Is this laptop too powerful for music production?

[fantasyvn]

Could you pls help me?

I need to buy a new laptop for my music production, but was wondering if this laptop is too powerful. In other words, is it unnecessary to have this spec?

Asus ROG GL552VW-DH71-HID4 15.6" i7-6700HQ 2.6-3.5GHz 2GB GTX 960M Windows 10 (512GB SSD + 1TB HDD / 16GB RAM / DVDRW)

CPU: 6th Generation "Skylake" Intel® CoreTM i7-6700HQ Quad Core Processor, 2.6-3.6 GHz
GPU: nVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 128bit w/ 2GB GDDR5
RAM: 16GB 2133MHz DDR4, Hard Drive: 512GB SSD + 1TB 7200RPM HDD

Could you pls advise?

Thank you

[Dave B]

Er .. no ..?

There is a school of thought that says that only video editing needs excessive horsepower, but it depends on how much work you do 'in the box' when doing audio. If you already have a load of, say, UAD Satellite OCTOs and plugins, then you might not use all the machine, but it's still worth having the grunt for when it's needed. And if you're just buying now, then buy the best you can afford now because in a few years time, it will still be good and you won't need to upgrade just because the latest generation of plugins need more grunt...

I know people who don't live in the depths of the countryside who still own Range Rovers. Although you'd probably get the best out of it living on a farm, people still use them for more mundane stuff. And don't complain that it's over powered...

[CS70]

Could you pls help me?

I need to buy a new laptop for my music production, but was wondering if this laptop is too powerful. In other words, is it unnecessary to have this spec?

Obviously there is no such thing as too much power, so I guess you're asking if you could go cheaper?

Yes you could. What you is critical is to have a lot of ram (16Gb as the specs are very good) and 64bit Windows to make use of it; a large, fast disk, and a motherboard with fast buses. A big screen and serveral USB inputs are very useful as well, as you'll likely have two occupied at any given time (mouse and audio interface). You can skimp a little on the graphic card as audio is not so graphic-intensive.

[Mixedup]

In other words, is it unnecessary to have this spec?

Impossible to say without knowing what sort of music production you do and whether you have a limited budget.

For instance, I find that it's perfectly possible to do a decent large mix on a three-year old MacBook Pro with lots of plug-in processing. But if I wanted to use the latest greatest Acustica Acqua stuff a lot, then it wouldn't cut the mustard. If you want to reduce costs in some areas and invest more in others, you need to figure out whether the sort of work you do relies more on CPU, RAM or speed of hard drives... we can't tell you that unless we know what sort of production you're doing (recording, mixing, how many simultaneous tracks, lots of low-latency instruments, lots of sampled instruments, what sort of plug-ins you're wanting to use in real time and so on...).

[Jack Ruston]

Get the most powerful and up to date machine you can afford. The trick is deciding what you can afford!

J

[fantasyvn]

Thanks a lot for your kind replies.

Is it perfectly alright if I choose a laptop with only 256GB SSD, which will be cheaper?

And then I will buy an external portable SSD hard drive, like a 1TB SSD Samsung to store all my sample libraries like Kontakt, Omnisphere?

Will it be good and fast enough?

I use Reaper for routine projects and Ableton Live for occasional EDM projects. However, my old laptop was very slow to load Kontakt libraries.

Thank you

[Aled Hughes]

Get the most powerful and up to date machine you can afford. The trick is deciding what you can afford!

J

Yup. I spent a fair bit on my self-build desktop back in 2008, and it's still my main machine (Intel Q9550 CPU and 4GB RAM)! It was still running XP until a couple of months ago, but now running W7 perfectly fine. I did the upgrade to W10 and it ran that too with no problems (I rolled back to W7 for other reasons, but those are now sorted so might go back up to 10 soon)

I still don't feel a need to replace it as it's very reliable and does all I need with no problems (I don't use loads of sample libraries etc, but I run a few instances of Sampletank etc., and some VSTi's quite often).

Instead of replacing it, my next purchase is a Surface Pro 4 to complement it. So, ond that experience, I'd concur with JAck and say get the best you can afford.

Of course, being a desktop, it's a slightly different situation. If I'd spent the same on a laptop back in 2008 I probably wouldn't still be using it.

Aled

[Mixedup]

Is it perfectly alright if I choose a laptop with only 256GB SSD, which will be cheaper?

If your OS and applications fit on there, then yes. Just don't crowd it with lots of other junk.

And then I will buy an external portable SSD hard drive, like a 1TB SSD Samsung to store all my sample libraries like Kontakt, Omnisphere?

Will it be good and fast enough?

