After a rather unpleasant experience with a macbook pro I’m considering replacing it with a windows laptop and as a result moving from Logic X to Cubase 8.
The laptop will be used as a mobile studio (projects with @20 midi tracks and possible a few audio tracks), for general office tasks, photo editing and occasionally a little video editing. VST sample libraries used will probably be less than 500GB in total size. The laptop needs to be portable, so I guess a screen size of @15" and relatively light.
I have a Mac Pro based home studio, which will also move from Logic X to Cubase 8. I am not looking to replace this studio with the new laptop, more complement it.
While I would consider myself reasonably capable when dealing with computers, I have no interest in building or fiddling with them. As a result my main requirement is a laptop that will facilitate the above with the minimum amount of effort.
I’d be grateful if anyone could recommend an appropriate laptop. While I don’t wish to skew any recommendations, my initial investigations have highlighted the Dell XPS15 and the Dell Precision M3800.
In the forum section “hardware” there is an entire listing of hundreds of machines that will do the job.
FWIW you can google a little and you will find specific websites that sell machines that are designed for audio workstations. They are not a lot more expensive then a normal machine, but still they use quality hardware inside, most of the time they end up around 1.000 $/eur at least.
I recently bought a custom build desktop replacement. In fact it’s branded as a gaming machine, but i can only advise this since the difference in power is just amazing. Rock solid also and super stable and not heating up too much. But a bit expensive too. These are branded as SAGER or CLEVO machines and are custom build.
They use desktop hardware (also processor which results in a cheaper system if you would buy it as mobile gear and quite a huge amount faster then the mobile counterparts)
I bought it here, but you can find these all around the world. http://www.bytesatwork.be/clevo-notebook-p771zm.html
I just put a 4790 intel i7 in it, but took the S-version since it is a bit less heating things up.
You will never look the same way to a “laptop” again.
While the “gaming” type laptops are a temptation, particularly given the extra RAM and additional HDDs, I am reminded that I’m not trying to replace my desktop, but rather complement it. Hence my leaning towards an ultrabook.
I’ve had a pretty thorough trawl of the internet and I have found little that relates specifically to the machines I mentioned, and ultrabooks in general, and Cubase.
I did find this, which is a bit of a worry.
However I did find some comfort and quite a bit of interest in the following.
Which audio interface will you use with it, if any?
This is mainly important if you have a FireWire interface because they can be very picky about the FireWire chip in your machine.
