[LAU] Laptop for realtime audio

[Ken Restivo]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 05:09:51PM +0200, Lars Luthman wrote:
> I'm thinking about getting a laptop, and of course I want one that I can
> run jackd and friends on with reasonable performance. I really don't
> know much about hardware in general and laptops in particular, so I was
> wondering if anyone had any advice. This is what I'm looking for:
> 
> * Mainboard / sound / CPU etc working well with recent RT-patched
>   kernels.
> 
> * S/PDIF out, at least 16 bits, 48kHz, stereo. Inputs are not
>   important, ADC/DAC quality is not important.
> 
> * DVD+-RW burner.
> 
> * jackd running without xruns with ~10ms latency (when using S/PDIF
>   out at 48kHz).
> 
> * Room for plenty of RAM (at least 2 GB).
> 
> * Not too expensive ( < 1000???).
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 

Actually, I apologise for my earlier slam against the ASUS Z96F. If you're using USB audio, this thing is excellent.  By Wednesday I should be able to report how well a FireWire ExpressCard works on it too with FreeBoB.

Although this thing's firewire chip and firewire interrupt assignment sucks, the interrupt assignments for USB are pretty good. Only one USB port is on that awful everything-shared interrupt; the other four USB ports are each on pretty much their own interrupts. USB performance so far appears to be excellent. 

So it seems that ASUS (or Intel, whomever made the decision), optimised this machine for USB, not for firewire.

I'm using an old M-Audio Audiophile with it right now, -n3 -p128, and it's fantastic.

NB: the Z96F is US$400, barebones. That's pretty cheap. I added 2GB RAM and a 7200RPM drive to it, and a T7600 Core2Duo CPU. 

- -ken
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFGR+2Ie8HF+6xeOIcRAlizAJ0VHRcMrzbaRodnwg6TUCsw7WXpKQCgj62D
a2YEqCBvyF9Zhtd+TH8wA+M=
=RsgG
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----