The thing is, it depends on you. I have a Mac and a PC. So I tried FL, Live, Logic, Studio One, Bitwig, Mixcraft Pro, garageband and some other DAWs when I was choosing my DAW.

This week I’ve got a massive post on picking a laptop for FL Studio (and in most ways – music production in general).

In this post I’m going to list out what are the specific requirements we’re targeting for, which laptops meet them for every price range and what you should do after getting a laptop. Time to find out what is the best laptop for FL Studio!

Without further ado.

2018 June update. Last month Image Line released FL Studio 20 so I’ve decided to do an update on recommended laptops for FL Studio including the best laptops available in 2018 Summer and beyond.

What are we looking for?

A good place to start would be FL Studio 20 minimum requirements:

• 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon 64 (or later) compatible CPU with full SSE2 support
• WINDOWS 7 or later / macOS 10.11 or later
• 4 GB or more RAM recommended
• 4 GB free disk space
• Soundcard with DirectSound drivers. ASIO/ASIO2 compatible required for audio recording

Looking at these requirements it seems that any recently released laptop would be more than enough. Well… yes and no. It might be enough to launch FL Studio but it is far from what you need if you’re using VSTs and sample libraries. Apparently some known plugin libraries have significantly higher requirements than FL Studio itself.

So do these requirements actually say anything?

I’d argue that the only thing that you should take from these requirements is that video card doesn’t matter at all and hard drive space matters only if you have an extensive sample library.

FL Studio team have written a lot more sensible guide for choosing a PC but that is mostly focused on desktop/tower setup.

In sum, it seems that we need to form our own custom requirements one by one.

Let’s dive in.

Processor

Processor is THE most important thing that comes to FL performance. You do not need to get the best product to run it smoothly but a few extra bucks for a higher-end processor will surely help.

That is what we’re targeting for.

Cores vs Threads vs Hertz

FL Studio can use multiple cores and threads. But despite that, you should prioritize faster clock speed.

Why?

As it turns out, FL Studio (and you) will never balance out every single instrument through every channel without chaining multiple sends. And that causes not all the load being split equally.

That results in a peculiar case where you could run 2 instances of FL Studio both claiming to use 80% of CPU without glitching. That’s because FL Studio CPU Load doesn’t reflect usage of every core – as Task Manager does.

But how to avoid that?

Split your instruments into more channels, avoid using too many effects in the same chain. It is a lot better to split every generator into its own channel and give every channel only the essential effects they need instead of trying to balance multiple instruments in the same one.

This is especially noticeable when adding a lot of VSTs to the mastering chain. Since it comes last in the audio chain, it cannot be speed-up with multiple cores. Try to keep it clean and lean.

What does it mean for you when buying a laptop?

Your priority should be clock speed and not cores. In short – anything beyond 4 cores, at least right now, is not worth the extra money.

If I understand FL Studio correctly, this graphic should help you understand how dual core processor would handle a mixer with 5 tracks:

In this particular case, “the red core” helps out the main blue one and cuts down the time to prepare the master track by 31%, since blue one didn’t have to process Track 2, 3 and 4.

If Track 1 sends to Track 5, having extra cores will not help at all. On the other hand, if Track 5 is independent then 3rd core would speed up the process by 11% and 4th core by final 4%.

Obviously, this is not a real-life scenario unless you’re making a simple beat. Usually, you’ll end up using more tracks which can be processed in parallel but even then the additional gain is limited.

So which processors we’re looking for EXACTLY?

Anything in the higher range of the latest two series of processors. A higher-mid range is the Goldilocks zone for processors – not too slow and not too hot – just right.

To be sure how good a processor is I’ll use benchmarks from Notebookcheck and Passmark. Then I’ll prioritize single core priority over multi-core when comparing several models. I’d consider anything above Intel Core i7-3630QM very good. I have this processor in my own laptop for the last two years and it manages to handle ~20 generators going to ~20 mixer tracks with ~6 effects each. It can handle almost that much even without ASIO when oversampling isn’t used.

