pro tools 11 and qualified graphic cards

[sevenson]

Hi,

I´m about to buy a Dell laptop with a Intel HD Graphics 5500 card. Will it work with Pro Tools 11? On Avids site they only list NVIDIA Quadro cards...

Chers!

[sw rec]

Hard to say without exact specs on the DELL. Graphics cards aren't the only concern. Get us some specific system details when you get a chance. What processor? How much ram? What OS?

[mesaone]

You'll want a discrete graphics card. Most recent Nvidia GT, GTX, and Quadro series will work.

The Intel graphics stuff is part of the CPU, so that isn't advisable.

[sevenson]

This is the one:

Dell Latitude E7450 - Ultrabook - Core i7 5600U / 2.6 GHz - Windows 7 Pro 64-bitars/Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit - 8 GB RAM - 256 GB SSD - 14" 1920 x 1080 ( Full HD ) - Intel HD Graphics 5500


1. Will Pro Tools even install on this computer or will it fail beacuse of the graphic card?

2. Will it work?

Thanks for helping me out!

[sw rec]

That's actually a respectable rig (for a DELL, anyway. You won't find a lot of DELL fans on here.) So, yes, it'll probably INSTALL just fine. Work? Windows laptops are kind of a crapshoot with Pro Tools. I'd highly recommend a secondary dedicated hard drive for recording and playback though. Companies like MATROX have USB-driven graphics converters to take the graphics load off of the CPU, although that sort of negates the portability of it. I've seen LESS qualified laptops run PT.

[mesaone]

Some laptops have a second hard drive bay built-in, but few and far between. Any laptop with an optical drive can easily house a second internal drive with the appropriate HD caddy (the optical drive bezel snaps into the caddy, making for a seamless install). The only thing to watch out for is vertical clearance - 9.5 mm seems to be the standard, but some drives exceed this. Solid state drives tend to be thinner (and faster!) so they are a more attractive option if space is tight. However, most laptops only have SATA II connectors for the optical drive, so it usually makes more sense to put a 7200 RPM spinner in the drive caddy, keeping your boot drive on an SSD in the laptop's main drive bay.

As for the graphics card, I thought about it and checked it out. I've noticed that Optimus (the GPU switching function of NVidia mobile cards) reports no NVidia activity on my laptop when running PT. This seems to imply that it is using the Intel HD graphics 4600 instead, and I have yet to run into a problem with it. YMMV

[albee1952]

As a dyed in the wool PC user, I only recommend re-furbed MacBook Pro's for Pro Tools use. i7 quad core with at least a 15" screen(how anyone works on a 13" is beyond me).