- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 7 November 14
- RRP: £1550 inc. VAT
-
The Aorus X3 Plus works well as a portable games station, providing fast
framerates with modern games at high details settings. Its
high-resolution screen is less obviously useful for its gaming role as
fewer games may benefit from its high 262 ppi pixel density, and the
Windows platform does not support absurdly high resolution displays
well. When it does work you're rewarded with a pin-sharp image but
remember that for gaming there's arguably little need to exceed 2560 or
even 1920 screen pixel widths. Overall there's definite room for
improvement by its maker but the X3 Plus should prove popular with
Windows gamers looking to combine performance and portability.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 2 October 15
- RRP: £586.80 inc VAT
-
The Inspiron 15-5558 straddles budget and midrange laptop camps,
depending on configuration, asserting excellent build quality and decent
performance as you’d expect of a £500+ design. The screen is one of the
best you’ll find on a laptop around this price too.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 9 June 15
- RRP: £1978 inc VAT
-
The Precision M3800 is Dell’s take on the ‘Ultrabook’ portable
workstation notebook. It’s made from a mixture of materials, and has an
undersized battery in order to stay fashionably trim. In its favour, the
quad-core processor and midrange pro-certified graphics chipset provide
useful performance, and without too much histrionics from the cooling
fans. This year’s model now has a UHD 4K display although this still
serves to exaggerate problems in some Windows programs, while the overly
reflective touchscreen facility results in a heavier panel with poorer
viewing that drains the battery faster. For professional users even more
so than with consumer laptops, we here question the real worth of a
touchscreen on a laptop. Ultimately the Dell’s circa-3 hour battery life
means the M3800 is seriously compromised as a mobile productivity tool.
If you don't mind staying tethered to the mains, it is a good clothes
horse.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 20 May 15
- RRP: From £1320 (this model price TBC)
-
Hewlett Packard has done well to build a lighter weight 15-inch
mobile workstation laptop with much of the strength and integrity of its
traditional models that are far less mobile in real terms. Sacrifices
have been made to the main CPU by fitting dual-core rather than
quad-core, and the AMD GPU is a middleweight part rather than
fire-breathing FirePro. But importantly the 15u runs cool and quiet
enough not make itself a nuisance, even under load. Assuming the version
we tested will cost under £2000 it could provide decent value, majoring
on resilience more than style and sheer performance, but well enough
equipped to prove attractive to the target professional audience.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 29 January 15
- RRP: £2100 inc. VAT
-
With the help of nVidia's recent push to make powerful mobile graphics
processors that consume less energy, the Aorus X7 Pro now turns in
gaming performance once only available to desktop machines. Just make
sure you pack some sound-deadening headphones to block out the white
noise of high-speed fans required to keep this slim chassis cool. If you
can deal with the noise you'll be able to enjoy incomparable mobile
gaming.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 13 May 15
- RRP: £1750 inc. VAT
-
The Gigabyte P37X is built for gaming speed, based on a large
17-inch display chassis but in a thinner than traditional case. With the
help of the best single-chip mobile graphics processor currently on the
market it can play any game you want, up to very high rendering
quality. It may not stand out in style but it gets the job done, albeit
at a high price.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 11 August 15
- RRP: £999 inc VAT
-
Sensibly powered for great games action, while remaining portable and
comfortable to use, the GE62 is only compromised by tricky upgrade
potential and disappointing battery life. It has a great display and
respectable keyboard for gaming, and crucially plays games at high
detail without distress.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 14 May 15
- RRP: £1299 inc. VAT
-
While still not especially petite by the standards of some
15-inch laptops – its footprint is 14 percent larger than a MacBook Pro
despite its smaller display – the MSI GS60 2QD-470UK does manage to keep
within the magic size and weight figures of 2.0 kg and 20 mm, making it
the most totable gaming laptop in its category. It has the graphics
processor to take on modern games up to their highest detail settings,
and is only let down by noisy fans and a relatively short battery life.
- R
- Reviewed on: 12 October 15
- RRP: £1559 inc VAT
-
At around £1500 the G751 is a battleship in mobile gaming, in build
quality, looks and firepower. We’ve seen costlier machines but this Asus
is a bargain in relative terms, a solid desktop replacement and a
bruiser of a games station.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 22 April 15
- RRP: £849 (with 128GB storage), £999 (with 256GB)
-
After some extensive testing, we found the MacBook Air (13-inch,
Early 2015) to be little different overall to the 2014 model. The
Thunderbolt 2 update will prove useful for connecting to high-resolution
UHD displays, and a few percent of added processor power is never
unwelcome. But hoped-for improvements in graphics performance and
battery longevity did not arise in our testing, in spite of a new Intel
processor which was expected to shepherd benefits in both areas.
