PCI-E Laptops no good for audio? Cubase testers?

From what I gather from around the net I would save my money at this time. I have been thinking of getting something new recently, but I don't want to gamble.

Things look misty for DAWs at this hour, especially laptops, that is if you wish to have some hi-end video capabilities.

Maybe the sky will clear up in a month or so.

I will be getting a new laptop soon with PCI Express most likely(Turion based notebook) but I dont run CuBase or Nuendo, but Rather Linux and Ardour, so I wont be able to help you out much sorry.

Seablade

Ardour, interesting. I would like to hear from you on this regardless.

How is Ardour anyway? I am reading up on it now, but would like to hear some opinions.

915 chipset problems

I bought a sager 9860 hoping it would be great all around. Turns out the Intel 915 chpset doesn't work for protools. That was a drag. I had to send it back. It seems like that's That's intel's PCI-E. I guess that would make sense.

Yea I heard about that chipset(Maybe frmo you it really sucks. Hoepfully the AMD Turion PCI-E combos will work a bit better for you should you choose to look again at it, if it isnt causing problems with audio that is.

In as far as Ardour, still in Beta Phase, still some errors, but overall a very nice program, and in as far as straight audio is concerned, very capable. I havent tried it with VSTs yet(Need the VST wrapper for it which I havent installed yet) but with ladspa plugs you can, of course, automate any part of them which is of course really nice. If that carries over to VSTs running under the wrapper I would say it is about equal footing with protools in as far as audio goes and capability, but once you get past straight audio it loses ground fast. MIDI is not implemented yet(Next version I think?) and neither is Video(Down the road, definitly part of the plans). So the only good use for it is audio right now and I have been using it exclusively on the past couple of shows I have done sound designs for with no problem whatsoever. Combined with Jack it makes a nice and powerful(And free) audio program, and since I dont do MIDI and am just getting started in post production audio for video, the other two arent a huge issue for me(And if you go by their roadmap within about a year they may have both in, I just am not holding my breath for it

UI is a little clunky, but the ability to program in custom keybindings for most things is pretty useful once you play with it for a while and it can act pretty similar to most audio software out there, or you can create your own interactions.

In as far as performance... well combined with Jack you can get some nice performance from a properly set up system. I havent had a chance to play with it on my optomized AMD 64 machine yet, and my AMD 2000 laptop(K7 I believe) is dying at best if not already dead from a crapily designed cooling system, so I cant give you straight comparisons right off hand, but once I finish setting this one up and design my next show if someone posts and reminds me Ill give up some info on latency, tracks, plugs and such.

So anyways if you do STRAIGHT audio, Ardour is one good program, but for anything else, not quite yet(But there are probably linux alternatives, RoseGarden4 for MIDI, Muse for a little of both, Cinelerra for Video or Main Actor(Though I am just getting into video so I cant give opinions on that yet sorry))

Seablade

Cool.

So what distribution are you going? I am a bit confused regarding what I need. Right now I am downloading Planet CCRMA Fedora Core 1. Would I need to download addition kernel and ASLA driver stuff?

CCRMA is a good choice from what I have been told, though I have never used it myself.

Actually for about the past year I used DeMudi, but recently I put together a new computer that I am building from the ground up using Gentoo, and loving it, currently what I am working on. But you need to have a good idea of what you are doing in Linux before trying that in my opinion. And a loty of patience because unlike other distros, it will compile EVERYTHING from scratch which takes a while.

Fervent put out Studio to GO also recently I believe which if I remember right is a live distro so you can try it before you install it, but I havent seen much on it, it appears to be based around RoseGarden though so may not be quite there for audio yet, but again I havent seen much on it.