A few great and common laptop processors for FL Studio:

• Intel Core i7-8750H
• Intel Core i7-7820HK
• Intel Core i7-7700HQ
• Intel Core i7-6820HK
• Intel Core i7-6700HQ

Also, there are a few popular upper mid-range CPUs that are OK for FL Studio:

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700U
• Intel Core i5-8350U
• Intel Core i5-6300HQ
• AMD Ryzen 5 2500U
• Intel Core i7-7500U

Here’s a graphic illustrating basic selection process.

How each processor is valued, especially below that line, depends more and more on their single core performance. For that I’ll use mobile processor list sorted by their score in Cinebench x64 using 1 core.

On social media I got a good question: “How these benchmarks scale up in real life FL Studio performance?“. I was given a personal example – a reader had a laptop with processor of ~4100 on Passmark benchmark page. And he wanted to upgrade it to a laptop having a processor with a score of ~8100. The simple question is, what performance gains would be realistic? As in, if right now the project runs at 100% – how would it run on the new laptop?

I love these types of questions as they help to apply all seemingly abstract benchmarks to clear real-life scenario. So this was my answer:

To get an answer to this I checked my FL projects from 2012 when I had a lot slower processor myself.
After doing a quick pen and paper “analysis” I saw that usually if you correctly setup your new PC, you should expect an improvement of 0.65 * benchmark ratio. That means moving from 4100 to 8100 would make your projects capped at 100% running on avg ~68%.
Though in reality, it depends on how you use FL. If you use under ~15 instruments while adding a lot of effects to them then the speed boost will be smaller. If you use a lot of instruments/samples with a few effects on each of them, then the difference will be more apparent. The best example of that is the master bus. If you put a lot of effects on the master bus you might get a rather small improvement. And if you have your master channel clean, you could get closer to ~60%.

ASIO Drivers Support

ASIO drivers are as close to The Holy Grail in digital audio processing as it gets. They allow DAWs as FL Studio to talk directly to the sound card.

And that matters a lot.

The good new is that basically every non-edge-case laptop released in the past two years will be compatible with some kind of ASIO/ASIO II drivers, usually ASIO4ALL.

If producing music is one of your hobbies – that’s enough. If it is more than that – you should get an external audio interface. I’ll touch this topic in a bit more detail later on in the post, but for now – let’s stay on course.

RAM

8 GB is the standard for RAM capacity. Though, in 2017, 16 GB is becoming the de facto choice for laptops starting at $1,000. You can go up to 32 GB if you’re absolutely certain that 16 GB won’t be enough. But 99% of the time it is plenty.

Just in case I’ll cover all my bases before getting a comment “what about memory speed/latency/dual channel?”. In this case channels won’t matter, frequency doesn’t matter and every laptop comes with CL9-11 RAM anyways.

One last thing we should consider is having extra slots for extra RAM later on. If you’re going for 8GB – that will surely come in handy if you’re planning to keep your new laptop for the long haul.

This can be a shortcut to better performance with very little additional spending (as you’ll see later on).

Hard Drive

In this case, you might face a hard decision if your budget is limited.

Now here’s why.

On one hand, 1TB of space can be used for a larger sample library. Meanwhile smaller SSD drives (for their cost) deliver gains in noticeable performance. This mostly improves the general experience of using a laptop and in our case – loading samples/VSTs and etc.

If you want the best of both worlds – pay the price for 1 TB SSD.

If you don’t care about extra hard drive speed – save your money for a better processor and just go for an HDD. That is completely viable since hard drive speed won’t hinder FL Studio.

If you’re on the fence, you could go for a hybrid solution which means having two hard drives – one (SSD) for Windows and FL Studio. And the second one for your samples. If SSD has 250GB+, most VSTs should fit too.

External screen ports

Working with multiple screens is a delight.

Firstly, good news! Almost every laptop has a connection for an external screen, usually via HDMI.

And now the bad news. A lot of laptops under 17″ have ONLY that connection dedicated for extra displays. You might be wondering what to do then if you want to rock out with a 2-3 external monitor setup.

