Laptop suggestions

[Media Man]

I have 2022.x PT Ultimate running just fine on a dual Xeon Windows 10 server, with an HD card and legacy Avid 192.

I need to get a laptop for portable use and looking for suggestions. I’m partial to Lenovo because of past experience, but open to suggestions. Also will need a 2 channel audio interface.

Suggestions?

Media Man

[Darryl Ramm]

An awful lot depends on what you are doing on that system, and you provide no info. Huge range say between orchestral composition/movie scoring/post editing and say tracking one track of vocals.

On interface...

Are you tracking? or only mixing? Do you want hardware mixer features for low latency monitoring.

Does portable mean the interface has to be bus powered?

Budget?

[EGS]

Originally Posted by Media Man

... I need to get a laptop for portable use and looking for suggestions...

M1/M2 MAC laptop. If you prefer Windows (I do), check out Dell XPS with Intel 12th gen.

[Media Man]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

An awful lot depends on what you are doing on that system, and you provide no info. Huge range say between orchestral composition/movie scoring/post editing and say tracking one track of vocals.

On interface...

Are you tracking? or only mixing? Do you want hardware mixer features for low latency monitoring.

Does portable mean the interface has to be bus powered?

Budget?

Hi,

I'm just looking for suggestions of what people are using because the Avid website it vague and has only recommended HP for decades. Not really interested in a fader by fader breakdown of which laptop/processor has specific performance.

Obviously a bit of power for pop music required.

Media Man

[Media Man]

Originally Posted by EGS

M1/M2 MAC laptop. If you prefer Windows (I do), check out Dell XPS with Intel 12th gen.

Yeah, Windows here as well, specifically because of have other apps that need to run on portable Windows.

I'll check out the Dell.

Media Man

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Media Man

Hi,

I'm just looking for suggestions of what people are using because the Avid website it vague and has only recommended HP for decades. Not really interested in a fader by fader breakdown of which laptop/processor has specific performance.

Obviously a bit of power for pop music required.

Media Man

Well what advice would you want then? Buy the most powerful Lenovo workstation class laptop you... max out memory. Fastest PCIe/NVMe disk they offer and enough of it internally to store sessions and samples there. That was easy.

But yes Avid's HP bias is an effect of HP marketing, and HP laptops I'd run away from. The HP centric compatibility effort is pretty sad.

[Media Man]

Just saw this old post.

I'm looking for those wth real world experience running PT Ultimate on a laptop. We can all speculate on what may or may not happen, and of course the most power you can buy is always a good idea.

But looking for those with hands-on epxerience on a Windows laptop.

Media Man

[BScout]

I've been running a Thinkpad P70 maxed out for a few years with PT Ultimate. RME interfaces (Babyface Pro or MADIface XT) and also with thunderbolt chassis and HDX3 (yes it works just fine -- in fact, I saved a Mac HDX card by re-doing the firmware update in the chassis on Windows to recover the loop it got stuck in.) That's a Win10Pro system.

I have another Win11 system that is also a P series (Thinkpad P52) that is maxed out. That has less use on it but also runs well. (both have the mobile Xeon chips). I've had it record and playback the full 192 channel count possible in Ultimate using the MADIface XT at 48k with no issues.