I just wanted to revive this thread to address something I heard a lot when I was getting a PC for music production.
I was just contemplating this today when I was working on something in Ableton on my laptop so I figured I should come back and say something since I’ve been using my new laptop for a few weeks now and have had ample time in various use case scenarios.
Any time I brought up potentially going back to a PC from Mac I’d get countless people saying that it would only be okay if I wasn’t recording with any mics in the same room due to loud fan noise and even some people saying it would be completely unusable for anything audio for that reason.
my laptop is a legion pro 7i (8th generation) (2023) for cooling it’s a combination of vaper chamber, Liquid Metal and some high powered fans, but crucially it has the ability to quickly switch between the dedicated Nvidia rtx 4080 and the ingergraded video card that’s part of the motherboard so the huge advantage to that (other than much longer battery life when not plugged in) is that when you’re doing audio stuff you can switch to the intergrated card since there’s obviously no no need for the Nvidia during audio sessions. When in intergrated graphics card mode the laptop is just as quiet as my MacBook Pro was. You could absolutely record mics in the same room as it. When I’m playing games and I’m in dedicated GPU mode that’s when the fans really kick on and can and usually does get too loud for doing any recording for sure.
Just wanted to throw this out there for anyone that was in a similar situation and wanted to pull the trigger on a gaming PC for audio production.
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I missed all this. I don’t have a very fancy machine, just a standard M1. But I wonder if this means I should now be going back to upping the buffer sizes when a session gets big. I’d just got in the habit of making it smaller!
It’s been a while since I did a bit of benchmarking with us going back to using the higher buffer sizes. Just testing this out on my standard M1 chip on a latest session where I’ve gone wild with some heavy ass plugins.
The big hitters are:
- Kontakt x6
- Diva x2
- Serum x3
- ShaperBox x3
- God Particle
God Particle alone takes about 15%, so a lot of the burn on the meter is coming from that and Diva & Kontakt. I make it 34 plugins across 42 tracks of varying weight, plus the usual Ableton devices. These are all unfrozen with the session running 1024 samples.
This is running at approx 72% on the CPU monitor, and RAM/memory pressure is orange, but never red (including with this browser tab open, so could probably be slightly improved.) CPU load on the system is 50-60%.
Really, this is about as far as I can push it without needing to drop 3k on a pro rig, which seems unecessary for my hobbyist noodlings. There’s lots of bandwidth here. The power bottleneck is usually a good sign that I should roll back some of my plugin overdosing and turn stuff off or get it all rendered to stems.
I guess the issue for Ableton users and the newer M3 Pro chips is the reduction in power cores over the previous Pro line chips, which is (from various videos I’ve seen) hampering performance for music apps specifically.
Like Reaper and Cubase, Ableton could open up performance on more M-chips, simply by making use of both the core types. I also appreciate this may not be the work of a moment and having the goalposts move might be annoying on their side.
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Interesting. I will see if my legion has that option. Upon reading a bit, whether mine has it or not it will make no difference cause i read the big GPU is hardwired to the HDMI port and that’s the only way I use it, so… 
Got excited for a minute thinking I could maybe be able to wait longer with upgrading 
Live 10 here, on a m3 pro with 18g ram. This computer is still pretty new so I haven’t put it through all the paces, but it’s performing well so far. As a non scientific test, I was able to run 22 instances of Diva without killing it. I’ve ran over 20 some instances of various Arturia plugins and it didn’t break 20%. Best part is, I could copy paste plugins, make edits, change presets, add fx etc and audio would continue playing uninterrupted even during pinwheels.
Very unscientific like I said and I’ve had this laptop less than a week. The real test will be processing incoming audio along with overbridge. We’ll see.
I plan to upgrade Live if it will perform better. Maybe next time there’s a sale, but I’m not in a hurry.
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theoretically you can sign up for the beta, it’s Live 12 basically and I’ve noticed minimal performance difference between the beta and the official release. so you can try 12 and compare it to the 10 because they are installed separately and you can run them in parallel…
if you load a VST only project in each you should have minimal compatibility issues… native devices got huge updates between 10 and 12
Be aware that CPU metering isn’t necessarily linear or even an accurate picture of real-world performance - I found my well-specced M1 would get to about 65-70% during a heavy mixdown but adding a bunch more stuff didn’t actually increase CPU load by much at all, and others have found the same thing, from what I recall seeing online.
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