Then you have 3 options:

• Laptop with 2 HDMI connections
• Laptop with 1 HDMI and a DVI/VGA connection
  The most common scenario which is completely OK. When dealing with graphics VGA (D-Sub) connection is inferior to others due to its lossy analog nature – at least somewhere people can agree digital is better than analog.
• Laptop with (mini) Display Port and a multi-screen hub
• Laptop with USB 3.1 Type C, preferrably with Thunderbolt 3 controller, so it can be used as DisplayPort
• Laptop with plenty USB connections and then buy a USB to VGA/DVI/HDMI adapter

Other ports

USB has been THE mainstream port for peripherals for a long time. Finally, it’s becoming a standard for external audio interfaces as well. Once a lot of devices rely on a single type of port – you’ll need a lot of them.

Look for 3 or more USB ports.

Of course a laptop needs a 3.5 mm audio jack but every single one has it. Even Apple left it intact after ditching every other port in their latest MacBook.

Sadly, FireWire is almost extinct from consumer-grade laptops. Its replacement – Thunderbolt is also found almost exclusively on Apple laptops with a few worthy exceptions I’ll mention in the suggestion section.

Battery life

Battery life requirement is entirely based on how you’re going to use the laptop. If it will be used mostly in home/studio – you can get away with a minimal battery life. Meanwhile, if a laptop is going to be your PC on-the-go – you’ll need every extra minute you can get. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Remember: advertised battery times do not represent actual time a laptop will run with FL Studio. As any other DAW, FL can be very performance hungry. Expect 1/2 – 1/3 of advertised battery time depending on a particular project and your workflow.

To keep things simple I’ll give extra points in my comparisons for laptops with good battery life.

Peace and Quiet

Working with a machine that requires a lot of power has one significant drawback – audible noise. Laptops aren’t designed to be liquid cooled (though you can try). That leaves laptops with the only other option – fans.

If you’ll want to record audio in the same room with a laptop – you’ll have a problem – a few extra decibels.

Thankfully, improvements in manufacturing and the speed of integrated graphics allowed some laptops to get away without using them. This is known as fanless design. Laptops with this type of cooling (or lack of it) only started getting traction in the last year or so. Their list is expanding and probably will double in the coming year.

Sadly they are limited in performance. So please consider them only if you’re fairly certain their processors will be able to handle the load you need.

That’s why fan-cooled laptops are here to stay for at least a few more years when it comes to music production.

How to minimize fan noise?

• When possible, opt for newer generation processors – they tend to produce less heat
• Coolers, cooling mats, and heat shields
• Once a year clean laptop’s fans and radiators or bring it to a person that can do it for you
  As time passes by dust accumulates within a laptop. That forces fans to spin a little bit faster and louder day after day. Not cleaning it long enough can result in your fans working at max speed and still not managing to keep temperatures within a safe range (which is usually under 212° F/100° C). Then processoris forced to slow down. This is known as CPU throttling.
  The first time I cleaned my laptop, CPU/GPU temperature dropped by 20 degrees. Which was way beyond my expectations. To do this I bought a small screwdriver set on eBay for 5$ and watched a disassembly video for my model. Though if you’re new to PC hardware – you might as well leave it to a specialist.

What doesn’t matter

Dedicated graphics card won’t help you one bit. Unless you’re using more than 3 screens or they are beyond Full HD resolution, an integrated graphics chip will be enough. Audio processing doesn’t benefit from a powerful visual engine. So if you don’t work with video/3D and don’t play new-ish 3D games – spend your dollars on a better CPU/HDD/more VSTs/etc.

It is worth noting that there have been various attempts to leverage the tremendous power of GPU to work on audio. But even in tasks that are best suited for GPU as IR reverbs – it is not a mainstream practice due to its complexity and drawbacks.

I also did not weigh a few minor things as laptop speakers as anyways even the best notebook speakers fall way too short to be used for actual sound monitoring.

Suggestions

MacBooks

FL Studio finally fully supports Mac and it can be used on a MacBook. Hooray! I haven’t got a chance to use FL Studio on a Mac, but it seems working fine enough for most people with occasional crashes or plugin malfunction, but that’s FL Studio for ya.

FL Studio 20 can be used with close to every Mac even including MacBook Air. The only problem is, I don’t find entry-level MacBooks sufficiently performant to deal with FL Studio for a long mixing/mastering chain. For that you’ll need a MacBook Pro, preferrably a 15-inch model as only they come with a quad-core processor.

