I fired up DPC latency checker on my 1-1/2 year old desktop... it's a dedicated DAW running a 3.2GB quad at 1066.

at idle DPC max and average = 32μs+/-

_____________________________________________________________
44.1khz project 128 sample buffer

Kontak playing a huge drum library,
B4II
lots of Sonitus EFX on 8 audio tracks
Melodyne on one track
Pristine Space on the master with 2 6 second long IRs

DPC max = 83μs while getting crazy with dragging windows with my tablet pen.
DPC average = 40μs+/-
_________________________________________________________________
96kHz project 256 sample buffer

8 tracks of audio, a few Sonitus EFX on each track
Pristine Space on master with another pair of 6 second IRs

DPC max = 45μs while getting crazy with dragging windows with my tablet pen.
DPC average = 32μs+/-
_______________________________________________________________

I have noticed that the maximum seems to correlate with the moment I hit the reset button in DPC Latency checker... in other words... I can not hit the maximum I have reported while working with the DAW itself... I have to ask the test app to do some work to get the max spike.

If I was observing spikes to 500μs, I'd start searching my wav files in Wavlab looking for errors. (Wavlab has the best error search that I am aware of for Win... and I'd like to find an alternative... so if you have a suggestion... please suggest)


best regards,
mike

FOUND LAPTOP WITH ACCEPTABLE LATENCY!

I have been reading this thread for a few days while deciding on a laptop to buy and just registered on here to make this post and save some people time. I had a Dell Studio 1535 (look it up it's the most uncurable DPC latency disaster ever), I sold that and bought a Studio 1555 because I read on a forum a guy had no DPC spikes, however the idle DPC was still ranging 150-500us so I was having audio problems. I saw an even faster HP than my Dell for $700 on eBay but went to Costco and it's DPC was ranging from 290-500us. I was about to give up then I saw a review for the Dell Studio 1558 and the reviewer showed a DPC latency test which was fairly decent (compared to other off the shelf laptops) http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Studio-1558-Notebook.24496.0.html
If you look at his link for the Dell 1557 review you can see that one had the same crap DPC levels, but the 1558 was acceptable so I looked specifically to try another Dell with the new Intel mainboard and i5 cpu. Heres the link for the laptop I bought (it's on sale until January 30th for $649)
http://www.staples.com/Dell-Insprion-17.3-Laptop-(Blue)/product_851069

I didn't like that it didn't have a graphics adapter with dedicated memory, plus I'm going to have to upgrade the 5,400rpm hard drive for something faster, but this is the first time I've been able to use Guitar Rig at low latency without any problems. The latencies range around 60-140us on average, but this is with wifi on and straight out of the box with all of Dell's bs on it. I'm hoping I can get it consistently lower with a fresh install of Windows and some tweaking if anyone has any good suggestions to save me time?

It's not as low as the computer in Jim's video, and probably won't handle as much as a good desktop but for $649 I'm glad I can get something out of this. And considering I took my flash drive with the DPC latency checker and copied it onto every semi-powerful laptop in Best Buy and Staples, and the one I bought was the ONLY one with consistent latency under 130us, I didn't have much of an option. I took videos of several laptops with the DPC latency checker (with wifi turned off) but here's the one I bought (I used the camera on my new phone so it's really hard to see but it's ranging from 60-100us in the video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCqJ0JhuFto


Again, I've already put too much time into finding a laptop vs. actually playing/recording the music it's intended for, so if anyone has any tweaks to try out to get the DPC latency lower, that would be appreciated

Just a cheap Native Instruments Rig Kontrol 3 usb interface for right now

Could we take this senario and step back a little. Say you find an older duo core laptop with a TI chipset that will run XP pro fine with 4 gig of ram and a 7200rpm sata hard drive. Is it worth tweaking for firewire interfaces or are you still going to end up with lass than desirable results. I have 2 such Toshiba laptops A105S4004 and want to strip one down to nothing but audio.

 
Hi Don,
 
If you can get DPC latency under control... and the laptop has a TI Firewire controller, it should work pretty well.
If it's an older machine, it may not provide enough DSP resources to mix, but it would be useful for audio tracking purposes.

I checked the manual of my Dell and saw that the controller for it was not the Ricoh but rather Intel.  So I decided to buy an express card (bekin).  A safe thing to do since I could return it if it didn't work.  So Installed it and checked the device manager and saw it was using the TI Chipset from the express card.  So here is what I do in 5 minutes before setting up to record for the weekend and also what my experience has been thus far.  Again, I am really a layman at all this but am steadfast and gaining experience.  Here is what I do:
 
My setup first:
Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop
Windows Vista Home Preium
Intel(R)Core(TM)2CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz 2.00 GHz
Memory: RAM 2.00GB
System: 32 Bit
Recording w/Sonar 8 Producer Edition
Sound Card: Motu 8-pre
Yamaha S90ES Keyboard
 
