There is a reason Dell refers to this line as Mobile Workstations and not just "laptops". We played with a Quad-core version of this monster for about two weeks and this is also the same configuration our marketing and sales team will be using on the road for the upcoming V-Studio 700 tour. If you made it out to NAMM you may also had the chance to see one of these laptops in action powering either SONAR 8 , SONAR Home Studio 7 or the V-Studio 700.
This laptop has a wealth of business-grade features that suit themselves very well for DAW use. Lots of RAM, a great video chip and a crazy high screen resolution lets you cram loads of soft-synths into your projects and still see them all on the 15.4" display! At the heart of this workstation is an Intel Core2 Quad Extreme processor (although it also available with Core2 Duo's as well). It is pretty common for laptops to have a "numbed" down processor for the sake of battery life, this is not the case with the M4400.
The case design is very modern and includes an ample amount of ports including USB 2.0, FireWire, eSATA, Express Card, PC Card slots, SD slot and a VGA port for adding a second display.
Reccomendations for DAW use:
- Disable the Wi-Fi and Blue Tooth chips for best performance, this can be done from a switch on the side of the laptop.
- If you plan on using a FireWire based audio interface, consider taking advantage of the Express and PC Card slots to add a Texas Instruments based FireWire chip.
- Keep that power supply handy! Although this machine has very stellar battery life for a laptop, running a large SONAR project does put a heavier load on the battery.