Apple MacBook Pro

I recommend going for a 13″ 256 GB model ($1,500) or any 15″ model with at least 256 GB.

MacBooks have absolutely great displays with 500+ nits brightness, 100% sRGB coverage and a high resolution.

Windows laptops

Consumer level laptops have reached a state where their hardware does not limit the creative process. You might still want to buy an audio interface if already don’t have one but apart from that consumer grade is no longer something professionals can laugh at.

Here I cherry picked a few best-rounded laptops paying a lot of attention to previously outlined requirements.

Just like one famous Canadian rapper, we’ll start from the bottom.

ASUS VivoBook F510UA

Just to get this out of the way – this laptop is not as fast as the others on the list. But damn, it’s as close as you can get at this price. It’s definitely best budget FL Studio laptop. It doesn’t have most of the premium bells and whistles but it is a surprisingly decent computer for its price tag.

Intel made great strides with their 8th generation processors. This i5 processor performs as well as 7th gen i7 U-series processors. In fact, i5-8250U is the best processor you could find in a laptop under $700. If you don’t insist on having all of your synths running straight to your final mix, you should have a fairly smooth workflow with this notebook.

There’s also a very similar Acer Aspire 5 laptop with 256 GB SSD instead of 1 TB HDD.

Best value laptops (~1000$)

PROSTAR Clevo N850EJ1

A balanced machine which shines in all the compartments but portabilty.

A great laptop if you want the best performance your buck and you don’t care about portability. Also, it has subpar speakers but I guess no one should write or mix music without at least decent headphones or audio monitors.

HP Omen 15t (upgraded)

If you’re looking for a similar, but a 17-inch laptop, take a look at MSI GL73 8RC032.

Razer Blade Stealth

How could I not talk about best FL Studio laptops without mentioning the laptop that comes with FL Studio as part of its package? Even though it comes with FL Studio 12 Producer Edition, it is still covered under Lifetime Free Updates policy, so there’s nothing stopping you going straight for FL Studio 20. Image Line itself has a dedicated page for this deal with all necessary instructions and a few tips on how to optimize Razer Blade for FL Studio. Looks like a match made in heaven!

High-end laptops (1500$+)

Eluktronics N857HK1 Pro-X Special Edition

If you want a similar laptop from ASUS, check out their ROG STRIX GL503GE SCAR Edition

GIGABYTE AERO 15W V8-BK4

Extraordinarly good laptop. It almost achieves the trifecta of high performance, great battery life and light weight.

Custom-built music production laptops

I have found several sellers offering custom built laptops specifically for music production/DJing. In most of these machines I haven’t found much of a difference between them and general consumer laptops. One notable exception would be FireWire port which is only ever found in workstation grade laptops or Macs. If you have equipment that uses FireWire and you’ll need it for your laptop you should check out these custom solutions.

Price and performance wise none of the websites I played around with managed to beat out the consumer level laptops. Despite that, if you have very unique needs, you still should check these websites out:

Beyond the laptop

Audio interface

This can be a topic of its own but if you don’t already have one – something like Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 or something simple from M-Audio. If you’re just starting out, you don’t need an audio interface at all.

Setting up

Do not forget to clean all the useless pre-installed software that is usually added to PC laptops to maintain their prices low. Then install your FL Studio copy, move your VSTs and samples in. Finally check that you have ASIO4ALL or FL ASIO installed. If not, grab a copy. Then setup your FL settings and copy your projects to your new laptop. Happy producing!

Read if you haven’t – Optimizing FL Studio performance.

Table of Best Laptops for FL Studio

Final thoughts

I’ve showed what is important for a FL Studio laptop, what are good guidelines and which laptops are best for each price range. You might have some custom needs that are beyond this article, so adjust accordingly.

I hope this has helped you choose your next FL Studio notebook. I’ll shamefully close this post by quoting FL Studio Knowledge base:

A Review of FL Studio – Is It Worth The Hype?

There are a lot of people that want to learn how to make beats, and get into the music business.

Unfortunately, not everyone can master all the elements that some of the masters used to create their blistering hits.

That is, until now.

There’s a lot of software that is getting pushed around the internet, and it all promises you the glory of creating music from scratch, taking samples and much more.

