Alienware m17 R4 Review: The Fastest Gaming Laptop Yet

Just a few months ago, we reviewed the Alienware m15 R4, a seriously powerful 15.6-inch form factor laptop that, at the time, posted the best gaming performance benchmark results we had ever seen from a notebook. Not that we were particularly surprised—armed with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU based on Ampere and a 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10870H CPU (Comet Lake) CPU, it packs some serious artillery. Well, we've now tested an even faster gaming laptop, and it just so happens to be the 17-inch Alienware m17 R4. Call it sibling rivalry, if you wish, but the bigger 17.3-inch brother to...

Best Chromebooks Of 2021: Acer, ASUS And Lenovo Go Head To Head

by Brandon Hill - Fri, Jun 11, 2021

Check Out These Great Chromebook Options From Some Of The Most Trusted Names In Computing Unless you've been living under a rock, you already know that the Chromebook market is red hot at the moment. The COVID-19 pandemic and the sharp increase in demand for cheap computing devices from everyday consumers and school systems has led to a significant surge in Chromebook adoption. With this in mind, we decided to pull together a roundup of three current-generation Chromebooks that cover a broad pricing spectrum from Lenovo, ASUS, and Acer. Our Video Deep-Dive Of Chromebook Contenders Lenovo Duet Convertible...

AMD Radeon RX 6800M Rips Benchmarks In Powerful All-AMD ASUS Gaming Laptop

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 31, 2021

During her Computex 2021 keynote this evening, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, along with compatriots Frank Azor and Scott Herkleman, revealed a number of the company’s new products an initiatives, targeting the server, desktop and mobile markets. For gamers, perhaps the most enticing announcement was the revelation of AMD's Radeon RX 6000M series of mobile GPUs. Though Dr. Su had mentioned that mobile RDNA 2-based Radeons were inbound back at CES earlier this year, it wasn’t until today that the actual line-up with specs, speeds and feeds was announced. The flagship product in the Radeon RX 6000M...

Intel Expands Tiger Lake-U Laptop Line-Up, Teases Vicious Beast Canyon NUC

by Ben Funk - Sun, May 30, 2021

Computex might be a virtual online-only show this year, but you should expect some big announcements from many of the heavy hitters in tech. The virtual show kicks off May 31 at 7:30 AM local time in Taipei, which translates to 10:30 PM Eastern on Sunday the 30th in the U.S. While there will undoubtedly be a ton of announcements over the next few days coming out of the show, we do have some early news tonight from Intel, to get the show started. Intel hosted a press and analyst Performance Workshop, and has lifted the curtain on how it's expanding the Tiger Lake product lineup, with a few new point...

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 Review: Ultralight Greatness

by Dave Altavilla - Thu, May 27, 2021

Lenovo's venerable ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been one of the longest-running of the company's trusted business-class laptop series. Now in its 9th generation, Lenovo sought to re-energize the X1 Carbon not only with Intel 11th Gen Core Series processors (Tiger Lake), but with Intel Evo certification that brings with it a number of key refinements. The machine that we have on tap for review here today also includes an impressive new 16:10 format UHD+ (3840X2400) display. Though the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 retains its unmistakably classic and understated hybrid carbon fiber weave and magnesium alloy...

Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 Review: Zen 3 Laptop Invasion

by Ben Funk - Thu, May 20, 2021

Over the last eight months or so, segment by segment, AMD's various Zen 3-based processors have taken the world by storm. High performance servers, desktops, and notebooks all feature AMD's flagship silicon, thanks in no small part to its excellent perf-per-watt and strong overall value proposition. That dynamic really started in 2020, but we could sense a bit of hesitancy on the part of manufacturers with last year's Ryzen 4000 series gaming notebooks, since those topped out with midrange graphics. This year, though, the kid gloves have come off and higher-end graphics options have been made available. ...

Intel Core i9-11980HK Preview: 8-Core Tiger Lake-H Unleashed

by Marco Chiappetta - Mon, May 17, 2021

Last week, Intel officially unveiled its Tiger Lake-H45 based H-Series 11th Gen Core processor line-up, for high-performance gaming laptops and mobile workstations. The flagship consumer processor in the family is the Core i9-11980HK. The Core i9-11980HK is an 8-core / 16-thread processor, with a base clock of 2.6GHz and maximum turbo clock of 5GHz on one or two cores, when Intel’s Turbo Boost technology kicks in. The Core i9-11980HK supports DDR4 memory at speeds up to 3,200MHz, but this particular “HK” processor is also fully unlocked and overclockable via Intel’s XTU...

Intel 11th Gen Core H45 Tiger Lake-H CPUs Launch To Push Laptop Performance Envelope

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, May 11, 2021

In early January, Intel officially announced its Tiger Lake-H mobile platform. For those that missed it, Tiger Lake-H is the foundation of the 11th Gen H-Series mobile processors. Like mainstream 11th Gen mobile processors, Tiger Lake-H is based on the 10nm Tiger Lake architecture, but Intel upped the ante with the H-series in terms of performance and features, and also pushed the form factor envelope. In addition to traditional gaming notebook form factors, Intel boasted that the new 11th Gen Core H-Series Tiger Lake-H processors would appear in high-performance gaming laptops as thin as 16.4mm,...