Device Manager
 
The Following are disabled when recording:
    *Battery:Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery
    *Display Driver:NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300    
    *DVD Drive
    *IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers (only the following)
       -Ricoh Memory Stick Host Controller
       -Ricoh MMC Host Controller
       -Ricoh xD-Picture Card Controller
    *IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers (only the following
       -RICOH OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
    *Imaging Devices
       -Brother MFC-7820N LAN (my printer)
    *Modems
       -Conexant HDA D110 MDC V.92 Modem
    *Networking:
       -Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller
       -Broadcom 802.11g Network Adapter
***NOTE This doesn't take but a couple of minutes and a reboot, but before reboot, I also do 2 other things. 
Here they are.
1.  Under the "Start Menu" in the search pane I type in the following "msconfig"
2.  I am then prompted by a pop-up window -the user account control and it requestes my permission to continue.  I select "continue"
3.  I then see the System Configuration Panel.  There are 5 tabs at the top.  I select the "Services tab"
4. VERY IMPORTANT, at the bottom left corner of the screen you will see a box you can check that says "Hide All Microsoft services" .  I check the box.
5.  Then I select the "Disable all" tab at the right side above the help tab.
6.  Then I select the Apply tab to the left of the help tab.
7.  Then again to the top where the 5 tabs are I select the Startup tab.
8.  On that screen I simply select Disable all at the lower right above the help tab.
9.  Again select apply
11. On the General Tab (again found at the top-one of the 5 main tabs) I select it.
12.  Here I have 3 options for startup selection.  I see the following choices: Normal startup, Diagonostic startup and Selective startup.  The one that is selected is the 3rd on and the associated boxes under that have "Load system services" checked.  "Load startup items" is NOT checked and Use orginal boot configuration is Greyed out.
13.  If you make any changes here then select apply, otherwise just close by selecting the X at the upper right coner of the box.
14.  If you get a window that asks you to reboot, select "exit without rebooting or restarting"
Lastly, I go to the bottom right of my main windows screen and place my pointer over the norton icon in task manager.  I disable "norton anti virus" and "smart firewall"
OKAY, then I reboot.
 
Results
I have been recording just fine. No pops/clicks or dropouts.
I have not done any live recording yet.
Initally I took one of my old songs that had 4 midi tracks done and cloned them to the point of having 32 tracks.  Not a problem.

The DPC Checker I ran shows all in the green and no red.  (This was similar to what I saw in Jim's recording of the latency for the hp.  However I will try to do the same and provide more in the same manner.

It has now been several weeks and without problem.  (My recording has been using the S90es and true pianos and other various instruments with the S90es & VST's.

Again to set this up only takes about 5 minutes.
Don't know if this will help you out, but it did me.

As I am a layman at this (really)  I got a response from Zungle saying " Sorry Dude .........thats physically impossible....run a genuine loop back and start counting samples
Can some one elaborate on how I should test this out?  Genuine Loop Back?  All I am doing is recording tracks like I said and have been midi.  And please talk to me so I can understand what your talking about. Thanks
 


Ratona
Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop
Windows Vista Home Preium
Intel(R)Core(TM)2CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz 2.00 GHz
Memory: RAM 2.00GB
System: 32 Bit
Recording w/Sonar 8 Producer Edition
Sound Card: Motu 8-pre

That is exactly what I was saying.  I will look into the startup manager way of doing things.  Any pointers appreciated.  Also as a side note:
 
My express card has a usb port as well as the 2 firewire ports.  Since the usb port was available, I have found that by dissabling the usb ports on my laptop also brought down the latency more.  I have to redo all this and video tape it as well just to share what I am saying so there is no misunderstanding.
 
I will do this as soon as I can.  Perhaps this weekend and put it up on YouTube.
 
Chao

  Hi, all.  I do wish I had seen this thread a couple days ago, before I brought home a Dv7-3085DX (same as was tested but no blu-ray).  I have been using a Core 2 Quad touchscreen setup at home with what I'd consider good results and was hoping to duplicate its audio performance (or better) with this i7 machine.  I feel I do need a laptop machine due to health issues.

  I did a lot of looking for people on the web with problems with this machine before I chose it, but never heard of DPS latency till now.  Out of the box, under Sonar 8.0, it runs all the examples fine.  But on the desktop I use maybe 4 to 8 softsynths including Reaktor, and a lot of FX including Antares Autotune and Harmony Engine in live improv, and want to hear it all in the monitors of course.  I can deal with "high" (5-10ms) latency settings if necessary and I typically use USB adapters, and never record more than 8 channels at a time, but it sounds like the DPS latency issue will also affect plugin processing, instead of just I/O.  Is this correct?

  Since I anticipate real heavy plugin processing loads, and I kinda like to run at 88.2kHz these days (I feel like it's good for cleaner sound after extensive FX math operations), I'm now thinking of taking this machine back.  I see some of the custom shops have entry level 1.6GHz core i7 laptops, should these be able to beat my 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad desktop?


