Check this out - lower DPC Latency is better ...

https://www.notebookcheck.com/DPC-L...bieten-die-niedrigsten-Latenzen.504375.0.html

Or you can buy a fully audio optimized notebook / workstation:

https://www.xmg.gg/en/news-deep-dive-audio-laptops-xmg-dpc-latencies/

 

let me play devil's advocate here and dispute some of those thoughts,

since Apple M1 release in 2020, its further evolution became very slow, old M1 Pro has more performance cores than M2 Pro which has more performance cores than M3 Pro, Apple went full on crippling standard specced Macs to push people into paying extra for non-crippled models,

speaking of performance (for audio), literally every decent laptop nowadays is capable of matching Apple MacBooks, in average studio you're plugged on power brick and so amazing battery performance of Apple Silicon becomes useless spec,

if you talk about "totally silent", in Apple's design it means thermal throttling, which is the least thing you want in audio workflow,
silence in recording studio is not really crucial, what matters is noise ratio, it's rather simple to mitigate/minimize noise by proper studio layout, for ex. with louder instruments miked at close distance there won't be any noticeable noise from a computer, and with average studio headphones there will be more bleed of backing tracks and metronome into the microphone than noise from a computer on the opposite side of a studio room,

Apple Silicon Macs do suffer from thermal throttling, instead of ramping up the fans they slow down due to thermal limitations,
energy efficiency does indeed offer more thermal headroom and more aggressive fan curves, but in the end what ultimately matters are audio dropouts caused by inconsistent cpu performance caused by thermal throttling,

outside of studio you literally don't need a studio to begin with, and being "outside" there's much higher ambient noise to make silent MacBooks practically uninteresting again,

speaking of price advantage, pardon me, but Apple remains ridiculously overpriced, we're talking about 7-10x more expensive than comparable PC counterparts,
it costs $1400 for 2TB SSD Apple's upgrade while something like high-end faster 2TB Samsung 990 Pro costs $200,
Apple's 8GB memory upgrade costs $200 while average 64GB ram kit nowadays costs $150,

with recent announcement of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chip, soon there will be no advantages left for Apple Silicon,

all that said, Apple Silicon MacBooks are not bad machines, if you can justify their value, they're functional laptops, and for agile Linux user definitely a more friendly/effective option than Windows with WSL - but I personally could recommend current Macs only if their base model configs (without overpriced upgrades) will be sufficient for desired use case, or if there's a really good deal on used market

 

DPC latency is the highest problem on modern PC laptop.

It's very difficult to find a good audio laptop because there is no indication of DPC latency and the only way to check a laptop is to buy it ...

Best rule : avoid gaming GPU (nvidia RTX for exemple), gaming GPU need cooling and in a laptop cooling often lead to cpu throttle and DPC latency.

Honestly I would rather go for desktop PC instead of laptop. In a desktop PC you can choose your hardware to your needs.
Most power/fast laptops are gaming laptops and most of them suffer from DPC latency. You can buy gaming laptop and disable GPU in the bios, but you will pay high ca$h for a GPU you wont use, that's pretty useless.

 

You make a partly valid argument regarding the price advantage, in spite of making the same error as I did. You generalise by claiming everything Apple to be ridiculously overpriced and 7-10 times more expensive, whereas I disregarded their outrageous upgrade pricing policy and had in mind the lower-specced versions only. Anyway, I stand corrected: in case of higher-specced machines, in terms of RAM and storage space, there is still a price advantage on the PC laptop side.

However, your argument regarding the importance of a silent studio environment is predictably weak and not worth addressing.

Particularly amusing is your attempt at invalidating the huge advantages the Macbooks have in operating on battery and in total silence. The battery is useless in a studio and silence is useless outdoors. Brilliant!

No wonder you had to invent the issue of thermal throttling and audio dropouts. Thermal throttling can happen with the Macbook Air, but by all accounts, when it comes to music production, it's quite rare in practice. Most of the users have never noticed any degradation in performance under normal circumstances. It's more likely to happen during video rendering, for example, but it's a totally different kind of load.

 

so if this person mentioned in the first post does not want a Mac, why have this debate about them? If someone has it set in their mind they do not want a Mac, there is no persuading them. The have either never used a Macbook Pro for much more than a few minutes, can't afford one, or do not like change. Some are even flat out afraid of learning a new operating system, and they have no interest in using Logic. Some even factor the availability of warez into their decision. Who cares why? Someone can write me a 10 page dissertation on why I should buy a PC to use for music, and it's not going to happen either way. If a few hundred bucks, or even a thousand; either way are going to be this important, you have either picked the wrong hobby or gone into the wrong line of work.

 

@ptepper depends on point of view for sure, I do field recording and studio recording (more than mixing) and from my own experience silence+battery importance seems overrated

about thermal throttling, running just one instance of iZotope RX Music Rebalance causes thermal throttling on actively cooled M1 MacMini,
I'm planning some benchmark of how many live instances of Accentize dxRevive will bring M1 MacMini to its knees

 

You do field recording and consider battery life and performance on battery overrated? Good thing I'm not your client.

