Tim Haslett

Well, in my searching, I found that in my price range, the best TDP I could get was 45W. I found a 15" Lenovo Yoga C940 with a 6-core/12-thread i7 that has the 45W chip, so I have ordered it. It was actually a bit more than I wanted to spend, but I think it'll be worth it. Lenovo actually categorized it as a gaming laptop. The only thing it doesn't have is dual hard drives, but it does have a 1TB M.2 drive, and I'll likely do some tweaking to get system events as low as possible, so I'm hoping I'll be good. I'm looking forward to getting some testing done on it in the coming weeks, although I probably won't receive it for about 10 days or so. The great thing about getting it now is that Lenovo assumes it that it could be a gift, so the restocking fee is waived and it can be returned until some time in January. Once I can get it configured and tested, I'll report back with the results. Fingers crossed.

So much great info here to digest! I'm having some trouble finding laptops that will support dual drives, other than the Clevo ones that @Lord Tim suggested. Since I'm in the US, that doesn't seem to be an option. I'm not too concerned about the USB ports. The USB 3 ports are backward compatible, so that shouldn't really be an issue. I figure I'll need three at most, which most of the ones I've looked at have, if you include the C ports. But, it is a good point to not forget to make sure that they are there. It is something that could be easy to forget to check. I was not very familiar with the TDP rating of CPUs. I read up on it a bit, and I guess that it can be used to see how powerful the CPU is. I haven't seen any laptop makers list the TDP ratings, but it seems that Intel lists it on the ark.intel.com specs page for the processors, so it's a bit of a pain to get it, but it's out there. I was really hoping to get 2-in-1 laptop/tablet like a Lenovo Yoga, mostly because it seems that it would be easier to integrate into the drum kit, not to mention look cool. It doesn't seem that would be a good choice, though. Their CPUs all seem to have a TDP rating of 15W. Thanks for all of the tips. I feel much better informed now and can make a better choice.

Although it ends with some hope, it's still the saddest that I know...

Hi All, I am looking to buy a new laptop. I will be using CbB on it with VSTi plugins to play live and do some recording. I have an Alesis Strike Pro SE that I will be using to trigger Steven Slate Drums 5.5, and may eventually also get Superior Drummer 3 as well. I have an Edirol UA-1000 for my interface. It's a bit old, I know, but I did manage to get it working with Windows 10. Eventually I hope to replace it with a nice FocusRite or somethin else that can handle 8 i/o and MIDI/USB. I'm new to the world of DAWs and triggering. In fact, I'm new to e-drums, just having gotten my kit in May. I've done some MIDI stuff in the past, so I have some limited knowledge there. Now, I am assuming that it's more the interface that counts when trying to reduce latency, but I wanted to ask here to make sure. I plan to get a 1TB SSD drive and at least 16GB RAM. Will a quad-core i5 CPU be good enough? Should I really go to an i7? I have a more than capable desktop that I would use for any mixing/mastering, so that's not really a concern for me. Thanks all!