LAPTOP --- LAPTOP -- LAPTOP
Okay, I've been quite the lurker here for awhile. Finally things opened up for me to consider a laptop and I took JoePaz's advice and checked out the eMachines M6810. Interestingly enough, I too have a M-Audio Firewire 410 (just like Joe), so this should be interesting. Does the M6810 outrank the M6805 like it probably should (although the 6805 is nothing to complain about in my opinion...looks solid!).
wow...wOw...and WOW! This laptop ROCKS! Apparently back in March or May (I can't remember), Gateway took over eMachines (but kept the label for brand recognition) and now they are respectable machines. I know that the one I purchased from my local BestBuy yesterday (for $1500 with $250 in rebates that made the total $1250) is simply too beautiful for words (can you tell it's my first laptop?? and I have 4 other machines down here in my studio!).
Anyway...it seems to have quality guts (like AMD 64 3200+ processor, 512 Mb of RAM (soon as this expensive laptop RAM comes down..if it ever will..this box will have 1 Gig), and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64 Mb of video RAM. I could ramble further...but you probably want the specs.
eMachines M6810 Laptop with stock everything (except the OS):
Athlon 64 3200+ Mobile processor
HT technology
512 Mb RAM (PC2700)
60 Gig HD (Hitachi)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
On-board AC97 sound card
M-Audio Firewire 410
Windows XP Pro SP2
Sonar PE 3.1.1
You can see the specs of the laptop for yourself at:
http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?prod=eMachines_M6810 Okay, with the sick pathetic onboard AC97 Realtek soundcard (I couldn't get the latency slider to go directly to the same points that Scott did, so you'll have to interpolate a little...also, no ASIO drivers as far as I can tell, so these are WDM drivers - also, buffers = 2, I/O buffer size = 64):
40.1ms 37%
30.1ms 39%
20 ms 41%
10 ms 44%
and that's as low as I could move the slider. Wow! Coming from my existing desktop DAW (an Athlon 1800+ (1.15 Ghz) with 1 Gig of RAM and the Firewire 410 hooked to it), I would regularly be up in the 75% range with 2 tracks so this is definitely getting better!!
I then hooked in the M-Audio Firewire 410 and here are the specs for that:
46.4ms 37%
23.2ms 39%
11.6ms 44%
5.8ms 52%
2.9ms couldn't drag the slider this low
1.5ms couldn't drag the slider this low.
It is interesting that the sucky onboard AC97 soundpuke card has some decent results. Maybe my Firewire 410 wasn't as fast as I thought it would be? Doesn't really matter though, because both sound avenues are better than what I had AND it's on a laptop!! Yee stinkin' haw!!
Now realize that this is on a fresh install of WinXP Pro SP2 with a fresh install of Sonar 3.1.1 PE and nothing else. I haven't even had time to work with a song yet...so these are very empirical numbers with no real working experience to go with them (in terms of working with a number of different types of songs and tracks and such), so on the surface it would appear that this laptop should work well for my needs, but if it's one thing I've learned in the DAW world, ya just never know!!
I had wireless networking running as well as Symantec antivirus and I would usually turn these and all other similar extraneous services off. Plus I haven't stripped out unnecessary services, system sounds, etc., yet, so mayhap I should do all that and then test again and see if I get better numbers....forgot about all those things in the Sonar FAQ that help you turn off unnecessary CPU hogging things.
Hope this helps!
< Message edited by Selbalicious -- 8/22/2004 1:44:46 AM >