Bach
June 14, 2011, 9:07am
17
parnasso:
Well, in my opinion that is greatly exaggerated and not true… I have a Macbook Pro from 2008 (Core 2 Duo at 2,5 GHz with only 4 GB of RAM) and I get absolutely satisfying performance with it. Apparently Windows systems have a considerably better performance at low latency (the figures at Dawbench speak for themselves) but to me the performance of my MBP at a latency of 128 samples seems really fine. If you buy a new MBP with quad-core Sandy Bridge processors and 16 GB of RAM you will certainly get amazing performance, far better than on my now old MBP. All general benchmarks of this new generation of MBP’s I’ve seen support this.
Often people tend to see only raw performance and imo that is just one part of one’s DAW experience. Cubase 5 and 6 have been absolutely stable and reliable for me on my Macs and the performance has been great, too. I don’t care if on Windows I can run 50 multiband compressors more at 64 samples latency as I wouldn’t need that anyway. And if you work with lots of VSTi’s then you will have a hard time on a notebook anyway because for most sample based instruments you need additional hard drives for streaming…
With a Macbook you get a system that is very well built hardware-wise, has high quality components, lasts for years, is usually very quiet and light weight. The operating system is a joy to use and never gets in your way; in my experience (and I actually come from the PC world and used to build my own Windows machines) OS X gives you far less annoyances than Windows. You don’t have to tweak any system settings, you don’t have to deal with antivirus, you don’t get annoying system pop-ups and notifications, you just install your software and you’re good to go. Also on my Mac systems I haven’t witnessed the slowing down of the system over the years as I have with Windows, my OS X installations seem as quick and snappy as they were at the beginning.
All this leads to a very pleasant working experience and is more important to me than the ultimate low latency performance. And I would be quite surprised if you couldn’t get enough performance out of the new Sandy Bridge MBP’s actually.
Still, the best bet would be to try to find someone with a new MBP who let’s you make some Cubase benchmarks so you can judge for yourself.
Do all the new mbp have sandy bridge processors?