How good of a laptop/desktop do I need?

[Agog]

I've been looking to record music.

I'm a guitarist and have pretty much all of the gear that I need. I use a scarlett 2i4 to record my guitar directly plugged in. I have a decent pair of monitors to hear the audio. I plan on using reaper as my DAW to start and bias FX for my amp sims.

The thing is, my current desktop is on its way out so I can't really record on here. Now, I am a bit on a budget to be honest. Realistically I can spare a good 600 or so for a laptop or desktop, but honestly I don't want to spend that amount right now as I have bills and other things to pay for.

I have a small samsung laptop that I use for school/youtube videos. I was planning on buying either a laptop or desktop and use it pretty much solely for recording my music and mixing etc. Just to get my songs recorded and edited properly.

My question is..exactly how good of a laptop/desktop do I need? Looking around a bit on bestbuy I see laptops for around 200. I do plan on getting a new desktop later on when I have more money to spend to use for everything. But for now I really just want to get to recording. I have all my gear ready minus a laptop. would something that's 200 suffice? How good of a laptop/desktop do I need to have my scarlett 2i4 connected with direct guitar plugin. Reaper running with Bias FX as my plugin. connected to M-audio studio speakers and possibly other plugins like superior drummer running.

I'm anxious to start

[Arpangel]

A neighbour recently bought a bog standard desktop PC for around £200 excluding peripherals from one of the many on-line stores, he makes music on it quite happily and it's also his general purpose computer, he's very surprised at how good it is.
I use a place called Power C in Watford, bought a couple of decent PC's from them.
You shouldn’t have to spend more than £500 and that’s really pushing the boat out.
Reaper is very light on processing, be careful with plug-in's and you should be fine with your budget, or even less.

[Wonks]

I think the OP is in Canada (or the US), so they’ve got a bit less to spend than you think.

Laptops vary a lot in their ability to run DAW software.

You need to be looking at RAM size (I’d suggest 8GB minimum) and I’d be looking at one with an SSD. ‘Mechanical’ laptop hard drives still generally operate at slower speeds than desktop ones, and an SSD overcomes that and also reduces the power consumption - reducing fan noise.

I’d be looking at a 500GB disk as a minimum. I doubt if you will stick with the basic DAW and drum software, and it doesn’t take long to fill up a 256GB disk.

The O/S could be an issue if you want continued support and you don’t get one with Win 11. There are very easy ways to load it onto almost any Win 10 machine though.

There are some laptops (as there are desktops) that are very poor at running DAW software as they have processes/drivers that take up too much interrupt time and cause audio clicks and dropouts. Some issues can be fixed, some can’t. They are fine for other things but not audio. However, without running a program such as LatencyMonitor, you won’t know how good a particular laptop is.

You can get big variations within the same brand and model ranges, so you can’t simply say get an Asus or Dell etc.

If you are buying used, then ideally get a laptop that someone’s already been running a DAW on for a while and you should be OK. You can always fit a bigger SSD and more RAM if you aren’t paying too much for the laptop to start with.

If looking at new, then look at what the makers of music PCs/laptops are using as a guide. E.g. in the UK, Scan are a top provider of audio PCs. https://www.scan.co.uk/

[amanise]

An early decision is whether you need a mobile solution - or a static one. I'd guess a mobile one would be more flexible perhaps? Laptops are great these days when buddied up with a good audio interface (so there's another spend). Whatever you go for - I'd make sure it has 16Gb of RAM because sooner or later you'll most likely want to use a software plug in that requires that. When they say something needs a min of 8Gb - that's usually just to get it loaded on its own.

In either laptop or desktop situation I'd make sure there's SSD drives in the machine. Although I get away with my HDD C: drive on my desktop DAW because all my projects and recording and rendering drives are all separate SSDs. I don't mind waiting for it to boot while I wake up too. That puts the price up a bit more but it's well worth it in the long run. Processors don't need to be super powerful for audio only - I use i5s because I'm an old skinflint. If you want to go further and make a video for your track(s) though.....

My preference for laptop hardware is HP, and Dell for desktops - but everyone's different on that one. Both can be bettered for price if you look further than I did. The important one there is that you are confident in it. If you're not confident in it - it'll always niggle away in the background.

I'm sure there'll be lots of other suggestions as well, so good luck and I hope you find one you feel really good about.

[shufflebeat]

My current laptop is a second (possibly more) hand w10 Lenovo t460 with SSD and a dodgy speaker that I never use because I’m either on headphones or external monitors.

