Hi guys, I found a very performing laptop with an i7 12th Gen at a great price. Is the RTX 3050 Ti enough to produce music? Is the dedicated gpu as decisive as in gaming world?

 

GPU does not matter for audio production right now. What you want is a decent laptop chassis (that feels solid in the middle of the keyboard) and good cooling for the CPU.

 

Graphics cards are usually not the limiting factor in producing music as DAWs and plugins are more reliant on the processing power of the CPU, size + speed of RAM and file storage.
There were some ideas of running plugins or other processing on CUDA cores, but in general day-to-day usage you shouldn't worry about it.

I guess for offline processing like stem separation via tools like demucs, UVR or other similar software a decently powerful GPU indeed makes a difference, ymmv depending on what exactly you do.

 

sounds like a dream machine to me. I bet you can do 100 tracks with it.

 

Probably closer to 50. RAM needs to be a sufficient amount too. The plugin usage per channel also starts to become a concern at about 50-ish. But the GPU should be fine for audio production. Google says it is similar to between an nVidia GTX 900 to about a GTX 1060. That is quite a bit better than needed for audio work, and you could probably even play some older games.

 

depends on other stuff, usually laptops with gaming graphics cards have beefier cooling, so they are able to sustain audio workloads on cpu better,
that said, let's hope it has 32GB ram (or at least ability to upgrade to 32GB or 64GB in future) and upgradeable NVME SSD (which could be upgraded with bigger capacity later too)

 

If you are curious it's a i7 12th Gen H Series laptop, RAM 64gb Ddr4 3200, 512gb nvme m.2 7000mb/s. The only non-top feature is the 3050Ti, which is great, and I would have preferred a 3060, but I don't have to play any game. Light Photoshop use at best, but very light and basic. I only need it for Ableton and Pro Tools. Audio production only.

 

As long as it's not an integrated graphics you're fine - and the only reason even that much is desirable is graphics-heavy interfaces on some plugins.
What you need to look for is the amount and speed of RAM, the SSD performance and the CPU.
I'm on i5-4460, so I run into issues with processing-intensive sound design, but it's more than enough for mixing the recorded music.

 

512GB SSD isn't "top" either, but 7GB r/w speed is totally usable )
what screen, what keyboard? those are actually major decisive points for me when choosing a laptop

 

Pc laptops is always risky when it comes to audio latency issues compared to a self build desktop

 

15.6 inch Full HD IPS 144Hz, backlit keyboard. Yes, it certainly could have been a 1tb or more ssd, but all my programs weigh around 70gb, so at the end 512gb is enough for me. Luckily the ssd is very fast, and satisfies me a lot. All the libraries are on an external 4tb extreme pro ssd.

 

I travel a lot and also work on planes, so for me the desktop is not an option at the moment, perhaps in the future when I will replace the studio one.

 

My advice do multiple latency test right away; both latencymon and real audio projects. If you have issues with latency send it back. Also smart to do a clean install of Windows right from the start. You never know what crappy software those companies install

 

Thanks I'll do it

 

Graphics card is rather important if you wanna use VCV Rack though.

 

obviously no

you gonna need a storage for kontakt libraries

 

Is this thread serious?

My advice: If you ask if the graphic card is good for music, you probably shouldn't do any music (on a computer). Producing is full of technical stuff.

 

It should be fine... just make sure that you have proper asio drivers installed. Also use these tutorials

4 Hidden PC Settings that Boost DAW and OBS Performance (Process Lasso)

and use plugins from https://www.gpu.audio/ to help offload processes from the cpu.

 

a few days ago they dropped another $250 off the M1 Macbook Air so it is now 750$. it probably won't run 13 year old Protools tho.

 

it's a 3 years old computer now, base model with laughable ram and storage capacity and lack of any cooling for sustained work