A budget laptop that really impresses...

  Well, the old studio laptop was getting a bit long in the tooth, so I acquired an Acer V571G which has 8G ram, Core I7-3610 and 1T of disk. I had to rush because suddenly I realised that I had only a day left before Win 7 laptops would all vanish, and Windows 8 - which I am not impressed with at this stage - would be my only choice. Then I would have to scrape Win 8 off the machine, purchase a Win 7 license and downgrade. With Wifi and Bluetooth on (for worst case scenario), DPC latency reports around 130us average, 300us max. I can play Kontakt 5, and various other VSTs with the lowest ASIO setting available on my UA25 of 96 samples at 44.1KHz 24 bit giving approx 3ms latency and CPU usage somewhere under 10% for some pretty big Kompakt 5 instruments. So far this looks exceptionally promising. I appreciate the hard drive is 5400rpm but since I mainly play softsynths that's not really an issue. This is a real bargain laptop - definitely built to a price - but frankly the raw power and glitch free low latency performance are stunning. And it has a pretty powerful GPU as well as standard integrated graphics. That's the best of all worlds because if you want to play the odd game, it'll do that brilliantly, but when it's doing UI work for the DAW it's using the integrated graphics avoiding the various odd glitches you tend to get with high-end GPUs when they're your only video card.