Most off-the-shelf PCs/laptops come loaded with bloatware that really dopes nothing Windows doesn't do already, but just slows the computer down. And the fast 3D stuff isn't needed for your DAW.

Neither will any built-in audio stuff for games be of any benefit, e.g. Dolby Atmos or other surround programs. You don't want those apps running. Just the DAW and the ASIO driver for your audio interface.

I only use Win defender on my PC, but if you've got another ant-virus program loaded, that may be constantly checking your audio files and slowing things down. Tell any anti-virus to avoid your audio files. Certainly don't have two anti-virus programs loaded at once.

[OneWorld]

Disabling WiFi and making sure the GPU driver was up to date. Also, my graphics card installation came with all sorts of gaming claptrap, I found a setting whereby I could scavenge the GPU of all the superfluous bric-a-brac and that was that, the snap crackle and pop accompaniment was run out of town.

As far as the Wifi was concerned I put a shortcut on the desktop whereby I could disable/enable in an instant so I could connect to the internet as and when. That being said, in the end I got myself a long ethernet cable and now use a hard wired network connection

[tea for two]

I recently bought a strix g15 gaming

Hi Jonathan.
I will look tomorrow at my Asus laptop I acquired very recently. Preehaps something can be done with your Asus Rog strix, although a gaming laptop wouldn't be my first port of call for music making.

[ajay_m]

I will say that my Lenovo legion 5 (Ryzen 5800h and rtx3060 GPU) has performed flawlessly as a daw under reaper and also is damn good fun playing ms flight sim. No crackles and pops and reports 1.1/2.1ms latency back to my new dm3 mixer at a 64 byte buffer at 96khz. Very satisfied with it indeed.

[tea for two]

No crackles and pops and reports 1.1/2.1ms latency back to my new dm3 mixer at a 64 byte buffer at 96khz.

Ajay your settings to get this from your gaming laptop would be more helpful to the OP, than my settings for my non gaming Asus.

::

I have wanted to get a gaming laptop not sure why as I hardly ever game lol, still I have made a note of your Lenovo Legion 5.

[ajay_m]

I did not have to change anything on the legion 5. I purchased the base model from Currys and replaced the stock 8g ram with 32g and added a second Samsung 1t nvme drive. I ran it for a while on win10 and then upgraded to win11 (which is more resilient to things like usb audio devices going offline I think - in reaper now if the dm3 is turned off I get a polite dialog and if I turn it back on I can recover without restarting reaper which I dont believe I could previously).
Otherwise I have not tweaked anything. It'll run with the dm3 at 96khz and 64 buffers for most audio stuff giving 1.1/2.1ms latency reported from reaper, but embertones walker piano prefers 256, but it has always been a demanding vst.
The legion 5 is I think the best designed of the gaming laptops with excellent thermals and I think one big problem with a lot of these laptops is they aggressively power throttle to stop overheating. The fan noise is very low although ms flight sim will bring it up a bit but then it's cooling 125w of rtx3060. The GPU will chew through any modern game happily.
The base model screen is pretty average although there are better screen options for this model, but I run it through external monitors anyway. It will support 3 of these too and comes with a ton of ports.
It also doesn't look like a gaming laptop with a nice low-key design. Of course battery life is risible and the power brick is a massive 250w chunk but it's tethered to the studio so who cares.
I've had it for about 18 months now and I'm very happy with it, a quality piece of kit.

[ajay_m]

Sorry I did do one small thing, I marked the folders where all my vsts and kontakt libraries are as excluded from scan in Windows defender. This solved a problem where some libraries took ages to load.