Reasonably priced laptop for recording?

TTBZ

In the next few months I'm hoping to save a bit of cash to upgrade my laptop a bit. My main priority is recording as my band may be switching to more of a studio based thing with programmed drums for the time being. It would be nice if I could do some Photoshop/Lightroom and light video editing/motion graphics on it too (probably Adobe suite or the free Avid MC).

Software wise I want to use Reaper, GGD modern & massive via Kontakt player, Mercuriall Spark and possibly some Neural DSP stuff as the new Plini one is very cool.

I'm well out of the loop with this sort of thing, what specs should I be looking at? AMD Ryzen or Intel these days? Guessing 16GB ram, SSD for the system are a necessity. I would like discrete graphics for the video stuff but I know thats going to push the prices up. Something with 2 hard drive bays would be nice so I can keep the system drive clean without an external drive for recording onto. Has to be a laptop as I don't have anywhere to put a desktop.

Trying to keep budget around £500 if there's anything decent I can get for that. Thus I don't think Apple is an option - prefer Windows anyway.

Heartfeltdawn

£500 seems very low. CCL have no laptops with 16GB ram in the £349 to £500 bracket. Their cheapest 16GB laptop is sill £739. 

https://www.cclonline.com/category/101/Laptops/Laptops-between-650-899/attributerange/22/16384.00-16384.00/

So I'd up the budget a fair bit or change your spec. 

TTBZ

Ah balls ok then, I didn't realise things were still so expensive! 

Would 8GB ram be fine for what I'm doing, at least audio wise and Photoshop? The video stuff isn't quite so important, more of a nice to have. How about an i5 or would it be silly to go for anything less than a quad core i7 these days?

I'm not sure I'll be doing anything too crazy - programmed drum track, a few guitar tracks and bass with vst modeling plugins.

Edit - these Medion ones seem pretty good for the money if an i5 is gonna be ok - https://www.box.co.uk/Products/cat/Computing~B~Laptops~B~Laptops/sort/1/refine/m~Medion$a~ct?gclid=Cj0KCQjwhuvlBRCeARIsAM720HrBd3bPTk69zMLTt53jhJl6xlezaBYyWMgNLBzRlOD_rLFgdb9zSgAaAl7sEALw_wcB

digitalscream

My laptop with 8GB RAM and a 4th gen i7, with a 256GB SSD, was absolutely fine for us when recording our album with Reaper (along with lots of use of Helix Native, and a bunch of the bundled plugins).

Then again...I was using Linux (Ubuntu) with a fairly tightly-controlled set of services running; Windows might be a bit more of a struggle memory-wise.

Heartfeltdawn

Bought one of these earlier int he year. 

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/cosmosVII-15/

256GB SSD.m2, i5-8300H, MX150 graphics, 8GB RAM. Installed the OS myself (saves a load of cash). £633 all together. Bought on 12 months finance, can't remember what deposit I put down, laptop works very well. Couldn't find anything in that price range that suited me better. 

TTBZ

Heartfeltdawn said:

Bought one of these earlier int he year. 

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/cosmosVII-15/

256GB SSD.m2, i5-8300H, MX150 graphics, 8GB RAM. Installed the OS myself (saves a load of cash). £633 all together. Bought on 12 months finance, can't remember what deposit I put down, laptop works very well. Couldn't find anything in that price range that suited me better. 

Thanks, that one looks ideal actually! Do you think it's worth spending the extra on an i7 over that i5?

schrodinger1612

Personally I’d go for a PC rather than laptop for studio work, but either way, stay away from HP....the general consensus is that they’re unreliable. I’ve personally always had problems with them. 

TTBZ

I agree, I just don't have anywhere to put or hide a bulky ugly desktop any more. My current laptop is a HP I got for dirt cheap off a friend and it's ok since installing a clean version of Windows but showing its age now.

octatonic

schrodinger1612 said:

Personally I’d go for a PC rather than laptop for studio work, but either way, stay away from HP....the general consensus is that they’re unreliable. I’ve personally always had problems with them. 

HP are the only company to make Pro Tools certified PC's though.

TTBZ

Come to think of it the workhorse editing machines at my old workplace were HP, the high end pro stuff. All ran Avid day in day out no problems.

Danny1969

This comes up all the time .... HP like Dell and many others use contract OEM builders to build their laptops, some are great some are truly terrible ...... generally the business machines aren't bad but some of the stuff sold in PC world and currys etc is terrible 

Heartfeltdawn

TTBZ said:

Heartfeltdawn said:

Bought one of these earlier int he year. 

