Production computer specs? Recommendations?

[Rotten Deadite]

So I blew up the motherboard on my old(ish) laptop and now, instead of building a desktop for home recording and production, I'm thinking about just buying a laptop.

Maybe that's not relevant. My question is really: what specs should I be looking for? Lots of RAM? Hard Drive speed? Both of those make sense, but what about multi-core processors?

I'll be using Sonar if that makes any difference to anyone.

 

[ovation22]

What interface? I went USB since the firewire chipset on my current laptop is a generic brand, no supported by the interfaces I was most interested in.

 

[Rotten Deadite]

Well, I was thinking I'd probably limp along with a 7200rpm internal drive for the moment and then pick up an SSD when I could afford it. Either way I'd be backing up projects that I wasn't currently working on to an external RAID 10 array via eSATA, which is just a hair slower than firewire.

But is an SSD overkill? Should a 7200rpm drive do me fine?

 

[KingAenarion]

SSDs are better in almost every way except cost per Gigabyte.

Faster read/write
No moving parts so less noise, much harder to damage and less power consumption...

The only thing is that they wear out faster... but this is not really an issue.

You do need a good CPU for mixing....


The better your computer, the easier making music will be... trust me, I have a best of a computer

 

[Inception7]

I would go firewire if possible. I would also record with a desktop because you'll get better/faster parts for less. I don't use a SSD for my DATA drives because they have a limited number of read/writes and they are far too expensive for me. I run two 1TB 7200RPM HDD's, a 980x and 12 GIG RAM and get 1MS latency on all plugins... I believe CPU and RAM are far more important in a DAW as long as you are running 64Bit software... all of course IMO.

 

[h8leech]

I believe CPU and RAM are far more important in a DAW as long as you are running 64Bit software... all of course IMO.

i totally agree with Inception, i would go at least 6gigs of ram man, alot of the laptops at best buy are eazy on the wallet n can handle music production... alot of companys realize the demand for "media" computers now so..straight from the factory they come well stocked for their price