Maschine Laptop

Good morning,

First Post in the forum.

I got hold of a machine Mk2 and have been using it with my current six year old laptop. It was never a power machine when it was new but it is really struggling with maschine software even on relatively simple compositions. It's 3rd gen i5 with 4gb ram. As soon as I have more than a couple of synths on the go with a few effects I get cpu topping out, glitching, high latency and generally becomes unusable. It certainly is not fun.

I was looking at a laptop for sale locally with i5-7300hq cpu and 8gb ram.

I am expecting that that should perform a lot better than my current laptop but wanted to check with you experienced guys that I will not be wasting my money.

Cheers,

 

It will definitely be a massive improvement. You're doubling your RAM, which is super important, and you're getting a quad core processor that's way newer and should be able to handle much more.

Will you be wasting your money? Hard to say. Idk how much the computer is going for or what computers in your market typically go for.

 

I agree, a 7th gen Quad-Core will make a big difference. You still won't be able to load a ton of instruments but certainly a lot more than what you can now.

 

Definitely a good idea to buy a new laptop with that CPU. I have an older I5 with only 2 cores and 4 threads and it works fine.

Uwe

 

Thanks guys,
I went to see the laptop earlier - It was a gumtree ad.
1 year old laptop. It had an aftermarket charger. There was no box, no instructions, no proof of ownership, no warranty registration and the sellers story didn't convince me so I walked. Felt like it was stolen to me.

Am looking at one of these now... Seems like a good deal.
https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/compu...-1-tb-hdd-128-gb-ssd-silver-10182241-pdt.html

£650. AMD ryzen 5 2500. 8gb Ram. Ssd plus an Hdd.

Seems to tick all the right boxes?

 

For a laptop i would go with Intel i7 for that price like this

https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/compu...re-i7-laptop-1-tb-hdd-black-10184689-pdt.html

But I guess you like the 2 in 1 thing and I heard the new AMD processors also perform good with audio but I only heard it about the desktop CPUs (I will also buy one soon/and also have actually AMD in my desktop pc but Intel in my laptop) but maybe we have one here with some experience with the new mobile AMD processors and he can say something substantially about that.

Uwe

 

https://techreport.com/review/32877/amd-ryzen-5-2500u-apu-reviewed/14

I found a test and the ryzen CPU, so the one you want to buy in the 2 in 1 laptop performs good so you could buy it.

Uwe

 

I hadn't seen that one.

Is the SSD/HDD combo on the other one a significant performance boost in maschine terms?

I'm not actually that fussed for the convertible aspects. My current laptop - lenovo yoga 13 - is convertible and I rarely use it in anything other than laptop style. However i do like and use the touchscreen.

 

I would say no only if you open a projekt with lots of samples it may open faster if your samples are on ssd but then they are loaded into the ram and performance only depends then on the processor and ram. But I think with the one you want to buy you will never or at least for a few years use the processor and ram to a point where you would notice a boundary. So both would serve you well and if the touch screen is important to you then go with it.

Only if you want to make really big orchestral stuff with tons of samples in ram I would say take in any case the i7. Or lots of synths really lots - like I said I have an old I5 and have no problems with 2 groups with samples and 4 - 5 synths with fx on top.

Uwe