Building a DAW - don't forget the video card!

I started attempting the DAW thing back in the early 90's on a color Macintosh PowerBook with a MOTU interface for MIDI. Since then it's pretty much always been self-built towers until about 2 years ago when I tried to give laptops a serious try. Something I've admittedly not given much thought to since moving to laptops for DAWs is video processing. I do my gaming and movie watching on a Xbox, don't use my DAW for anything else crazy, so why would I need great video performance? Unfortunately as of late I've found I need to start caring more, to the tune of getting a new laptop, so I'm sharing this with you in hopes it helps someone else.

What I've discovered through a ton of digging (due to several performance issues) is that your video card can actually play a huge factor on overall system performance, at least in Windows 10. On the one hand this seems profoundly obvious, OTOH it bugs me that I didn't think this through the first time. Since upgrading my Acer Aspire Ultrabook to Windows 10 (from 8.1), I started having a variety of performance issues. The problems got worse when I upgraded to Sonar Platinum from X3. Projects that I had previously run on both a desktop (with "slower" procs) and the same laptop in Win 8.1 were barfing all the time. I was a bit confused at first as it's really a decent machine in general; i7 4500U w/ 4 MB cache (scales from 1.8 to ~2.7 mHz), 8 GB RAM, primary SSD, offloading additional projects to the well respected Corsair Flash Voyager GTX. I did the usual; started digging around for different drivers, changing BIOS settings, ASIO vs. others, latency settings, running performance utilities to see what was going on, etc. I started noticing that things were particularly bad when docked to my USB 3 port replicator (Plugable UD-3900), which I primarily use for connecting two 27" monitors via DVI. In fairness I hadn't pushed the laptop all that hard when it was on 8.1 though as I was still migrating away from my tower, which was older but a beast by comparison.

Long story short, the whole thing has come down to one issue; the on-board Intel HD Graphics 4400. It has a tiny bit of on-board memory (128 MB) and then uses shared system resources to scale to ~1.7 GB. This is pretty common for the ultrabook format, and apparently especially for systems that support 10 point touch. The result is that nearly everything I do in any application starts immediately pulling resources from the CPU because the GPU can't keep up. The tell-tale sign (besides looking at Task Manager or other utlities) is that the tiny fan will kick in to overdrive immediately. It seems to be worse when relying on the DisplayLink driver to bridge between the USB dock, but the issue is definitely still there otherwise, it just gets magnified. Using a utilities like ThrottleStop and Full Throttle Override only delay the evenitble briefly, though do a little to help distribute the load across virtual logical processors. Another thing that helps slightly is the Plug-in load balancing available in Platinum. It's actually amazing how quickly the whole audio engine can come to a halt by just touching the mouse or the screen during playback of a decent sized project (e.g. 8 audio tracks, 10 MIDI tracks, two instances of IK Kontakt, IK Guitar Rig, some AAS plug-ins.)

Based on all this, and because I still want to keep my primary DAW in laptop form for mobility (using multiple external audio interfaces), I'm now considering the following machines (trying to keep it under $1500):

HP Pavilion 17 Gamer
Processor: Intel Core i7-7700HQ
RAM: 32GB DDR4-2133MHz
Hard Drive: 256GB NVMe SSD + 1TB 7200rpm
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050 4GB GDDR5
Display: 17.3" Full HD IPS UWVA anti-glare WLED-backlit Touchscreen Display (1920 x 1080)

MSI GL72 7RD-028
Processor: Intel Core i7-7700HQ
RAM: 16GB (16GB x1) DDR4 2400MHz
Hard Drive: 128GB M.2 SATA + 1TB 7200rpm
Graphics Card: NVIDIA's GTX 1050 2G GDDR5
Display: 17.3" Full HD eDP Non-Reflection 1920x1080
 
MSI GE72VR Apache Pro-447
Processor: Intel Core i7-7700HQ
RAM: 32GB DDR4-2400MHz
Hard Drive: 256GB M.2 NVMe 2280 SSD + 1TB 7200rpm
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 6GB
Display: 17.3" FHD (16:9) Super Clear Matte-Type IPS Screen (1920x1080)