I bought it as an interim solution on the advice that, although it’s not the most powerful machine, all the bit co-operate well with each other and parts are generally available - and it was only to keep me going in the meantime.

As it is an older “office” machine there are lots of different dockers that connect all my peripherals and the Lenovo clips onto - and we’re ready to go.

I use Reaper, mainly for recording audio (SSL2+) with some VSTi’s or mixing multitracks recorded elsewhere, usually 12-24 at a time.

I’ve not felt the need to replace it.

[ef37a]

Hi Agog and welcome to Bedlam! Mine and my son's experience with laptops and desktops over many years might help you? Note, we a not 'computer people' just an old valve amp tech and a talented musician putting our heads together.

I built a 'music' desktop some years ago. Asus MOBO AMD 3G 6 core Black. 500G spinner HDD and 6G of ram. That ran Samplitude Pro X 3 no bother at all (Sam is much more CPU hungry than Reaper) on Windows 7.

I now mess about on a Lenovo T510 240G SSD 8G ram Win 10. Son now lives in France and has the smaller Lenovo T430 but the same CPU and ram etc. These run Sam ProX 3 and Reaper and son does some complex stuff with Cakewalk and MIDI from a kbd and says he has no problems with latency* or other matters.

Yes!! The hard drives are too small! Like yourself I only had a limited budget and bigger drives cost more than I could manage at the time. However, we both have a portable USB drive and can keep the internal drive spruced that way.

Unless you are running a great many tracks or complex series of plugins I doubt you would have any issues with any laptop of about the above specification. I also have an old HP G6 i3 W7 machine and that runs Samplitude Pro X3 fine.

*That is with a MOTU M4, known for excellent drivers but I don't think Focusrite are far behind these days?
Should have said. Both Lenovos are i7 machines and yes, get more than 8G of ram if you possibly can.

Dave.

[tea for two]

First year of lockdown when I got back into music making after nearly a decade break, I made tunes on a £50 purchased macbook pro 2010 with 4GB RAM for over a year. Just the internal hard drive I swapped out for a SSD : was easier to do on earlier macbooks.
Nowadays there so much free music software available they will run fine on a current recent Quad Core 3.5Ghz cpu, that it's just putting as much RAM as you can afford and SSD into the laptop desktop.
Also not overloading the instrumental song with lots of FX plugins, or Soft Synths that chew up a Quad Core 3.5Ghz cpu.

[James Perrett]

I'm a big fan of refurbished laptops. The Lenovo range that Dave mentions have a good reputation for music but I like older high end Dell laptops. I bought my son a Dell Precision M4800 with 16GB RAM and 240GB SSD for about £250 a few months ago. It handles just about anything he throws at it including 3D rendering in Blender. Reaper barely scratches the surface of its processing power.

For serious recording you would probably want to add a second SSD but that's no problem with the M4800 as it has space for that - and even a third SSD if you remove the optical drive.

[Jimmy B]

It has been said that the poor man always pays twice. That is certainly true if he is buying a music computer. It is almost certainly a waste of money to buy a Windows machine that has anything less than an i5 processor, and the ability to be expanded to 16GB RAM and 512GB or even 1TB SSD (even if those are not currently fitted).
If it is necessary to live with an inadequate computer while saving up, one approach could be to stop using an amp sim, and instead to use either a modelling amp or a modelling pedal. If you then switch on direct monitoring on the Focusrite, you can hear what you are playing without annoying delays, and the computer only has to record the output of the modelling hardware, which is a much easier task.
The modelling amp or modelling pedal can presumably have other uses as well.

[forumuser821533]

You've probably read more than enough by now but I thought I'd pop up a quick comment...

I've been building music PCs since the late '80s and am constantly surprised by the capability of moderrn machines. I recently picked up a refurbished Dell quad core i7 from Amazon for £135 purely as a backup host but tried running Reaper on it as an experiment. It happily ran a project with 500 tracks and quite a few plugins so don't let cost put you off - music can be done quite cheaply these days.

I would suggest the following though...

