The Wolfdale series processors also have excellent heat and power management.Īnother option is the HP Elitebook 2530p notebook which is still available on Tiger Direct for less than $620. If you are in the Pacific Northwest, come and join the Pacific Northwest Audio Society as we are doing a group-build of a Firewire/USB/Toslink music server based around a Pentium Wolfdale CPU and Foobar. I read in a couple of forums that the latest Mac Mini with a SSD is the best sounding Apple platform for Amarra - assuming you mean the Apple platform since that is the only OS that Amarra runs on. These are some of the things I can think of. I would assume as Don mentions that you are using outboard DAC as I don't know if there is any laptop with decent analog audio fidelity. If the LCD backlight is not LED, I would turn off the LCD as to shut off its high voltage inverted for the CCFL bulbs (although this would naturally occur if you are controlling it remotely).
And use Windows 7 to reduce chances of "garbage collection" in the SSD which changes its access pattern. If you are using SSD, I would turn off paging, as with this fixed application you would not run out of memory. Do you mean large desktop replacement laptops versus smaller notebooks? If so, the former might have some kind of digital out so if you don't want to use a USB dac, that might be useful although it likely will not be very clean from performance point of view. I am not sure what distinction you are using between Notebook and laptop. I would load it up with more RAM as to reduce probability of disk access.
For a machine dedicated to audio, core i3 is plenty powerful and then some.
I am a fan of Intel Core i3/i5 series due to their much better power management as compared to older Core 2 series. Computationally, any laptop which has been released in the last five years is sufficient for audio playback.