Laptop Recommendations ~$500-600

[polak]

Hey guys,
I'm in desperate need of a new laptop in the $500-$600 range and I'm looking for suggestions. I'm really looking to just max out the RAM and processing power as I mostly use my laptop for producing music which kills my current processor. I made the mistake of prioritizing the # of cores above all else when buying my last laptop when it turns that for music making software, clock speed should be priority #1.

Now I've been looking at specs for laptops at Best Buy but that's pretty where my computer knowledge ends. Is there any sort of tips you can give me when trying to max out clock speed? Any processors that might have high specs but poor performance? Any notoriously bad laptops I should avoid?

Thanks for the help guys!

[CroFlames]

This guy is great. This particular video is actually about back to school laptops, but he really is good an getting you to identify your need and match the best product to that, including price range.



He's Canadian too. And awesome.

[DoubleF]

I wonder if using a SSD may help to reduce bottle necks that many laptops with 5400 RPM HDDs experience. Any way you can grab an SSD and try to see if there's a difference with the music production on the same hardware?

[Hack&Lube]

I know a lot of DJ software have CPU utilization meters because it's important to them. Low-end DJ software isn't well-optimized for parallelism and hyperthreading.

That said, I have a 5-year old i7 laptop and it still kicks ass in music editing while my friend's brand new i3 laptop simply whimpers and dies because he didn't know how to shop.

I work in enterprise now so I'm out of the commercial game and don't follow tech trends anymore. You might want to check out http://www.notebookreview.com/ and http://www.notebookcheck.net. Their forums were/are the best resource regarding notebooks.

Intel just came out with their next gen Skylake family. I would get a high clock-speed i5 in this family. Don't take my word for it though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylak...ile_processors

[Vulcan]

Yeah, Linus used to work for NCIX but he's moved on to take on other sponsors. Nice to see him having success.

[photon]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I know a lot of DJ software have CPU utilization meters because it's important to them. Low-end DJ software isn't well-optimized for parallelism and hyperthreading.

Huh, what about producing music is it that makes it so CPU intensive? I assume one works with lossless files while doing things, is it mixing different files together? EDIT: Oh wait you said DJ, I was thinking more of composing in like Fruity Loops or something. Yeah for DJ I guess it'd be constantly mixing and manipulating the playback on the fly?

[polak]

Producing music in FL, Ableton and the like takes a lot of CPU power as your computer has to render every note live and a decently full song has many many many synths, samples and effects going simultaneously.