Re: [LAU] Laptop for realtime audio

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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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Received on Sun May 13 00:15:02 2007