Launched at the same price as last year’s model it still deserves
attention as one of the finest ultraportable laptops available - doubly
so now that its flash-drive speed has shot up another 100 percent - and
it will remain the more affordable option in lightweight notebooks when
the new MacBook launches this month.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 14 April 15
- RRP: £749 (128GB model), £899 (256GB model). More expensive build-to-order options available
-
-
Available at the same price as last year, the new 11-inch MacBook
Air has the same super-fast storage as before, and around 10 percent
increase in performance. Gaming performance was always
borderline, and now we find it no better and even fractionally slower.
But overall battery runtime increased by almost a third in our tests, a
very useful upgrade on the already very decent 10 hour-plus battery life
of the previous generation.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 1 April 15
- RRP: £650 inc. VAT
-
The new ZenBook is a great home for Intel’s new Core M processor,
which proved up to basic daily tasks in Windows with no obvious lag in
the interface. Good battery life and decent screen quality are further
plus points to a well-made case with a familiar design to Apple fans. At
a price of £650 this is an attractive package as a carry-anyway Windows
laptop.
- Rating: Reviewed on: 31 October 14
- RRP: From £639 inc VAT
-
A very decent laptop replacement, and an okay tablet, the Surface Pro 3
is undeniably impressive. If you need a single device to do everything
we can't think of any better device. And when you consider the cost of
buying a discrete laptop, tablet and desktop PC the Surface Pro 3 is
priced to shift. The question remains as to whether people want a single
device rather than multiple gadgets that are better at their individual
tasks. Microsoft's latest results suggest that Surface Pro 3 is winning
hearts and minds. Has it won yours?
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 24 August 15
- RRP: £579.99 inc VAT
-
For under £600 the Aspire V3-574G is easy to recommend. It's a
commendable balance of virtues from the IPS screen, to the precise
trackpad and highly regarded CPU. Nvidia graphics allow fluid gameplay
up to 720p. The five-hour battery life, while half that of the best, may
even get you through half a day’s use away from the mains.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 30 March 15
- RRP: £1099 inc. VAT
-
The Dell XPS 13 9343 stands as a
shining beacon of hope in the world of Windows laptops, a compact laptop
that outdoes the obvious competition in some key respects like screen
quality and near-borderless display. Here is a 13.3-inch laptop that
takes up little more space than an 11.6-inch model. Poor thermal
management needs to be improved, while a non-touchscreen version could
answer other outstanding issues.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 30 March 15
- RRP: From £999
-
While it looks just like every Retina-screened 13-inch MacBook
before it, the Early 2015 revision is streets ahead of earlier models.
Its storage speed is up to double the already ground-breaking speed of
the 2013 model. The new Force Trackpad brings tangible benefits in touch
control, with an intelligent coprocessor that helps interpret our
digital movements. And the Broadwell processor, with other running
changes too, has spearheaded just about the greatest upgrade any mobile
computing user could ask for, namely insanely long battery life.
Improvements in graphics performance were less emphatic in our tests,
but at least always positive changes. The world’s finest 13-inch
notebook is now unassailable, especially given it’s kept the same
sub-£1000 price point as its predecessor.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 13 January 15
- RRP: £2116 inc. VAT
-
Most ultraportables we test are dumbed-down MacBook Air clones with
cheap construction and low-grade components. That's why it makes a
particularly refreshing change to find a Windows laptop that not just
matches but surpasses Apple's popular ultraportable in a key area like
screen quality. The price is much higher than even the Retina-display
13-inch MacBook but if you must have a laptop built for Windows that can
make a statement in build quality and top-class components, check out
EliteBook Folio 1040 G1.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 8 June 15
- RRP: From £1,599
-
-
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 13 May 15
- RRP: £1100 inc. VAT
-
The Alienware 13 is a compact yet very powerful laptop, suited to
playing all modern Windows games. It’s chunky thick but relatively
light in weight, and has been well designed and equipped to be a premium
yet still portable powerhouse.
- Rating:
- Reviewed on: 14 October 14
- RRP: £1725 inc. VAT
-
The Aorus X7 v2 is a sturdily made all-metal gaming laptop that
keeps its waistline to around 1in, even if it still tips the scales
beyond 3kg. With its dual-GPU setup it proved itself the fastest gaming
laptop in the group, albeit with an unsurprising price premium.
Read our
Aorus X7 V2 review
No comments:
Post a Comment