Almost new laptop time

[mitchiemasha]

The sales are coming and business expenses to spend...

Looking at new laptops around the £500 budget. Ideally i5 with SSD 500GB. My question isn't going to be which one! Why such slow base clock? Obviously to save power unplugged but we're always plugged in. 1.6 is laughable. My current DJ laptop is an i5 3rd gen 3230M 2.6 - 3.4 turbo and it was only £400, there's nothing at a reasonable price even close. I always thought speed stepping was bad for audio/asio etc. If we lock max performance what will they base at, mine bases at 2.6, not the Turbo, so wont they base at 1.6?

I know there's more to it than overall clock speed but what are we to do? I'm tempted to use a tower instead, leave it at the venue, alongside the jukebox PC.

Any thoughts appreciated

[pete]

I can't see any modern laptop being bottlenecked on audio applications.
Video, yes, but audio should be fine.
Wasn't too long ago we were all running audio on core2duo without many issues (hell, when I was doing studio stuff it was on very expensive powermacs that are outperformed these days by any budget laptop). I've never had speed-step issues, but maybe I just got lucky.


I buy laptops second-hand for the same reason I buy cars second-hand : you can get a untouched, better performing product, cheaper.
Laptops have increased in price over the last few years. My old laptop (17" touchscreen, i7, 16GB) from 2014 would cost more than I paid for it, for a contempory model.
For my present model I pushed the boat out for 1.3K GBP and got a monster laptop. Which serves its (gaming) purpose. But for general (internet) use I would consider the cheaper laptop I got for the missus (acer swift i3) better/faster at the job

So I'd check on some music production forums for laptops that are best optimised for your purpose. Software/firmware/ports etc will affect your usage more than Ghz, but generally speaking you are probably worrying about a non-issue.

[mitchiemasha]

So I'd check on some music production forums for laptops that are best optimised for your purpose.

I've built a few DAW machines over the years. My studio machine is currently running a i7 9700k 5.0 OC with NVMe 970 pro drive, built last Christmas.

I buy laptops second-hand for the same reason I buy cars second-hand : you can get a untouched, better performing product, cheaper.
Laptops have increased in price over the last few years. My old laptop (17" touchscreen, i7, 16GB) from 2014 would cost more than I paid for it, for a contempory model.

That's what i noticed. My old laptop seems to have a higher second hand value than I'd of expected. As for new products, I'd say the prices kind of stay the same, they do go up, but what you get is a lot better. 1.6 IMO just seems to slow... I need to know more about how VDJ works with Turbos. I'd usually set my Laptop in High Performance mode, which my current sits at 2.6. For a tower I'd always OC into max Turbo, undervolted with offset curve, extra cooling, we can't do any of that with a laptop. it just seems they've gone for huge power saving for extended battery life etc but for us who're always plugged in, not so good. They chip is better but to go from 2.6 to 1.6 seems like a risk, especially if you want tight buffers, it doesn't matter if we get an extra 2 cores or Hyperthreading.

I need to know more about it.

VDJ uses video too, we're getting HD ran to all the TV's during a refit after Christmas... My current laptop could handle it. I doubt 1.6 could. Even an i7 based at 1.6. I was always under the impression that any kind of stepping can be very bad for audio.

[DJ Bobcat]

I don’t use laptop computers. I have a laptop that I keep for a backup of last resort, and another one I use for business applications, but I don’t care for them as DJ computers. I like my All-In-One computers or my Nano computers for DJing. I get that I’m giving up the battery capability, but none of my PA system runs on batteries, so if the electricity goes out the laptop continuing to operate is not all that useful. My problem with laptops is the screen size. Even at 17”, having the placement of a laptop behind my controller (at arms length), it’s simply too small for me to see comfortably in a darkened venue, and built-in keyboards and mousepads are practically useless. If you have to use an external mouse and keyboard (as I do), why do you need a laptop PC? Newer laptops have too few USB ports and other connectivity options of older ones. I’m a computer junkie, and I want a new laptop PC to play with, but won’t use it for DJing.😊

[mitchiemasha]

I don’t use laptop computers. I have a laptop that I keep for a backup of last resort, and another one I use for business applications, but I don’t care for them as DJ computers. I like my All-In-One computers or my Nano computers for DJing. I get that I’m giving up the battery capability, but none of my PA system runs on batteries, so if the electricity goes out the laptop continuing to operate is not all that useful. My problem with laptops is the screen size. Even at 17”, having the placement of a laptop behind my controller (at arms length), it’s simply too small for me to see comfortably in a darkened venue, and built-in keyboards and mousepads are practically useless. If you have to use an external mouse and keyboard (as I do), why do you need a laptop PC? Newer laptops have too few USB ports and other connectivity options of older ones. I’m a computer junkie, and I want a new laptop PC to play with, but won’t use it for DJing.��

This is exactly what i'm thinking, why should we pay more for an inferior laptop when we can just as much take a mini desk top, save money and have more power. We just go with what is but that's not always the best solution... I have old PC's sat unused that would easily out perform any of the laptops I've been looking at. It just doesn't feel right yet but, I guess it will after a few weeks of it. I think you've just saved me £800... Now i need to find something else to spend the excess on!!!