Seablade

i have a travelmate 8104 with pci-e and run cubase without problems... as much as the graphic card is concerned - i have th ati radeon x700 and i can reduce the pci-e pipelines from 16 to 1 using powerplay...
i worked on a pentium 4 system with a 3,2 GHz Hyperthreating cpu before (hp pavillion 7000 series) and my 2 GHz centrino notebook is doing about the same performance... sometimes it achieves better performance ever - in some cases also worse, but not much... i can't complain

best regards and greetings from austria
gernot

I'm following this thread between the nuendo and here, a tiny bit sceptical, and like I asked on the nuendo forum, I'd like to know some more specifics about the symptoms and what tests where done to verify this. Also, as I stated on the nuendo forum, I'd like to know if any attempt was made to tweak the driver to cure whatever problem there was. Finally, as I also stated on the nuendo forum. :-), it's been common practice in the past to have to tweak the video drivers and promise raid controllers to make them not hog the bus, so I'm not going to panic until I know there's no tweaking that can be done to alleviate whatever issue there might be.

FWIW, I recently got a Sony Vaio A-690 (which is their multimedia laptop and is a sonoma) and installed Sequoia V8.1. I got double the performance in cpu usage(i.e. plugins) and comparable disk throughput between it (1.86 processor, 5400 rpm sata drive x600 128 MB video) and my old DAW, a 2.4mhz p4 prescott/7200 rpm ata drives/parhelia 256 agp8x card. I didn't run it for a long time for glitches or whatever problems there are supposed to be, but the performance was stellar and the screen glorious.

Thanks,
-randy

P.S. I also installed Nuendo 3.0.2 and could run a test or two if someone has one. Don't have time to play with, too busy working on post projects.

Hmm I can tell you running Ardour one a PCI-E Desktop machine(Opteron 200 based but only single chip right now) I notice nothing I woul consider a problem in linux anyways. In fact I recently rendered about 5 minutes of silence by accident on a track without noticingt because it was that much faster than my old Laptop. Was a fun thing to find out, got a post on it in the SOS Linux Music boards, AMAZINGLY fast compared to my AMD 2000+ K7(I think)Non PCI-E laptop, running similar setups.

So While I cant provide any numbers that iwll do you a lick of good, I dont seem to have any problems.

Seablade

I love replying to my own posts. Did some more digging around
and found good info at

http://www.rme-audio.com/english/techinfo/index.htm


Thanks,
-randy

Interesting. Where can I download Powerplay? If it is trial/freeware at all that is.

It would be really great if you culd do the Thonex Nuendo test:
http://www.nuendo.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=121

btw: what sound card are you using? Because as far as I understand there are no problems when using the built in audio.

So here we go.
My first laptop is a Sony Vaio A690. Great machine. has the x600 128 MB.
5400 rpm drive. good memory.

My audo card is an rme cardbus/multiface. Using Nuendo 3.0.2 and the latest
patch.

I could load thonex just fine, but only play thonex with the first 5 vst instruments enabled. But I got all the way through with the rme buffer size down to 2048. That may not sound
so great, but this laptop isn't a dual xeon/opteron either. I don't think this is too shabby.

My second laptop is a new Toshiba A4-s11. 1.6/1GB memory/x600(64MB)/4200 rpm drive. Used the rme cardbus/multface.

It was a no-show. Hung while loading the project (not the full one but the one with only 5 vst instruments enabled) and never came back.

Third system. My trusty "old" P4 2.4 prescott/1GB memory/7200 rpm drives everywhere. Also a no-show. Couldn't even load the 5 vst instrumentenabled version.

Your turn. :-)

Thanks,
-randy

Thanks for this.

I posted your resoults on the Nuendo forum (hope you don't mind?), and hopefully someone there can provide test resoults for some comperable "old" centrino laptop.

My current laptop is P4m 1.8GHz, so it can't run the test.

btw. How low can you set the latency on the VAIO for normal work?

It's newish so I don't have a lot of experience with it. I plan on using it mainly for GigaStudio3 and occasionally nuendo/sequoia. However, I ran a sequoia project that had a lot of plugins and such, and it had double the performance of my p4 at 512. I usually run the rme at 512, but with thonex if I removed the virtual instruments I didn't have enabled, I could run down to 128. Without all the extra vstis and groups thonex isn't much of a challenge, though.

Thanks,
-randy