Anyone using Lenovo legion 5 pro with cubase or as a DAW in general (intel 11800 or AMD 5800) and can recommend or the opposite ?
(thought about getting the new M1 Macbook pro/air ,the most advantage its thin and low noise to no noise at all which is great, the disadvantage for me, no more then 16 gig ram,small screen, and im not used to Mac)
if yes, is the legion 5 pro good for DAW producing with VST instruments, mixing ITB and recording with low latency ?
of course should be glitch free, compatible with Steinberg’s Audio interfaces (tend for the intel version cuz it has thunderbolt ports that theoretically should work with firewire interface ?)
also the fans kick loud for DAW purpose? (no gaming or heavy graphic works )
You might want to check out the computer forum at Gearspace, and the DAW sub-forum.
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If it’s any help, I’m using a Lenovo Legion Y520 gaming computer that’s about 3 years old. So it has an older Intel i7-7700HQ CPU. I have a Steinberg UR242 interface, which is USB, not Thunderbolt. There is a USB-C port, but if I understand correctly, it is not Thunderbolt, even though the connection is the same. In any case, the Steinberg UR242 that I bought then was USB, and according to what I read, there was no advantage to USB-C or Thunderbolt for an interface back then in terms of latency. I don’t known if that is still true. I was very nervous about going to USB at the time because my prior computers used Firewire interfaces, with very good low latency. But it turns out that the Steinberg interface using the standard USB port (USB 2.0?) is just as fast or faster.
The fan is very quiet for what I do. I don’t do gaming on it, but it has a high-end NVIDIA graphics card from back then. I don’t know whether it’s better to turn it off; I’ve never tried.
I plugged a 1-TB solid state drive into the USB C port, and I put all the sample libraries I use on it. I also upgraded the memory to 32GB, which is the max for this machine.
Another thing I did was replace the original 128-GB C drive (M2) with a 1TB drive which I partitioned so that the C-drive is 256GB, and I still have a bunch of space to use if I need it. I did not move my Cubase projects to the SSD drive; they are still on the internal 1TB disk drive. Some have said I might get better performance if I move my projects to the internal SSD.
I am not having any performance problems. I sometimes do orchestral stuff (Spitfire BBC Core), that will load up a lot of instruments. Takes a few seconds, but the system has no problem with playback at a buffer size of 128. If I’m using mastering plug-ins (Izotope), I might increase the buffer size to 512, just to be safe, but if I forget to change it, it still works fine.
I also do stuff where I record guitars and basses directly into Cubase, running through amp sims and effects. I set the buffer to 128, with no issues at all, even with a lot of VSTis running. I think most people are comfortable playing live at that buffer setting, but maybe you are not. I could get away with a buffer setting at 64 in many cases, but I am comfortable at 128.
So to conclude, I run Cubase 10 on a three year old Lenovo Legion Y520 gaming laptop, with 32GB main memory, and lots of additional storage, using big VSTi’s, with little fan noise, at a buffer size of 128. Newer models must be even better now. But I also had to replace the main fan about a year ago because it started to become noisy. No problems since. The fan was a cheap part, and easy to install.
Anyway, hope this is helpful to you.
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Thanks for the detailed response .
one of my my main concerns is the fan noise, especially for recording low level instruments in the same room with the laptop, but if its low enough its great 