Windows laptop recommendations

[Brian Dean-O]

I built my current PC about 6 years ago, it has:

Intel Core i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz
32 GB RAM
Running Windows 10 64 Bit
Focusrite 18i20 Gen 3 interface

Recently upgraded to Ableton Live 11 Standard from Live 10 Intro because I needed more tracks and Live 11 Standard has been on sale for 20% off with free upgrade to Live 12 Standard when it releases soon so I figured it was a good time to upgrade and get unlimited tracks.

I’m happy with my PC.
I’m not really super knowledgeable about PC tech things, I’ve always gotten help from more knowledgeable friends when buying the parts for my PC builds over the years and have them with me to help build it.
Never used Mac and don’t want to have to switch if I don’t feel that I need to but I’ll keep it in mind and can figure out what to get on my own if I do get a Mac laptop seeing as there’s TONS of information on the best Mac laptops for audio engineering.
However I don’t see nearly as much about what are the best kinds of Windows laptops for recording.
I’m looking for advice and suggestions to that effect. I’d be happy with anything that’s even comparable to what I’m running in my PC and I’d be ecstatic if it can be done without breaking the bank. I’ve got time to figure this out as I don’t have the money to do get anything right now but in the hopefully not too distant future I’d like to be able to reflect back to this thread to reference for tips.
Thank you.

 

[marsonic]

However I don’t see nearly as much about what are the best kinds of Windows laptops for recording.

The reason for that is that ACPI and Windows 11's Modern Sleep have thoroughly nerfed PC laptops for a handful of different applications, including low latency audio. That's not to say it's impossible, just that it's a lot harder than it should be. And you absolutely can buy something that will never work right.

I wish I could say "just buy this thing", but...as an example, there are music-focused computer builders/resellers that flat-out don't offer PC laptops anymore because it's such a PITA.

I will say that a few years ago, my (almost exclusively remote) day job bought me a decent (good i5, 32GB Ram, 1 TB NVMe) Dell laptop so that I could actually go to the office for a week without bringing my desktop setup with me (or being totally useless). Well, the trip didn't happen and I eventually decided to try using it with my DJ setup. At the time, I used a PC desktop as my main DAW machine...definitely familiar with getting low-latency audio to work on Windows. And literally the only way I could get it to not click and stutter was to do all the optimizations and set the ASIO buffers to literally 2 seconds.

After doing some research, it turns out that Dell just does that. So, uhh...don't even consider a Dell. IMHO. YMMV. But, I don't think it's changed.

If you're talking about a desktop, I firmly believe that mac vs windows is largely about preference. Even the price-performance ratio isn't all that far off until you get into somewhat specialty things (e.g., need a lot of USB -> PC winds up cheaper; need nVidia graphics/cuda/etc -> PC is your only option; etc.). If you're talking about a laptop, based on what I know now, mac is the best choice.

If you're dead-set on it, I'll ask a DJ friend who gigs with a PC laptop. But, I'm pretty sure he's still refusing to upgrade from a several-year-old machine because he's had to keep returning new laptops that just plain don't work for him.

If you want to build a desktop....today, I'd probably go for Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 with a good but not ultra/mega/whatever overclocker board and go from there, as well as looking into the SpiceWorks Decrapifier script to run before the out-of-box experience (last step of the install) to disable the Win11 features I'm not going to use (store, xbox, cortana, bing, telemetry, etc.) and switch to the more stable update cycle, plus the normal tweaks....then just test it and exchange the motherboard if latency is a problem. But, I wouldn't personally even try a PC laptop unless I really needed it for some reason.

Then again, I'm also kind of "over" laptops, personally. Years and years with them, and desktops are always a better experience for me. But...I don't really care about pretending I can be productive in coffee shops or libraries anymore.

 

[strabes]

I agree with the above post. I’ve built several windows desktops over the years for gaming. They work fine for that purpose and for casually practicing guitar because all my hardware is cross platform (interface, FM9, etc). But when I need to get actual work done (producing / recording / keys), I switch my dock’s USB C cable from the PC to the Mac.

Got an M1 MBP about a year after they came out, still blows me away how much it can handle in a DAW running natively (i.e. not in Rosetta which still outperformed my old Intel machine). Took about a year for all my plugin vendors to update their stuff to run natively on M1.

 

[marsonic]

I’ve built several windows desktops over the years for gaming. They work fine for that purpose and for casually practicing guitar because all my hardware is cross platform (interface, FM9, etc). But when I need to get actual work done (producing / recording / keys), I switch my dock’s USB C cable from the PC to the Mac.

Honestly, PC desktops work fine for all music stuff if you build them right.

There are a handful of high-end DAWs (Sequoia, Samplitude, Pyramix, SADiE) that are Windows-only. I think Cakewalk/Sonar were Windows-only for a long time. Also, ASIO is simpler than CoreAudio and easier to not screw up if you're worried about absolutely not losing any quality or suffering any side-effects (it'll just break and be obvious in certain cases where the same things will cause CoreAudio to do things behind the scenes that change the audio but don't necessarily tell you about it or make it obvious). Unless I'm mistaken, ASIO is also capable of very slightly lower buffers than CoreAudio. PCs can run damn-near silent just like modern Apples (though it takes a lot more electricity to do it). They can be just as stable. They can be just about as "set and forget". They handle storage better. They handle networking better. And if you're like me and tweak everything to work the way you want anyway, setting them up initially isn't actually all that much slower....you just do different things. Every single "killer app" that I really liked on either one has an alternative on the other. Certain hardware is easier to integrate with PCs because they still have at least a few PCIe slots, though that doesn't apply to everyone. If you need PCIe (e.g., for HDX cards or whatever), your options on mac are basically spending a lot of money (potentially the price of a reasonable PC) on external enclosures or jumping to a Mac Pro that seems to fall short in many workloads when compared to PCs of the same price (I think that's why people online keep comparing a $7,000 Mac Pro to $2,500 PCs...just so they can win).