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/cosmosVII-15/

256GB SSD.m2, i5-8300H, MX150 graphics, 8GB RAM. Installed the OS myself (saves a load of cash). £633 all together. Bought on 12 months finance, can't remember what deposit I put down, laptop works very well. Couldn't find anything in that price range that suited me better. 

Thanks, that one looks ideal actually! Do you think it's worth spending the extra on an i7 over that i5?

Not to me. It i5 8300h is comparable to my 4th gen i7-4770 which still does the business for my needs. Depends purely on what you're going for in terms of high end video and audio work. 

mrleon83

I'd just get the best used Macbook Pro you can for your money.. I went mac 10 years ago and have never had any problems like i used to with Windows, maybe Linux is a good option too... or Hackintosh .. of course , the software you want to use is multi-platform which is good..

 

TTBZ

If I wanted to use Apple-only software I'd get one, but everything I use is the same on Windows so refuse to pay the ridiculous premium for some nice looking but overpriced hardware.

Had a hackintosh desktop before and it was unstable and unreliable, never again.

digitalscream

TTBZ said:

Had a hackintosh desktop before and it was unstable and unreliable, never again.

With Hackintosh machines, it's very much down to the hardware choice right at the beginning - particularly the motherboard and graphics card. If you get those right, you'll have a rock-solid machine forever more. If not...crash-happy piece of junk.

TTBZ

Mine matched perfectly with specs recommended online and still had issues, randomly not booting, network not always working being the main problems. Don't particularly love final cut or logic either so don't see a need for it. Only use a mac at work because that's what's been provided, when we do an upgrade I'll likely ask for a beast of a Windows machine for half the cost

andy_k

look for a good condition macbook pro, pre retina screen, so probably 2012, i got mine for 400 on here about 18 months ago, the superdrive wasnt working, so swapped that out for a 2 TB rust disk, I got mine already supplied with a 500 gig ssd, and I upgraded ram to 16 gig, so I guess it came out closer to 600, but that was over time.
I run reaper, with SSD5 drums, and Kontact plus about 8 instances of LABS VST, plus SLATE suite on mixbus etc, it sometimes gets to about 50% system load, but has only crashed on me once, and I think that was problems loading up plugins. Just done a project for myself with over 300 tracks, which was a bit too many really, but it worked well enough as an archive project-keeping stuff lined up and bouncing out stems to mix in a smaller mastering project.
I keep pushing it-but it hasnt failed me yet, and when it dies I will be sad.

Freebird

I went with a low-end Asus gaming laptop, as they use most of the budget for the components that count. It has two drives (M.2 + SATA) which I replaced, and I upgraded the memory myself with an extra 8GB RAM.

So my new spec now is i7-7700hq CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD for OS, application software & VSTs, and 2TB SSD for libraries & projects.

Not cheap, but way better than a stock laptop for the same total cost. I added about £400 worth of RAM/SSD, but totally worth it for the improved performance, and I upgraded as I went along.

andy_k

My other system, which I use with a Zoom R16 as a usb interface for outside recording, ( 8 mic inputs) is 10 inch Asus zenbook, i7, running on ssd, but only has 4 gig soldered ram, still works surprisingly well for recording, and some minor mixing, I dont push it too hard with vsts, but I was amazed how well it handled recording (reaper) 8 tracks simultaneous over usb, I'd rather drop that one in a pub than my main macbook, the only thing I really dont like is windows 10, cant seem to strip out the bloat. I have tried.

Freebird

andy_k said:

My other system, which I use with a Zoom R16 as a usb interface for outside recording, ( 8 mic inputs) is 10 inch Asus zenbook, i7, running on ssd, but only has 4 gig soldered ram, still works surprisingly well for recording, and some minor mixing, I dont push it too hard with vsts, but I was amazed how well it handled recording (reaper) 8 tracks simultaneous over usb, I'd rather drop that one in a pub than my main macbook, the only thing I really dont like is windows 10, cant seem to strip out the bloat. I have tried.

You could try Windows 10 LTSB if you know what you are doing.

schrodinger1612

Freebird said:

I went with a low-end Asus gaming laptop, as they use most of the budget for the components that count. It has two drives (M.2 + SATA) which I replaced, and I upgraded the memory myself with an extra 8GB RAM.

So my new spec now is i7-7700hq CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD for OS, application software & VSTs, and 2TB SSD for libraries & projects.

Not cheap, but way better than a stock laptop for the same total cost. I added about £400 worth of RAM/SSD, but totally worth it for the improved performance, and I upgraded as I went along.

Which ASUS laptop is that, Freebird? Do you happen to use Omnisphere with it at all, and do you do any CPU intensive mixing?