1. An i5 as minimum but, if you can run to it, get an i7
2. Refurbished machines can offer very good value for money but you have to expect shorter lifspans
3. Unless you're planning on running large sample libraries 16g memory should be ample and 8g is doable
4. Go for Win10 rather than Win11 if possible. Win11 is not a "complete" operating system yet. It will be eventually but at present there are chunks of code that haven't been ported across so it is less flexible
5. Make sure the machine has at least 2 USB3 sockets. The Focusrite will run quite happily through USB2 but you'll probably want USB3 for external data drives.
6. A lot of refurbed machines come with 250g SSDs. This is ample for the system drive. However, I'd suggest using an external USB3 drive for your data. This means that if the PC fails your data is safe and easily accessible. A USB3 SATA HD will allow streaming of quite a few tracks (I use one for live recording with a very old Lenovo laptop) but an SSD will be quicker though more expensive.
7. If you hit performance issues be prepared to render tracks, even if just temporarily - Reaper is very good at that!

Hope this might help a bit and reassure you.

[Jimmy B]

A lot of good advice there and nothing to argue with. As several people have said, a refurbished business computer is a good way to go in the UK. The reference to "Bestbuy" suggests that the OP may be in the USA. Hopefully the same applies there.

[ef37a]

A lot of good advice there and nothing to argue with. As several people have said, a refurbished business computer is a good way to go in the UK. The reference to "Bestbuy" suggests that the OP may be in the USA. Hopefully the same applies there.

My thoughts as well especially on the OS point. Many people involved with "mission critical" applications use an OS at least one behind the current one.

Dave.

[Wonks]

But there is the proviso that whilst you can run lots of audio tracks on even a very low-spec computer these days, there are times when you need a lot of processing power to run some plug-ins, especially some convolution-based ones that can struggle on even a powerful computer.

Stick with the DAW stock plugins if you can, as these shouldn't require too much processing power. If you are tempted to buy third-party ones, always check the minimum specification requirements first (though ones simply saying something like 'i5 processor' don't impart much info, as the performance difference between the original and the current range of i5 chips is immense).

[alexis]

This from Mr. Wonks ...

• "there are some laptops (as there are desktops) that are very poor at running DAW software as they have processes/drivers that take up too much interrupt time and cause audio clicks and dropouts. Some issues can be fixed, some can’t. They are fine for other things but not audio. However, without running a program such as LatencyMonitor, you won’t know how good a particular laptop is".

... is gold. I've read often of folks that can't really do much DAW audio recording on their laptop, even if it's very expensive, because of interrupts.

May be helpful to go to one of the sites that prebuild audio computers for DAW works and ask them if they have any used ones, and if the guy is in a good mood he may even give you some advice on how to choose.

(I went looking for an old thread in these forums about laptop audio recording, I thought maybe it used to be a sticky, but wasn't successful. I thought it had a good discussion about the potential pitfalls of using a laptop for DAW work ...).

Another alternative to a laptop is a Microsoft Surface. This site https://surfaceproaudio.com/ looks pretty good, and the author, Robin Vincent, is a contributor here as well. He also has some really good youtube vids on the topic, which I used to set up my Microsoft Surface Pro 6 to record using Cubase some years ago.

Happy Hunting!

[Moroccomoose]

I thought I'd share my own experience here.

My first proper audio computer was from SCAN, I bought it about 9 years ago and for me, at the time, it was a very serious investment of over £700... but it was for exactly what I wanted. The service from SCAN was exemplary. I was vey pleased. It was from the SCAN 3XS range, custom built for the purpose of making music. It felt like it was the last computer I'd ever need to buy. It was the latest and greatest i7 chip, quality fast RAM with lots of storage.

Fast forward 8 years, and it was still going strong, showed no signs of aging, it never felt like it was under powered I'd probably still be a happily using it today if I hadn't knocked that cup of tea over! It died.

That happened last year and I was left needing to buy another computer. The equivalent computer from SCAN was going to cost £1300. I simply couldn't justify it.

In the end, I bought a refurb from what I believe is a reputable refurb firm. (Backmarket)I bought a DELL Optiplex 3070 i5 mini tower for about £230 and then spent about £80 maxing out the RAM and swapped over SSDs and HDD from my old computer, so a total spend of about £330. The CPU comparison sites suggest that my new computer has about 50% better performance over the SCAN build.

I use old gear - My interface is a firewire interface which I bought 2nd hand and it works as well today as it did the day it was unboxed. However with the SCAN computer I would get periodic BSOD attributed to the firewire card which was not stable. I moved the same firewire card over to my new computer and in a year, it has not even so much as flickered, not once. It is way more solid than the SCAN computer.

