Hard to get advice and help on.....

R

riccol

New member
Buying a laptop for recording.

Have rock solid desktop system... but for reason I wont go into absolutely have to have a laptop.


A guy in another forum recommended getting an eSATA controller if using a laptop.
Like this one:
http://www.syba.com/index.php?controller=Product&action=Info&Id=532

Is there any benefit from using this over the regular USB ports on the laptop?

Also Know some basics to look for 7200 hard drive.
But what about processors.... so many newer ones
any advice appreciated.
 
Some advice

heyo

that eSata port is a cool little idea, but because its a converter from eSata to expresscard you'd be losing a little of the speed that eSata has.
specs read that you should still expect a peak rate of roughly 480 Mbit/s which is fairly equivalent to USB 2.0. so in the end, I don't think you'd notice much difference, and it being a composite device, I'd be leaning towards running pure USB 2.0 over eSata-Expresscard converter's

As for laptop specs, regardless of what make or model you go for, the things you don't want to compromise on are:

*Hardrive speed- (as you said-7200rpm is good news)

*Ram- in a 32bit OS max it out at 4Gb, if you have a 64bit OS the max ram addressable is something absurd like 16 exabytes (realistically more like 192Gb) But if you got 8Gb you'd be more than fine.

*CPU speed- this will often be your biggest bottleneck in most system intensive applications, such as music or video editing. so look at this first. decide how much you can spend and look for the fastest Clock speed in that price bracket.
As far as numbers go, dual or quad core with 2.0Ghz or above is a good start, but of course the more the merrier.

hope this helps some :)
 
Leroy Hotdogs Z said:
*CPU speed- this will often be your biggest bottleneck in most system intensive applications, such as music or video editing. so look at this first. decide how much you can spend and look for the fastest Clock speed in that price bracket.
As far as numbers go, dual or quad core with 2.0Ghz or above is a good start, but of course the more the merrier.

hope this helps some :)
Click to expand...

Clock speed isn't everything. i7's with a lower clock speed than i5's are normally faster.

But anyway, I would recommend getting a laptop with at least an i5 (get an i7 if you have the money), 4-6Gb RAM, a 7200RPM HDD, and a discrete graphics card. Also, many laptops now have an eSATA port built in. Mine does and it cost me $1000 over a year ago.

How much do you have to spend?
 
I'm going to take the opposite side on the eSATA argument.. I was in your same situation a few months ago dude. I ended up getting a 15" macbook pro with the core i5, 4gb of blazing fast RAM, the dual graphics etc.. Go absolutely as high and fast as you can possibly go for all of these components, do not sacrifice anything. The faster, the better. I was mixing some decently large projects using this MBP and it only got frustratingly slow when I was mixing the songs with 4-5 instances of Drumagog, 4-8 copies of autotune, and 2 copies of Eleven running. (Pop-Punk :eek:)

I brought USB hard drives with me to school... They are completely un-usable for anything more than very very light recording. They are very slow in comparison to eSATA. The real transfer speed of USB is like 1/3 the speed of any SATA format.

Take a look at this thread on another forum.

I was mis-informed at the Apple Store that the SD card slot doubled as an express card slot and I was sorely disappointed when I bought one. USB is capable of 480mbps, but that doesn't mean that it actually transfers that fast. (Similar to the way that your ethernet card is 100mbps capable, but it is rare that you see faster than a 1.5mbps transfer speed with your connection.)

If you want to reliably record a track count higher than 2-4 on a laptop I would be getting eSATA via expresscard. (Just don't get the 15" macbook pro if you want eSATA and end up like me ;))
 
i7-i5

We could discuss the pro's and cons of the different i5 and i7 derivatives for some time, and yes for a given value of "faster" the i7's are more efficient in proccessor load-time than the i5's due to the "hyperthreading" feature.

But for applications such as music recording and editing (and I made a far more verbose post on this subject elsewhere) when it comes to running plugins and such, each plugin runs as a discrete thread, so the bottleneck does then indeed become the clock speed, as each core can only process one thread at a time. Then theres the compatibility issues.

So please be careful in giving out absolute advice on a certain make or model of processor, as he might invest in an i5 now, and then 6-12 months from now decide to bump it up to a i7 and lo and behold! they run on different sockets!

There is a bit of a furor in the scene surrounding intel's heavy handed approach to their socket designation for these chipsets. with the i5's and SOME of the i7's using the LGA1156 socket. While more of the i7's are and will be using the LGA1366 socket. its made for a murky landscape to plan PC upgrades in.

So in the end, while I agree with your choice of chipsets, I had good reason for citing clockspeed as a something of higher import. Especially in its application to recording.


hmmm I've just read this back and its come off a little more ah... antagonistic, than I meant it to, so please understand I tend to get into rants, and truly don't mean come across as a patronizing Arsehat.

peace
 
eSata

@samth3mancgp Man... you summed that up perfectly
I wasn't very clear at all in my post on USB vs eSata.
I mentioned preferring USB over the eSata/expresscard converter's.
Should have also said that pure eSata would trump it all hands down.

anywho riccol
samth3mancgp hit the nail on the head.
 
Woah buddy! Most good helpful replies I ever got to this question.

I have about a grand or slightly more to spend!

what would you buy?
 
Leroy Hotdogs Z said:
We could discuss the pro's and cons of the different i5 and i7 derivatives for some time, and yes for a given value of "faster" the i7's are more efficient in proccessor load-time than the i5's due to the "hyperthreading" feature.

But for applications such as music recording and editing (and I made a far more verbose post on this subject elsewhere) when it comes to running plugins and such, each plugin runs as a discrete thread, so the bottleneck does then indeed become the clock speed, as each core can only process one thread at a time. Then theres the compatibility issues.

So please be careful in giving out absolute advice on a certain make or model of processor, as he might invest in an i5 now, and then 6-12 months from now decide to bump it up to a i7 and lo and behold! they run on different sockets!

There is a bit of a furor in the scene surrounding intel's heavy handed approach to their socket designation for these chipsets. with the i5's and SOME of the i7's using the LGA1156 socket. While more of the i7's are and will be using the LGA1366 socket. its made for a murky landscape to plan PC upgrades in.

So in the end, while I agree with your choice of chipsets, I had good reason for citing clockspeed as a something of higher import. Especially in its application to recording.


hmmm I've just read this back and its come off a little more ah... antagonistic, than I meant it to, so please understand I tend to get into rants, and truly don't mean come across as a patronizing Arsehat.

peace
Click to expand...

I'll tell you right now that you know more about this stuff than me, but I just didn't want him to find some old laptop with a higher clock speed and think it was better than a new laptop with a somewhat lower clock speed. Just for example, my brother's 6 year old Dell had a Pentium 4 at 3.06GHz, and now he has a Sony with a Core2Duo at 2.66GHz. The Core2Duo is a much faster and efficient processor.

But it's all good, I just thought I would put that out there. ;)
 
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