  Recommendations, including specific entry level custom i7 models or equivalent appreciated, before I get a wild hair and restore this thing and take it back.  I haven't got it all set up yet but I have another week to decide.  Out of the box, bloatware and all, the Dv7 is running around 250us, about the same as the test model.

  I guess my real question is, about how much additional capability will a custom machine get me for my additional ~$500?  Interested in things like latencies and guesstimated numbers of tracks and plugins.  - cmb

Ok to everyone concerned about which laptop CPU and motherboard, ect... 
What Jim showed is this: It doesn't matter how fast the laptop is. And it doesn't necessarily matter which CPU, motherboard or brand of laptop it is; DPC latency issues are both hardware and software/driver dependent. A number of issues could cause higher idle DPC latency levels so it really comes down to testing the specific model of laptop. I had bought a Dell Studio 1555, and although there were no red spikes on the DPC latency checker (when the wireless adapter was disabled), the higher idle in the green (like the HP Jim showed) was enough to still cause glitches and pops in my audio streams. I had no way of knowing this until after I bought it. So load the DPC checker onto a flash drive and attempt to find a laptop in a store with a low idling latency.. the lower the better (remember to disable the wifi driver in the device manager). Write down the model number and hardware specs then shop around to see if you can find a better price. 

The laptop Jim tested is more powerful than the laptop I bought, but without low latency, it's useless for music. Staples sold out of the color of laptop I bought so the link is dead but this is the same one:
http://www.staples.com/Dell-Insprion-17.3-Laptop-(Black)/product_851067

   All good points.  Personally I figure I have one chance to do this right, and I might as well maximize all variables while I have a chance.  I want to know that loading up a buttload of future synths and effects isn't going to cripple my system.  I don't care about firewire now, but might later.  Same with ultra low latencies.
 
  It's pretty clear from what I read that if I can get a well designed i7 system, the i7 processor benefits should show up in the performance.  If not, there's no other reason I'd need one.  So I'm looking at custom setups at this point.  Pointers toward companies with well performing i7 laptops anyone?
 
   Having seen ADKs mentioned positively I checked the website.  I see the base ADK 7600-i7 just barely fits my budget, but couldn't find the 1900 wide display option in the menu! =)

smoothjeff


...So load the DPC checker onto a flash drive and attempt to find a laptop in a store with a low idling latency.. the lower the better (remember to disable the wifi driver in the device manager). Write down the model number and hardware specs then shop around to see if you can find a better price. 

That's exactly what I've been doing recently, and let me tell you, it was an eye-opener. Obviously, I wasn't going to find laptops with latency as low as custom-made, but I didn't expect as many laptops I tried to spike as badly as they did. The only serious contenders were an HP core i5 and a Sony VAIO core i7, and I'm not too sure about the HP, cos I had to shut down a lot of processes to get it down below 200 and I wouldn't want to have to go through that each time I wanted to record!
Also, of course, there was no way for me to check the points Scott mentioned in his last post. So other nasties could also be lurking.
The VAIO, especially with a 7200 RPM drive, gets into the same range as custom-made, so the only benefit of buying off-the-shelf at that point would be financing.
YMMV, depending on what's available near you to test.

Hi,
Just 2 days ago I puchased a HP dv7 3197eo laptop  (It's a european model and seems to be the same as the dv7 3080 except for the Blueray-drive) and after reading this I 'came a little sceptical about the suitability of the laptop for daw-work. I also got a buffalo usb 3.0 express-card and USB 3.0 HDD.
I have to say that I'm positively surprised because even though the dpc-latency is (with no tweeking done) about 150-240 idle I still could load a project containing my bands tracks for our new EP (about 40 tracks of drums, guitars, bass and vocals) with several instances of Izotope alloy, some sonitus-reverb and Izotope ozone 4 on the masterbus with a 3ms latency and 512 palyback-buffer. Almost no pops ( I mean some minor occational pops when scrolling the screen with a mouse). I also loded Dimension pro pianopatch and played it realtime with my novation remote 25 while playing back the project (with out the ozone 4 since it grows latency anyways). And all this was using the inboard soundchip with ASAPI-drivers. I was kind of blown away. The processor load was round about 50% and usb3-drive load about 35%. I have a Fireface UC and plan to use that with the laptop, but since the inboard soundchip works so well I can imagine doing some light composinwork with just it.
 
:)

what is your interface?

Thanks for this Jim - i wish you wrote this before I bought my DV8! All I wanted is a laptop for location recording, using it essentially as a hard disk recorder - all mixing will be done on my main DAW. That firewire chipset though!!!! My oh my! Am i gonna waste my money if i buy the StarTech EC13942? Will it solve my problem? Please say yes, otherwise this exercise has been a colossal waste of money! It's for a presonus firestudio...

bugger

256 samples at 96 kHz is 5 ms.

 
You'll find very few laptops that can sustain large 96k projects (glitch-free) at 5ms total round-trip latency   
Working at higher sample-rates is only a solution (to high RTL) if the machine can effectively keep up with the load.