It’s easy to find these things, but which ones are worth the hype and which ones aren’t that grand?

That’s the hard part to decipher. It’s for that reason that this review of FL Studio was compiled.

With this, you will see whether or not FL Studio is in fact worth the hype it’s been getting around the music world.

If you haven’t heard of this software, then check out the following breakdown.

What Is FL Studio?

Simply put, this is a software choice that is often referred to as a DAW.

This stands for digital audio workstation.

Some people in the industry refer to this software was “Fruity Loops”, and it’s an audio software that can help you record, mix, master, and publish music.

It’s one of the crucial components that you need to have in place if you’re going to make hip hop or any type of electronic music.

Whether you want organic sounds or you want to loop samples, this converts your computer into a complete mixer overall.

The Feature List

When you decide whether or not purchase FL Studio, you’re no doubt going to want to know what features are in the mix.

Some platforms just give you bare bones options, which can work, but if you want something a bit more compelling, then you will definitely want to look at the list of features that are getting a lot of buzz today.

The following are just some of the most prominent features overall.

Easy To Use Interface – if you have ever used any sort of music studio software, then this one will come easy to you. It’s been designed to look like a large multi-channel mixer, only this is all digital.

Multi- Touch – want to mix several sounds at once? Well you can do so with ease. You can extend elements in a mix simultaneously, and use several sounds at once.

Channel Settings – the latest update features an all new robust channel settings and menu mixer. Whether you want to work with multiple channels, or one at a time, you can separate, edit, and mix everything with these options.

You don’t have to deal with pop ups, or anything that you may have in the past, the settings and menu have all be integrated into the main interface.

Playlist Editing – for those that are using several different audio files at once, you can easily now drag and drop them into the mixer.

You can create playlists for a party, or you can edit on the fly, it’s up to you.

Interchangeable Step Sequences – if you’re using piano rolls, you can easily interchange them with step sequences. This is an upgrade to the latest edition of Fruity Loops.

Plugins – perhaps one of the best features that you will find here is in regards to the plugins that abound.

This software has a lot of plugins that you can focus on, and utilize.

Whether you want to get a unique sound, or you have a mod in mind, there’s a lot to explore in this regards.

The above features are just some of the new updates that have come through with FL Studio today.

If you download and use this overall, you will find that compared to the other releases, this is definitely the most intuitive overall.

Support and Questions

Fl Studio 12 Mac Review

One of the issues that people have with music mixing, and learning how to work with digital means it hat there usually isn’t any support.

Fl Studio 11 For Mac

If you spend a great deal of money on a program, you’re often times left on your own.

You’ll need to take classes or purchase a FL studio course like this one and figure out how to move every piece of the proverbial puzzle.

That’s not the case here, as you will find that there is full support, and manuals that you can get to help you pull through the latest aspects of this DAW.

Trial and Demo

Don’t want to buy the software? Don’t worry, you can get the trial and demo version to allow you to see what the hype is all about.

In fact, you could very well create your biggest hit within a few minutes if you just test the waters with the trial solution.

You’re going to find that this is a simple, intuitive solution for produces, and it can rival some of the more expensive options that are out there.

If you go ahead and purchase this option, you will get lifetime updates and so much more.

Is FL Studio Worth The Price?

Discussing the cost of software is always tough, because people usually run at the sound of pricing that may be a bit much.

In the case of producing beats, and making sure that your audio sounds amazing, you’ll need to spend a bit.

In this case, you can get an entry level of this software for as little as $99.

That’s right, under $100 gets you FL Studio, and you can get started.

Now, if you’re serious about music, and you want to get the professional grade option with all the bells and whistles, you’ll find that the cost rises upwards to $400.

This includes plugins, audio recording features, FL, VST elements, and of course lifetime updates.

To answer the question of whether or not it’s worthwhile, the short answer is in fact yes.

It’s a stellar program that has a lot of tools that you can use right away.

Whether you’re recording a track, mixing, or you want to test the waters as a DJ, this is something that helps anyone get into the game.

Furthermore, it’s cost effective.

You’ll find that FL Studio is far less than other comparable options, and better yet, you don’t need to have an expensive computer to run it.

Simply put, this is a simple software to get you moving forward in creating the best beats possible.