My conclusion is this: The DELL optiplex is a business computer. DELL make all of the component parts, its not even a standard ATX MoBo or standard formfactor power supply. But they make them to be robust and reliable for business. They are in control of the processor, chipsets and everything from the ground up. The cases are simply amazing and easy to make upgrades. Businesses continually upgrade their leased computers providing a steady stream of quality 2nd hand computers that have ZERO bloatware installed! This all adds up to a very stable machine for very little money 2nd hand.

So my advise is to look at the refurb market, be clear about what is needed in terms of CPU horse power, and buy the best you can afford. RAM and storage can be added (Or swapped). Try to stick to mainstream computer builders such as DELL or HP.

As a footnote, this was in no way intended to be a put down for SCAN, they are excellent with great products and customer service. I believe there are many happy 3XS users in this forum including myself.

Stu.

[Sam Spoons]

Scan are excellent, I've never bought a complete computer from them but have built a couple using components from them and bought countless other computer bits over the years.

My conclusion is this: The DELL optiplex is a business computer. DELL make all of the component parts, its not even a standard ATX MoBo or standard formfactor power supply. But they make them to be robust and reliable for business. They are in control of the processor, chipsets and everything from the ground up.

This is one of the advantages of Apple computers.

The cases are simply amazing and easy to make upgrades.

Unfortunately this is not

TBF all modern computers have their primary memory and storage integrated into the MOBO, electrons take too long to traverse the wires between the CPU and 'offboard' memory/storage. If my MBP had the option of a removable SSD for bulk storage I would be an even happier man than I am*

* Apparently the happiest years of our adult life are around 70...

[Daddyo]

I've used older desktops and various laptops, but by far the best result I've had has been from building my installation in an Alienware gaming laptop that I bought refurbished from Dell Outlet.

I think there are a couple of reasons why this time everything is working out so well:

1) Alienware laptops have physical room onboard for multiple drives, in this case three of them. It came with the one SSD as a system drive, and I added two more SSDs, again, all onboard! These are fast fast fast. System and DAW installation are in the C: drive and music file storage and other files produced by the DAW are on the D: drive.

2) I expanded its RAM to 32 Gb. RAM isn't an issue.

3) It has an I7 processor.

4) It has a dedicated graphics card with its own processor and its own RAM (an additional 6Gb, just for video). It isn't that the user interface of a DAW takes all that much processing, but most laptops use "integrated graphics", meaning that video and UI processing happen in their main CPU, splitting tasks and system RAM between that graphics work and audio processing. A dedicated graphics processor offloads all of that from the main CPU, freeing it entirely to make music.

5) I've disabled or uninstalled quite a number of Windows utilities and services that may be great for a normal use case but prove to be almost meaningless for a dedicated recording computer. That means fewer resident services constantly tapping on the shoulder of the CPU, trying to get its attention.

All of this taken together had made this most recent installation by far the most trouble free I've ever had. I hung back from software DAWs for years but this time around the experience has been excellent.

[ef37a]

I've used older desktops and various laptops, but by far the best result I've had has been from building my installation in an Alienware gaming laptop that I bought refurbished from Dell Outlet.

I think there are a couple of reasons why this time everything is working out so well:

1) Alienware laptops have physical room onboard for multiple drives, in this case three of them. It came with the one SSD as a system drive, and I added two more SSDs, again, all onboard! These are fast fast fast. System and DAW installation are in the C: drive and music file storage and other files produced by the DAW are on the D: drive.

2) I expanded its RAM to 32 Gb. RAM isn't an issue.

3) It has an I7 processor.

4) It has a dedicated graphics card with its own processor and its own RAM (an additional 6Gb, just for video). It isn't that the user interface of a DAW takes all that much processing, but most laptops use "integrated graphics", meaning that video and UI processing happen in their main CPU, splitting tasks and system RAM between that graphics work and audio processing. A dedicated graphics processor offloads all of that from the main CPU, freeing it entirely to make music.

5) I've disabled or uninstalled quite a number of Windows utilities and services that may be great for a normal use case but prove to be almost meaningless for a dedicated recording computer. That means fewer resident services constantly tapping on the shoulder of the CPU, trying to get its attention.

All of this taken together had made this most recent installation by far the most trouble free I've ever had. I hung back from software DAWs for years but this time around the experience has been excellent.

Fork! Yes, they should be good I can't see anything under two bags!

Dave.

[Arpangel]

From a performance point of view, I’m running a Macbook Air, M1 8 gig 256 SSD.
No issues, running Reaper, Ableton, complete Arturia synth's, Kontact, Valhalla plugs.