Running cubase 6 elements on a budget laptop

WaveLab
1

Hello all,

I appreciate there is a recommended laptop thread, but it doesn’t seem the place to ask a couple of specific questions I have. Hopefully someone can help!

I run Cubase 6 Elements on an old and mediocre laptop and I desperately need to upgrade to get decent performance. I’m looking to spend around £400 - £450 for a laptop and hoping that I can get something that can handle playing 15 or so tracks without breaking down. My current favourite is the Samsung 350V5C-A0E, which has an i5 processor running at 2.5 GHz, 6gb ram and a hard drive speed of 5200rpm.

My questions are:

  1. Is this sufficiently powerful to run cubase 6 elements to a decent standard?
  2. If not, where are the key spec problems? In particular, do I need to get something with a 7200rpm hard drive?
  3. If the 6gb ram necessary or could I make do with 4? Which is more important for running cubase - ram or hard drive speed?

I recognise that I’d get better performance withthe same outlay on a desktop, but that isn’t an option unfortunately, as I need a new laptop.

I’d be grateful for some expert input!

2

This depends a bit on the nature of your cubase projects. If it’s lots of virtual instruments and fx, you need a strong CPU. If it’s more sample work (Kontakt or similar), you’ll need a fast harddrive that can stream many samples in real time. If it’s just audio tracks and some mixing plugins, something in between :wink:.