ever again someone comes up with a question regarding what AI works with what laptop, so I just thought I would share my results.

Last September I bought a Lenovo w540 laptop, spec'd with 

i7 4700mq processor

1TB Samsung Evo 850 SSD system drive

500 GB HDD in Optical drive caddy

8 GB RAM

I configured it to dual boot Windows 8.1 (for my wife;) and kxstudio.

kxstudio runs with the lowlatency 3.13 kernel.

I already owned a TC Impact Twin Firewire interface that I intended to try out on Linux.

I only just now got to connect the two, the w540 doesn't have Firewire onboard so I bought a 2 port express card for 20 Euros (brand is inLine, chipset VIA VT6315).

I can now happily report back that I'm running the TC Impat Twin with ffado and Jack at 64 frames, 2 buffers, with 2.6msec latency, and it's very stable till now. That is with HT turned on (I did not yet try it with HT turned off). At 32 frames I immediately get hundrets of xruns.

The ffado mixer doesn't offer control over the Impact Twin, except for the sample rate and clock master. That means neither configuring the TC for standalone operation, nor zerolatency operation will work on Linux (for now). 

In Jack all 14 I/O and the Midi ports of the interface are shown correctly.

I launched a ~50 track ardour 3 project with various LV2 Plugins (IR, Calf reverbs EQs and Compressors, Invada stuff, Linuxdsp stuff etc.) and got no xruns at all.

All in all I'm very happy, and I want to thank all the amazing folks out there that are working hard to make Pro audio work on Linux possible. I'm only a semi pro "user" (supporting financially a few projects, where I can), but started out with Linux audio work in 2004, and  it is remarkable where this amazing community got in those 10 years.

Cheers

Moshe