Not a bad plan, in terms of speed of loading your libraries. But bear in mind that if/when SSDs fail, you're more likely to lose everything. So it's a good plan to backup all your libraries on at least one regular hard drive (cheaper mass storage). Just make sure you boot it up regularly (weekly?) to make sure your backup drive works! Just make sure your machine has the right connectivity for adding enough peripherals (drives, audio interfaces, controllers, dongles, screens etc etc).

I use Reaper for routine projects... my old laptop was very slow to load Kontakt libraries.

The SSD should help if your samples weren't on one before. But you should also know that Reaper has some useful functionality that helps here. Eg, if you have a regular 'arsenal' of sample libraries that you fire up when composing — say a basic orchestra or some such — you can load those in one Reaper project and have your MIDI data in another, triggering those sounds. That way, you only have to fire up your libraries once — you can work on different projects through the day, without having to reload all your libraries.

[The Elf]

you can load those in one Reaper project and have your MIDI data in another, triggering those sounds. That way, you only have to fire up your libraries once — you can work on different projects through the day, without having to reload all your libraries.

What a clever idea!

[SafeandSound Mastering]

I watched this video recently about CPU performance vs real time system performance and found it very informative. I hope it is of interest and useful.

CPU Performance vs. Real-Time Performance in Digital Audio Workstations

[Guest]

My PC is an i7, 16GB RAM with an SSD + HDD - I can only say the power is like nothing I've had before, it's a couple of years old and I've had loads of tracks, 80 odd plugins, Stylus RMX running alongside Omnisphere, Battery 3, Superior Drummer, Alchemy etc. etc. - I think the CPU usage was at like 30%, RAM available was aound 10 GB.

Go for the power, loading big samples off SSD drives is so quick as well.

[Mixedup]

you can load those in one Reaper project and have your MIDI data in another, triggering those sounds. That way, you only have to fire up your libraries once — you can work on different projects through the day, without having to reload all your libraries.

What a clever idea!

Reaper's full of clever ideas. Have you tried the Subprojects feature yet in 5.11 onwards? It's another potential way to save on processing power and sanity — it's brilliant.

(Caveat: unfortunately, it's Reaper we're talking about, so it looks awful whatever theme you use, and pretty much everything is set up the way you (I) don't want it by default, meaning one has to spend several millennia customising it before it's anything approaching usable )

[The Elf]

I only use Reaper for the basics, mainly tracking on location, before bringing it into Cubase for mixing, so no, I am unlikely to get into anything as sophisticated as that.

Still a great idea, though.

[Mixedup]

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my use of Reaper. Every time I get annoyed at some aspect of Cubase I give Reaper another, more in-depth try. And each time I end up returning to Cubase or Pro Tools for one reason or another. It promises so much but... life is too short.

[Folderol]

My 2d
I'd rather grow into a computer's capabilities, than grow out of it!

[Sam Spoons]

Happy Reaper user here. I used to use Cubase and Wavelab many years ago before going back to hardware (initially with an Akai DR8) for a while. Those old windoze boxes were not there most reliable and took too much time away from making music. I finally got back to using a computer for recording a few years ago when I acquired a G5 Power Mac. I could not justify the cost of Cubase (at around £350 back then IIRC) and Wavelab a similar price. Plus I would have had to start again pretty much from square one with the learning curve anyway so I tried Reaper. I don't need eye candy just a functional UI so Reaper suits me just fine. I've even discovered I can edit stereo stuff as easily in Reaper as I used to in Wavelab.

[Wonks]

I started out with three SSD drives in my PCF, a 125GB one for OS + programs, and 250GB ones for projects and samples respectively. I've since upgraded the OS drive to 500GB, because it's surprising how many VSTi programs load samples onto the C: drive, with no option to load them elsewhere, and it was getting full. I'm not talking about sample libraries for things like Kontakt. but things like EZDrummer, BFD, EZKeys etc.

You can start with 250GB, but you'll immediately loose 1/10th of that if you overprovision the disk to make it more reliable and if you do accumulate lots of plug-ins, or have non-music programs on it as well, then you'll probably find you'll be needing to upgrade the size at sometime in the future. But maybe changing to say 500GB or even 1TB in a year's time will be fairly cheap by then, plus it allows you to spread your expenditure.

[Mixedup]

it's surprising how many VSTi programs load samples onto the C: drive, with no option to load them elsewhere... things like... BFD

It's been a while, so I can't recall where that option is in the installation process... but I'm pretty certain you've missed a trick there, as I installed my entire BFD library and approximately one gazillion expansion packs on external drives.

[Martin Walker]

It's been a while, so I can't recall where that option is in the installation process... but I'm pretty certain you've missed a trick there, as I installed my entire BFD library and approximately one gazillion expansion packs on external drives.

I'd agree with that - my entire VST plug-ins collection is currently installed in around 45GB on an SSD, and in my experience very few instruments DON'T offer an option to install their sample data into a different destination.

Martin