Questions: Apple or Dell – which is better for TD? I assume Dell, in which case is there a particular model/spec. of Dell laptop that would be ideal? (Looking currently at the Precision 754 with NVIDIA Quadro T2000 w/4GB GDDR5 dell.com/en-au/work/shop/wo … 7540wm04au).
Context: I work at a university teaching Creative Music Technology (Ableton, Pure data, a little Arduino, some TD), we teach entirely with Apple (currently) but the university is willing to supply either an Apple or Dell laptop. My options are therefore a Macbook Pro (with Radeon Pro Vega) or if I go the Dell route I’m less sure what the best move is, though it seems that NVIDIA is recommended…
Currently working on a 4-year-old (+) Macbook Pro, which gets VERY hot when running TD. For this reason, I’ve started running most of my audio-stuff on an iPad (Pure data via MobMuPlat) and am ‘just’ using the current laptop for visuals (with communication via MIDI). I do use Ableton too and if it were possible to run Ableton and TD on one machine (Mac or PC) that would be the ideal….
Hello,
Eternal question… With my experience, coming from 30 years of exclusive Mac computers, I bought a MSI 65G two years ago for TD and I dont regret it. But I continue to use Mac for some jobs and particularly for sound jobs, its so easier on Mac, concerning midi routing, sound routing, mix of different softwares outputting to the same sound card, mix of different sample rates.
Mac are better build and the system is easier to tune, but you are stuck with AMD graphic card and weak cooling.
A middle of the road solution would be to install Windows with bootcamp but its not the easier one and you have to restart.
TD, even in Windows make the machine very hot because of the huge use of GPU but in Windows its easier to manage fans and Mac machine are so closed thats cooling is not very efficient.
My solution: a Windows 15" gamer computer with nVidia graphic card and fans tune on “turbo” for the images part of my work, a macBook 13" without graphic card for the sound part. With OSC for data and Dante Via for sound, you can easily exchange between them (even images with NDI) and TDAbleton system is very efficient.
Jacques
If you go for the Dell, do not upgrade to the higher-spec 8-core CPU as it will be slower for TouchDesigner than the default 6-core CPU as clockspeed is more important than core count for TouchDesigner. Its unfortunate that its a Xeon with a base frequency of 2.80, the i7s are often base around 3.30 which would be much better.
Nvidia Quadro 2000 will be nice, that Dell would be better imo than the Macbook Pro for TouchDesigner, but can you live without your macOS applications for other tasks? You could also pickup a personal smaller/lighter Macbook for the other things and carry both like so many of us do
