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Laptop recommendations for Music Production? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/pcmasterrace

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Hi there, am looking for a new and powerful laptop that can handle music production quite well, but am not sure what to get. So far I've understood that its important for this laptop to have:

32GB RAM (DDR5 preferably)
Top-notch processor
Good graphic card
at least 1TB of SSD Storage, planning on buying external ssd later.

Anyone have any good recommendations for this? The budget is around 2,250 USD / 2,137 EUR.

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[–] Vinny_93 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I wouldn't look to hard for a decent gpu. Matter of fact, you might even get one without a discrete gpu but one with decent integrated graphics. You'll be fine with a Ryzen 7 or whatever Intel's equivalent currently is. Get a 9 if you want it to have some extra oomph. But save yourself the cost of getting something with a 4070 or 4080.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Been looking at a Thinkpad X1 Gen 11. It has pretty good everything (can spec it myself via their website) however it "only" has a Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics. I'm not too familiar with how these integrated graphic-cards work so im not sure it will fit my workflow or not. As far as I've understood it will be sufficient but if I were to want anything a little more graphic heavy then it will limit performance. What's considered the middle ground between Integrated graphics and a 4070?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

As a fellow music producer, you definitely don't need a discrete graphics card if this machine is purely for music production. Definitely better off spending that money on an audio interface and some studio monitors, or some plugins

[–] Vinny_93 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

4060 or 7600XT but that's still very pricey. It really depends on what you call graphic heavy. The latest video games will not run on an Xe. Then again, they'll not run great on a 4070 either. If you need to do stuff like video editing, especially rendering, will take longer on an Xe but will work. A 4070 will be quicker but you'll be far better off with a Quadro or whatever they call their professional series now. They do add to the price but you can settle for a lower model. If you're looking at just stuff like photo editing, an Xe will do fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Yeah the option to do more heavy lifting tasks with a GPU is there actually, so going to go with a discrete card.

Leaning towards this laptop right now, but customised with i9 CPU and 32GB ram.

https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/configurator/cto/index.html?bundleId=83DFCTO1WWGB1

[–] Vinny_93 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

For some things, the i7 works a bit more efficient than the i9, the i9 is a beast but that also makes it bulky. And power hungry.

32 GB RAM is solid, I wouldn't go for 16.

And for the graphics thing, well... If it's photo/video editing and you don't plan on using an external display as a default, you might want to consider the 3rd option for a screen. DCI-P3 is much broader than sRGB.

Edit: oh and I don't know what the upgradability is on this thing but you might wanna go for the 1TB drive just in case.

And if I can give you a bit of Windows advice: see if you can chop up that disk in two partitions before you start installing stuff. Keep your Windows partition, the part of the disk where you only keep Windows, at around 120GB. This will cause Windows not to create tens of gigabytes of cache files on the disk, freeing up space for more content. And something I always immediately do is turn hibernate off (powercfg.exe /hibernate off) in order not to get a hiberfile.sys the size of your used RAM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Great tips - appreciate it a lot! The display tip especially as it wont be connected to any extra displays most of the time. The PC also won't be for any photo/video editing. Strictly making music but also the occasional games here and there - nothing too heavy, but enough to require a discrete card.

[–] Vinny_93 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

sRGB is fine for gaming and your DAW, DCI-P3 is only useful if you want very accurate colours. The DCI-P3 one has higher frame rate, but it'll have more latency. You could go for the HDR variant, but HDR is mostly bad on laptop screens. Apart from that it uses a lot of battery power.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Noted, thanks for good intel!