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 GamerProcessor: 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-028Processor: 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-447Processor: 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-402Processor: 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 :-)