The problems with PCs come from power management in laptops, certain chipset-level design decisions that you don't always know about until you just try things, and Microsoft screwing with everybody to integrate tracking, ads, AI, and a bunch of other crap no one needs (though Apple has been getting worse about that too). And GPU drivers can be a headache. If you actually want to stay relatively safe and secure and not have MS & Apple themselves spy on you, you have to run an outbound firewall with both or keep them off the internet (the same is true for a handful of Linux distros).

At different price points, one or the other will wind up being more economical. I just had to buy a second thunderbolt dock for my Mini because I started having power delivery problems with my USB hubs. That was the thing that tipped this computer over into being more expensive than the PC I would have built if I'd stayed with Windows. I also think it's ridiculous that my "desktop" is now 3 small boxes instead of one big one, just to have basically the same stuff plugged in to it with more limited upgrade options and no repairability.

It's all just trade-offs unless you're talking about Laptops. In reality, both suck. The difference is which set of hoops you want to jump through.

 

[Brian Dean-O]

Yes I’m strictly speaking laptops here. As I stated my PC works wonderfully and if I had to build another I’d just do what has always worked good for me before but I’ve never had a laptop for audio recording and production, that’s the focus here.
I would like to be able to record other places besides at home without having to take my whole tower and monitor which is what I presently have to do. I was wanting a good Windows Laptop that is somewhat comparable to the specs I have in my PC unless what I have in my PC is overkill and then what would be minimum specs for GOOD (not sort of good, doesn’t have to be stellar but definitely GOOD) performance with recording in my DAW be in a Windows laptop?

 

[Stratman68]

Buy a laptop from Jim Roseberry and after recording with it tell us again how windows laptops do not work for audio. Always these broad "opinions" and statements. Ater all these years the same cultish bias exist. How sad.

 

[unix-guy]

I bought an ASUS TUF A17 gaming laptop last year. It's working fine for my needs with Protools 11.


Mostly used to record 24 tracks of simultaneous digital audio during band rehearsal or to to listen/mix that stuff with a few plugins. Recording to it's internal disk, too

Doesn't break a sweat...

I don't play computer games, though

 

[Brian Dean-O]

I bought an ASUS TUF A17 gaming laptop last year. It's working fine for my needs with Protools 11.

View attachment 134373
Mostly used to record 24 tracks of simultaneous digital audio during band rehearsal or to to listen/mix that stuff with a few plugins. Recording to it's internal disk, too

Doesn't break a sweat...

I don't play computer games, though

Something like this would actually be just what I was looking for and if nothing else I guess I could go with one of these sometime this year (though I looked and these all have Windows 11 on them now which I seem to recall seeing people say bad things about in this forum).
There is just one thing I wish though, I don't play games either (used to but don't have time for it anymore) and actually what would be perfect would be something like this but without having to have the high end graphics cards, I know for a fact that is a huge chunk of the price when buying one of these and it's the least important thing in a computer for me nowadays, I didn't even put one in my most recent desktop build until about 5 years after building it and only then because a friend gifted me one (an RTX 3050, super nice gift =D), up until that point I was just using the integrated graphics from the motherboard as my focus was strictly on the only things that matter for a recording PC....CPU/RAM/SSD HD.
Don't they make windows laptops with these kind of CPU/RAM/SSD HD specs without fancy graphics cards? Probably not I guess.

 

[unix-guy]

Something like this would actually be just what I was looking for and if nothing else I guess I could go with one of these sometime this year (though I looked and these all have Windows 11 on them now which I seem to recall seeing people say bad things about in this forum).
There is just one thing I wish though, I don't play games either (used to but don't have time for it anymore) and actually what would be perfect would be something like this but without having to have the high end graphics cards, I know for a fact that is a huge chunk of the price when buying one of these and it's the least important thing in a computer for me nowadays, I didn't even put one in my most recent desktop build until about 5 years after building it and only then because a friend gifted me one (an RTX 3050, super nice gift =D), up until that point I was just using the integrated graphics from the motherboard as my focus was strictly on the only things that matter for a recording PC....CPU/RAM/SSD HD.
Don't they make windows laptops with these kind of CPU/RAM/SSD HD specs without fancy graphics cards? Probably not I guess.

I feel you and I had some of the same thoughts before I bought mine.

This was the best spec I could find for the money when I bought it even considering that.

When I bought mine the seller (on Amazon) had a choice of OS.

Every time Windows updates it prompts me to upgrade to 11 but I'll stick with 10 until I really need to change.

I wanted a fast processor, a lot of RAM and a 17" display - and ASUS is a brand I have some trust in.

It's not light but it fits the bill for what I needed.