MSI GP72 Leopard Pro-402
Processor: Intel Core i7-7700HQ
RAM: 32GB DDR4-2400MHz
Hard Drive: 512GB M.2 NVMe 2280 SSD + 500GB 2.5" SSD
Graphics Card: NNVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti 2GB GDDR5
Display: 17.3-inch Full HD Display (1920 x 1080)

I'm still doing some hunting around but these seem to be the best back for the buck under $1500, while avoiding systems with known issues (like the Asus ROG). I've never been a fan of HP desktop or laptops, but the specs on the one above are really impressive for the money. I'll report back once I pick one and run my existing projects on it. In the meantime any constructive feedback is most welcome :-)
 

abacab
Under normal use a GPU shouldn't need a very large memory footprint to support 2-D graphics...

Thanks for the info, I will definitely check into this. You obviously have a very similar spec to my current machine.

abacab
 
...It turned out to be my Netgear USB Wi-Fi adapter drivers causing the freezing issue.  To test this I deleted the drivers, unplugged the dongle, and installed another brand with a different chipset.  No more problems.  Then I found a newer driver for the original adapter.  Tried them and all is well now.  So it can be something as simple as a driver version, but sometimes you have to rule everything out to discover what it is.

Thanks for the info, I will definitely check this out as well!

I have run my last 4 computer builds using AMD CPU's with built-in graphics, and run two displays in Sonar with no performance issues whatsoever.  The primary display uses the HDMI port, and the other one uses the DVI output from the computer - with an HDMI connector on the other end of the cable, running into the 2nd display.
 
I used to have a 3rd display, running with a VGA cable.
 
I saved enough money in each build to upgrade other components, such as memory or hard drive storage.
 
Bob Bone
 

I was looking to get a Pali GTX 1050Ti Fanless card. Silence and I don't play games. As long as I have airflow through the case, I don't need the added noise.
 
I did notice some come with a PWM fan which turns on when a certain temperature is reached however that's not a concern of mine.
 

I do need a decent gpu. I used an onboard Integrated graphics before alas I kept get screen tears and underwhelming performance under 2d.

I will have case fans so it won't be completely devoid of fans.

elsongs
My general rule when building a DAW computer: You don't need the fastest video card, but NEVER use the motherboard's on-board video adaptor.

The motherboard has no video adapter.  It is built into the CPU, if that feature is present at all.  Intel HD Graphics or AMD APU for example ...

interpolated
In my case (sic.), the chipset has an onboard Radeon 4200 IGP which is not bad however does share memory (UMA) and basically gives me less RAM. Also I run at 1920x1080 all of the time, so I need pretty good graphics especially when I undock Windows onto my TV screen.
 
Dedicated graphics means you never need to care about those resources unless you are indeed a gamer. As it goes, most current GPU's are beyond requirement even for modern games.

I wasn't aware that AMD apparently made a few chipsets with Radeon graphics.  Have always built with Intel, so not really familiar with AMD architecture.
 
But recently looked into pricing out AMD components for a new build. Must have overlooked the 8 and 9 series G chipsets ...

How does 4096x2304 sound? 
 
Intel® HD Graphics 530
 
https://ark.intel.com/pro...M-Cache-up-to-4_00-GHz

Just out of curiosity I opened up Sonar and loaded several soft synths (Hybrid, TAL Elektro, Addictive Drums, and Cthulhu) as well as several plugins with graphic displays (Voxengo Span, CA-2A, LP-MB. Melda MOscilloscope, and Pancake2). 
 
My baseline graphics properties looks like this (Intel HD Graphics 2500):
 

 
Using GPU-Z my graphics memory use looks like this while running Sonar:
 

 
So my dedicated video RAM is 32 MB, but while running Sonar, it seems to average below 200 MB.  It looks like the graphics adapter could allocate up to 1.792 GB RAM, but that is unlikely just using a DAW. 
 
So that still is not a very big chunk of my system memory... no worries!