What to spend money on - CPU or RAM relief?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

What to spend money on - CPU or RAM relief?

Okay, so I’m buying a new laptop. I fell out of love with the release of the new Macbooks and decided to stick to the love of my life, Dell (GO Windows 7, GO!). This time I’m going for the 13" XPS model with LED screen.

Here’s my dilemma.

I don’t want to waste money on stuff I don’t need just because I CAN. When working with a computer (I produce photos, music and sometimes short films and videos as well as obviously DJing in Traktor) I rarely find that my processor has to do a lot of work when I look at the CPU usage.

What I do notice though is the ginormous memory that goes to handle graphics, video rendering and things of that sort. So the logical conclusion would be, just to get the basic CPU config but add a 128 mb graph card and boost memory to 4 GB.

Would this be a logical conclusion according to your experience?

2

Processing power is pretty imporant with music too, it depends what you are doing though.

If you are routing audio from Traktor to Ableton and have a bazzilion fx units open you are going to need a pretty decent CPU with alot of ram to back it up.

3

If you’ve got a Core 2 Duo 2ghz you really shouldn’t need much more CPU grunt. RAM is always the most cost effective upgrade for any system.

4

Totally agree :slight_smile:

5

yeah the core 2 duo is pretty much whats in all new machines. I will prolly pick the basic Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T5800 (2.00GHz, 800Mhz FSB, 2MB cache). It’s a shit load faster then what I have now, and I’m still today not pumping my CPU to the fullest so I guess my thought was pretty accurate.

6

I also agree, theres no point in having a fast cpu is you only have, lets say 512mb of ram!!! haha