12 May
2007
12 May
'07
3:22 p.m.
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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?
Don't get the one I have (ASUS Z96F). It's a nice machine, easily-expandable, and
it was a great price, but the interrupt routing really sucks for audio: way too many
shared interrupts. Most of the Intel Core 2 Duo "Napa" based motherboards (i.e.
Mac Mini) seem to have similar interrupt-sharing limitations. They also have the miserable
hda-intel sound chip.
If I had to buy a laptop again, I'd bring a Linux livecd into a computer shop or
discount store, and walk around trying every single goddamned machine there, doing
"cat /proc/interrupts" and "lspci" on every one, and buy the one that
doesn't have brain-dead shared interrupts or unsupported (Ricoh) chips.
I wish there were an online database of /proc/interrupts, lspci, and dmiinfo output for
all laptops.
- -ken
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