So you experienced something that you interpreted as thermal throttling, using a particularly CPU-hungry plugin with the least powerful model among three generations of Apple Silicon processors, and that's your base for the claim that all of them generally suffer from thermal throttling, inconsistent CPU-performance and audio dropouts?

If Apple disintegrated tonight, I wouldn't blink. I dislike Apple, and all Big Tech for that matter, just as much as you do. But you are doing yourself damage here.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2024

As already mentioned in a previous post, avoid the gaming laptops with 3xxx/4xxx series NVidia GPU's.

I have a non-gaming Intel laptop and it's fantastic for audio, and the DPC latency is very low.

 

From what I've gathered we will not go to the "mainstream" brand retailers as cooling profile is very much an issue for a lot of model and that's a game I don't want to play
For PC, the custom audio workstation route seems to be where it's at, much clearer and flexible.

I already configured a Windows Audio Laptop at 3XS for 2 089,90€ (unfortunately they do not ship outside of UK)

Scan Performance 16" QHD+ (2560x1600 / 16:10)

Microsoft Windows 11 Home 64-bit

i9-13900H
RTX 4070

32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Vengeance 4800MHz DDR5
500GB Samsung 980 PRO - 6900MB/s Read, 5000MB/s Write (M2 NVMe)

2x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A (1x Powered USB) & 1x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C
1x HDMI 2.1 & 1x Mini DisplayPort 1.4
2.5 Gigabit LAN, Intel WIFI 6E & Bluetooth 5.2
1x Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C)
4-cell Lithium Polymer 73Wh Battery

At Bestware in Germany you can select different brands/models of RAM or SSD
Samsung Pro and Corsair being the most expensive but you can get a better deal with other brands.
You can also get a RTX 4060 instead or an i7.

Here's a few I found about and recommended in this thread :

UK :

https://www.carillonac1.com/
https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom

DE :

https://bestware.com/en/

FR :

https://www.pcspecialist.fr/
https://clevo-europe.com/default_zone/fr/html/home.php

If anyone knows about an established custom PC business within the EU and shipping to France please let me know.
If you bought from these businesses please share your experience

@AudioSox since you are happy with you windows machine, do you mind sharing the model you use ?

 

It's a cheapo Asus model with an i5 1135G7 CPU, that I upgraded to 40GB RAM and 2TB NVMe. It doesn't have a discreet GPU, but you don't really need one for audio. The DPC is super low, and is comparable to my desktop that I built specifically for my studio.

I see an RTX 4070 on your list. The NVidia drivers for these cards are known to cause high DPC latency, and make working with a buffer of 64 samples problematic.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2024

Keyword "claims"

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidias-new-geforce-driver-claimed-to-fix-dpc-latency-issues

I would buy the most dogshit GPU for what I care if its garanteed to run a DAW efficiently but these businesses only go down to RTX 4060.

Maybe Intel i9 can only roll with 4060 minimum ?

 

RTX 4060 is still a gaming GPU, and will most likely have similar issues. In a recent thread a guy published his LatencyMon results with a DPC over 1000µs, caused by the NVidia kernel. And it's a newer driver than the one they claim fixes the problem.

"Highest DPC routine execution time (µs): 1231.559401
Driver with highest DPC routine execution time: nvlddmkm.sys - NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 546.29 , NVIDIA Corporation"

 

I see, @AudioSox

When I go down to i7-13700H I have the option to select Intel Iris Xe Graphics integrated (RAM DUAL) or Graphic Intel UHD (RAM MONOCANAL)
would that be more efficient ? not compatible with i9 though, a least not an option at pcspecialists.

Keep in mind my friend is only doing sound design in Serum + Shaperbox so he will not be tracking vocals and probably be using the biggest buffer size available in Live so is latency even involved in these conditions ? (no vocals, no acoustic instruments or hardware synths).

 

If he's not tracking then he probably doesn't need low latency audio. I chose an Asus model with an Iris Xe to be on the safe side, but maybe in his case the higher performance of the i9 is more important.

 

if it is for live , I would probably go with a base/entry level mac book air m1 chip . That is what I will probably do (although I hate apple RAM and SSD prices , the base model price is great IMHO) For production at home I have a PC , it is now several genarations behind and still by far good enough . . But it was a little nightmare to get it running smoothly . On a laptop you often cannot change crucial parameters in UEFI . But you can network macbooc and PC with audiogridder , if you feel the need to do so ..

 

Please advise your friend to get a MacBook (M2 Pro, or M3 Pro) MacBooks with Apple Silicon the M1, M2, and M3 can play hundreds of Virtual Instruments. Watch some videos on YouTube (MaxTech Channel) they test the MacBooks reall world usage. He will be Amazed.

 

If he won't be recording/overdubbing audio tracks (vocals, acoustic and electric instruments) and won't be recording MIDI tracks playing MIDI keyboards or drum pads in real time, if he only intends to do sort of step sequencing and/or input MIDI data via the mouse and computer keyboard (I know of at least one such DJ/producer with a decades long and rather successful international career, nothing to sneeze at), latency will most likely be irrelevant. Although, whatever causes serious latency problems could potentially rear its ugly head at later stages of production, under increased CPU load, and still cause audible artifacts.