New laptop for SDR

ka2

I've recently got into the hobby of SDR (software-defined radio) but it looks like my laptop is starting to show its age because the CPU struggles with some of the more complex filters. So I'm putting the feelers out to see if I can get something more modern and beefy.

What I currently have was a monster in its day - a HP 8570w mobile workstation with an i7-3720QM and 16GB of DDR3. I also added a 1TB SATA SSD. It was probably worth about €2k when new (if not more) but I've had it for about 4 years. I could in theory max out the CPU by upgrading to a 3940XM (HP support it) but it’s about €200 on eBay and I'd be afraid that it still wouldn't be up to scratch as it's still 7 year old hardware at the end of the day.

Would anyone have any recommendations? The main thing I'm looking for is good CPU performance. It probably has to be a laptop because I wouldn't have the space for a desktop PC.

I don't know anything about SDR radio but doesn't seem like that cpu upgrade is worth it from benchmark comparisons

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3720QM+%40+2.60GHz&id=895

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3940XM+%40+3.00GHz&id=1482

if you're looking for a more powerful cpu then something like the lenovo 5 15 with the 8-core with SMT amd 4800u would be a good bit more powerful assuming the SDR software can utilise all cores and multi-threading

there was a deal on that laptop where you could not pay for windows and get 20% discount but I think that it's gone now

look for a similar deal or a different laptop with the same cpu if you can wait

ranking of the cpu. you can see that what it can achieve for a 15w laptop cpu is impressive

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_4800u-1142

As a comparison your current cpu gets 694 single-core score and 2652 multi-core on Geekbench 5 benchmark (good overall benchmark test).

The AMD 4800u gets 1,150 points for the single-core test and 7,047 points for the multi-core.

So on multi-core it's over 2.5 times more powerful.

Mech1

Are you sure? I know little about sdr but my feed is running all but 1 frequency to live atc through 2 sdr's, 2 rasberri pies and the one antenna. all working fine. https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=eidw

ka2

ka2 wrote: »

I've recently got into the hobby of SDR (software-defined radio) but it looks like my laptop is starting to show its age because the CPU struggles with some of the more complex filters. So I'm putting the feelers out to see if I can get something more modern and beefy.

What I currently have was a monster in its day - a HP 8570w mobile workstation with an i7-3720QM and 16GB of DDR3. I also added a 1TB SATA SSD. It was probably worth about €2k when new (if not more) but I've had it for about 4 years. I could in theory max out the CPU by upgrading to a 3940XM (HP support it) but it’s about €200 on eBay and I'd be afraid that it still wouldn't be up to scratch as it's still 7 year old hardware at the end of the day.

Would anyone have any recommendations? The main thing I'm looking for is good CPU performance. It probably has to be a laptop because I wouldn't have the space for a desktop PC.

You should have no problem with most SDR's at that spec.

Some SDR's work fine even on a Raspberry PI, My Airspy HF+ runs perfectly on a Raspberry Pi 3. Then again it does only show 750 odd Khz of bandwidth, but, in reality that's plenty for me.

IF you were running 2+ Mhz of bandwidth then it does cause higher CPU usage.

What SDR are you using ? and what are you listening to ?

I got 2 Kiwi SDRs online, check out the links.

http://emeraldsdr.ddns.net:8074/

http://emeraldsdr1.ddns.net:8073/

By the way, the correct place for this topic is Hobby Radio, for all things SDR and Radio, Amateur Radio etc, this is the best place for a response, I stumbled on this thread by accident from a Google search.

Do you have an Amateur Radio License ?

https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=922

ka2

Well I got myself sorted. Got a great deal on a refurbished HP ZBook 15 G5 - Core i7-8850H, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a Quadro P1000 video card. 3 year onsite warranty too. I wasn't looking for 32GB of RAM but it will do nicely for VMs.

Regarding the SDR stuff, I'm still very new to this. I couldn't run the sample gr-rds RX graphs in GNU Radio without audio underruns and hacktv didn't work with the VSB filters enabled; I'd get choppy video even with just a test card. Thankfully this sails through it all. My old laptop also didn't officially support Windows 10 and I was running into driver issues with the touchpad and sound card so I'm glad to have that behind me now.

ka2

ka2 wrote: »

Well I got myself sorted. Got a great deal on a refurbished HP ZBook 15 G5 - Core i7-8850H, 32GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a Quadro P1000 video card. 3 year onsite warranty too. I wasn't looking for 32GB of RAM but it will do nicely for VMs.

Regarding the SDR stuff, I'm still very new to this. I couldn't run the sample gr-rds RX graphs in GNU Radio without audio underruns and hacktv didn't work with the VSB filters enabled; I'd get choppy video even with just a test card. Thankfully this sails through it all. My old laptop also didn't officially support Windows 10 and I was running into driver issues with the touchpad and sound card so I'm glad to have that behind me now.

I've no experience with GNU Radio, why do you want to use this ?