dedicated or shared graphics on notebook?

[zephonic]

Hi people,

am looking into buying a notebook PC as the heart of a mobile studio set-up with possibly a Focusrite Saffire LE as the audio interface and Nuendo as my DAW. I have found that I am not very up-to-date anymore where it comes to hardware spec. I am a bit confused by the different types of graphics reproduction especially. I understand there's onboard chipsets which use the unit's main RAM, there's dedicated graphics accelerators that come with their own memory, but there's also dedicated chipsets that use the RAM? (turbo-cache, hyper-memory)

How essential to audio-performance is it anyway?

 

On average, I intend to run something like 30 tracks of audio, with copious amounts of processing. I want to buy a notebook with 2GB of RAM and need to know if shared graphics memory will compromise performance to an unacceptable degree. Also, what about hard disk speeds? Is a 5400rpm model adequate or do you really need a 7200rpm?

Any advice you can offer will be greatly appreciated, links to sites that discuss these things in-depth are also welcome.

Thank You,

 

the key-player

 

[zephonic]

PS And is it really necessary to run WinXP Pro or will Home Edition do just as fine?

 

[ITGITC]

Zephonic,

 

Hi.

 

There are lots of good sites for this information. One of my favorites is Tom's Hardware Guide; http://www.tomshardware.com/

 

My short answer is that if you plan to use a laptop for audio work, get the fastest hard drive you can. For a laptop that's 7200 RPM.

 

If you plan to use Windows XP, the Home Edition is fine unless you plan to connect to various networks other than the internet. XP Professional has additional capabilities for easily working within corporate networks. If you use XP, you're probably fine with integrated graphics which use 64 Meg (or so) of your main RAM.

 

However, if you plan to consider Windows Vista, the graphics requirement gets bumped up to a dedicated card. Read about this and you'll find that a card with 256 Meg DDR3 graphics memory is recommended.

 

Other reasons to get dedicated graphics in your laptop may be if you plan to edit pictures or video.

 

Tom's Hardware also recommends an Intel Core 2 Duo processor because of its low power consumption and other efficiencies built into its design. Again, please read up on that topic.

 

Here are some other sites that I find very useful:

 

http://www.cnet.com/

 

http://www.pcworld.com/

 

http://www.pcmag.com/

 

http://www.anandtech.com/

 

http://techrepublic.com.com/

 

http://www.zdnet.com/

 

http://www.intel.com/

 

http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

 

http://www.extremetech.com/

 

I hope this helps to give you a good start.

 

Of course, I tend to keep things like this way too long. So, I'd buy for future needs.

 

RAM is very important. Since the hard drive is the slowest component in the system, getting the fastest drive you can find makes sense to me. Dedicated graphics are getting more important for Vista and video. Of course, any game will require a healthy graphics card. I don't play a lot of games on my PC, but with Vista and video editing it was worth it to me to spend a bit more for a decent graphics card.

 

Tom

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MrThompson]

The forums at notebookreview.com are essential for researching a notebook purchase.

 

Dedicated video cards will decrease battery life while without one the built in graphics will snag up to 128 megs of your RAM.

[ITGITC]

Thanks for the info about notebookreview.com, MrThompson.

 

It looks like another good source of information.

 

Tom

 

[zephonic]

Thanks Tom and Mr. Thompson,

 

your input is much appreciated.

 

the key-player