[Windows 95]

This is exactly what I'm thinking, why should we pay more for an inferior laptop when we can just as much take a mini desktop, save money and have more power.

Are 19" rack-mounted audio PCs no longer a thing? Or are used ones as over-priced as new ones used to be? (Guitar Center used to sell rack-monted Rain computers designed for audio.)

Since empty computer cabinets aren't that expensive. If I was a mobile DJ that used a desktop instead of a laptop or an all-in-one, I would buy a 19" rack-mounted computer case and put my desktop in that.

[mitchiemasha]

Are 19" rack-mounted audio PCs no longer a thing?

What like this... I'm currently selling on ebay.



Too big and bulky, anything smaller, an old flat bed or tower would be better

[DJ Bobcat]

Are 19" rack-mounted audio PCs no longer a thing?...

I used rack-mount computers in my rack systems for a couple of years. They looked like this...
... They worked fine, but even at 1U, they took up space and were heavier than a laptop. They were also noisy. The cases were intended to be used as servers so I had to replace the fans with quieter ones. The thing is; a 1U (or even a 2U) rackmounted PC has no room for expansion, so what’s the point when a Nano PC like this one works just as well?...

... I have two of the Nano PC’s in my Large System and they still take up less than half the space as one of my old rackmounted computers, which are now mounted in my home server rack and used as servers.

[light-o-matic]

To compare CPU's, look up the passmark rating rather than the clock speed.

For example, your current i5-3230M CPU has a passmark rating of 3943 total (all cores together), and a single thread rating of 1577.

The machine I use for DJing currently (for Rekordbox), has an i5-2520M, with a passmark rating of 3592 and a single thread 1492. It's the last generation of really solid Thinkpads (T420), and I love it, but it barely runs Rekordbox decently, so I've been looking for a newer machine myself.... It's an 8+ year old machine, yours must not be too much newer.

Anyway, yea, search for the passmark scores on the CPU of any new machine you are considering, because there are a lot of different CPU's out there, some new machines, especially thin/light ones, have lower CPU capability than you would imagine for a new machine, because they are trying to achieve long battery life and/or low heat (to save cooling system size).

Passmark scores in the 8000's and up are common these days but not necessarily cheap. Here's a list of common laptop CPU's from highest to lowest passmark:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html

Then here is a pretty good place to research laptops by CPU or by other specs:

https://laptopmedia.com/specs/

So then, let's say I want to see what laptops contain an i5-7440 (passmark 7642/2100.. not amazing but not bad upgrade from what I have.. especially I am looking at the jump in single thread rating because you cannot count on all software taking full advantage of multiple cores but single thread increases are guaranteed speed increases).. So I plug 7440 into the laptopmedia.com search, and I get a list of 21 current and past models that have that CPU.

It would be great if there was a search where I could filter laptops by CPU passmark score directly (filter out all the low ones that won't work for what I need, and also all the really high ones that I probably can't afford), but this is still pretty useful.

Spend some time looking at these and you will soon get a good feeling for what level of laptop you can afford.

Obv. as people pointed out already, a desktop/rack unit can pay off in the end because you are not paying for the monitor/battery/keyboard etc each time you upgrade. At my workplace we just replaced all our desktop units with Dell Optiplex Micro models, they are tiny yet have 5 usb's, wifi, and room for two drives.. one m.2 ssd and one 2.5 inch SATA SSD or HDD. I'm thinking of getting one off ebay for a media PC at home, you can get good ones off Ebay for around $250-350 depending on configuration. Lenovo has a similar model that sells used even cheaper. But personally I need my DJ computer (again, only Rekordbox because I play on CDJ's) to be a laptop because I need to be able to toss it in a backpack and go, I am not always bringing a whole rack with me.. I'm not that kind of DJ.

[DJ Bobcat]

It’s very important to consider the software you’re running. My DJ computers run Traktor, and nothing more. I’ve run Traktor Pro 2 on a stick PC with a quad core Atom CPU without any hesitations or hiccups. However, if you’re running Traktor Pro 3 you better run at least a dual core CPU with a speed of 2.0GHz. If you’re running video, not just audio, then you need something more powerful. I have a separate Nano PC for video, but both are running fairly current quad core i5’s rated at 2.3GHz... more than enough power for the software I run. Ya also gotta think about RAM. Both my computers have 16GB of RAM.