Does Sonar work well on a standard laptop?

godparticle


What up fellas? i'm about to buy SonarX2 (in preference to Cubase7) despite the fact that there seems to be nothing but reports of more bugs and instability with 'some' users even in X2a; but my own logic does compel me to trust that a DAW which only supports Windows 7&8 has got a much better chance of future stability than a DAW which supports all OS's back to XP. Plus the Pro-Channel is hard to resist hehehe.

I just wish to ask if a new Laptop will work with SonarX2 out of the box without needing any special tweaks, meaning i am hoping that there is nothing particular i have to do to configure my laptop to ensure optimum performance with Sonar. Is Sonar designed to work on a standard Windows 8 off-the-shelf laptop without said Laptop needing special configuration?

My Laptop specs will be i7 2.2ghz. 8 gig Ram. Windows 8. Inbuilt sound-card (i only make electronic dance-music with softsynths so I won't need a dedicated third-party sound-card for inputs). Cheers.

godparticle


Guys, i really appreciate the feedback, especially the separate partition suggestion. But as concerns the external thirdparty soundcard which you all seem adamant about, my own experience says otherwise; the DAW i am currently using and 'without' a thirdparty soundcard currently allows me to achieve no latency whatsoever when playing back 26 tracks of audio and pre-recorded loops and additionally still play and record softsynths in realtime simultaneously with negligible latency (near-zero). I use the WaveRT option in my soundcard preferences inside my DAW and this seems to give superlative performance; does that mean the WaveRT driver is responsible for this good performance, and will that be available to me inside Sonar, or is it my DAW that is giving me this top-notch low-latency performance, meaning, if i can get this sort of performance on my current laptop setup without a separate soundcard then why wouldn't i get the same low-latency performance inside Sonar without the need for a thirdparty soundcard.

My current Laptop specs are a second-generation i7 2.0ghz with 8 gig ram, Windows7, and inbuilt Laptop soundcard. I mix my tracks down internally so there is no need for me to worry about the cheap inbuilt soundcard converter performance. This current setup gives me next to no latency as I already mentioned.
My next Laptop which i will buy in one weeks time will be even more powerful than my current one and will have the 3rd generation (Ivy-Bridge) core i7 running at higher speed 2.2 ghz and does outperform my current one by 1500 points in the PC 3D floating-point Benchmarks, and Windows 8 is meant to be even more efficient than Windows 7 by Cakewalk's own accounts, so unless there is something wrong with Sonar's internal processing i would think that i should be fine.

Mainly i was wanting to know about optimizing an off-the-shelf laptop with Sonar, will it need any specific configuration and optimization to the Windows 8 settings, or assuming that my laptop specs are up to the task, will Sonar in most cases work fine without me needing to configure Windows.

cheez


WaveRT is not bad. Compared to the older drivers like MME/WDM, it's certainly much better in terms of latency. I've started from the era of using MME for DAW. I've used all the drivers. And ASIO still beats WaveRT. There's no competition. That's not to say in any way that WaveRT is not good. In my humble experience, it's just that ASIO is better. That's all.