HP ZBook Fury 15 G7 Review: A Potent Mobile Workstation

by Ben Funk - Tue, May 04, 2021

Normally when people think of "business-class laptops" they envision moderately powerful systems that handle office productivity tasks and web browsing duties with plenty of performance to keep employees productive, but without frivolous cost-adding features. On the flip side, workstations conjure images of tremendously powerful beasts with all the right kinds of excess: plenty of cores, tons of memory, and high-end professional graphics with certified drivers for powerful, mission-critical applications. Somewhere in the middle is the mobile workstation market, where hybrid laptops like the HP...

Dell Latitude 7320 Detachable Review: Eclipsing Surface Pro

by Ben Funk - Tue, Apr 27, 2021

The detachable hybrid 2-in-1 laptop category may sound somewhat exotic, but these convertible tablet PCs aren't exactly a new thing. Hybrid devices with keyboard docks -- either first-party or made by other manufacturers -- are available that run Android, iPad OS, and of course Windows 10. Perhaps the most well-known detachable hybrids are from Microsoft's long-running Surface Pro family, including the x86-powered Surface Pro 7 and Arm64-equipped Surface Pro X. Dell is now throwing its latest entrant into this arena with the new Latitude 7320 Detachable.  At a quick glance, the Latitude 7320...

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 Review: A Mighty Zen 3 Gaming Laptop

by Ben Funk - Wed, Apr 21, 2021

At CES 2020, ASUS unveiled the ROG Zephyrus G14, which as its name implies is a 14" gaming notebook. It was our first experience with Zen 2-based APUs from AMD, particularly the 35-Watt Ryzen 9 4900HS. That processor had eight cores with AMD's best CPU architecture at the time, and despite the thin design and tight thermal budget of the G14, the performance of both the Ryzen APU and the included GeForce RTX 2060 with Max-Q really knocked our socks off. The system was relatively light, possessed performance that far exceeded its weight class, and was quite eye-catching with its unique, perforated...

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Review: A Petite Premium Powerhouse

by Nathan Ord - Thu, Apr 08, 2021

Lenovo's flagship ThinkPad X1 lineup has historically been one of our favorite business-class laptop product lines. Lenovo made a quick transition recently, and upgraded this popular laptop series with Intel's 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors that roared onto the scene with a nice performance lift and useful platform updates late last year. Besides the platform upgrade though, Lenovo also pulled a proverbial rabbit out of its hat when it dropped Tiger Lake into the thin and light 1.99lb ThinkPad X1 Nano. The performance-per-pound ratio of this machine should prove impressive and make for a solid,...

HP Spectre X360 13 (2021) Review: Gem-Cut Beauty Of A Laptop

by Paul Lilly - Fri, Mar 26, 2021

As time goes on, more laptops built around Intel's Evo platform are emerging, bringing with them a combination of specifications and features that meet or exceed specific baseline criteria for performance, battery life, connectivity, and a few other bits. These common threads weave through Intel's Tiger Lake silicon with Xe graphics, which are key cogs in the Evo machine. HP's latest refresh of its Spectre X360 13 for 2021 is one of those laptops, blending luxury styling with Intel's newest generation CPUs and graphics, and the result is an absolutely gorgeous convertible with plenty of zip. The...

Alienware m15 R4 Review: A GeForce RTX 30 Series Invasion

by Ben Funk - Tue, Jan 26, 2021

Alienware's m15 series of notebooks has typically impressed us, thanks to the family's performance and unique good looks in a relatively svelte mobile package. Performance always hinges upon having the latest platform hardware, so perhaps it's no surprise that the laptop we're looking at today has one of NVIDIA's latest mobile Ampere GPUs on board from its new GeForce RTX 30 family. When NVIDIA pulled the lid off mobile Ampere, it made some pretty big promises. Performance across the Ampere lineup that spans from RTX 3060 to 3080 should be faster than NVIDIA's previous mobile powerhouse, the...

MSI Prestige 14 EVO Review: Great Performance And Value

by Ben Funk - Wed, Jan 20, 2021

Intel's Tiger Lake mobile platform came out of the gate swinging, with excellent performance and improved power efficiency. The early Core i7-1185G7 development platform we evaluated set several mobile processor records in our benchmarks, and retail notebooks were just as strong when they arrived. So far we've reviewed two such notebooks from ASUS and Dell, but both of those targeted the 2-in-1 segment and commanded a bit of premium as a result, due to their smaller sizes and expanded feature sets. For folks who don't mind (or rather, prefer) the traditional clamshell form factor, and would like...

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Review: Ryzen Powered Thin And Light

by Marco Chiappetta - Tue, Dec 29, 2020

Lenovo was among the first partners to announce support for AMD’s Ryzen 4000 U-series mobile processors. When it initially unveiled the processors, AMD also revealed the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7, which was the first thin-and-light, ultrabook-class machine to pack an 8-core / 16-thread processor. To date, all other notebooks in this category featured dual or quad-core processors, with support for up to 8-threads. That kind of bump in core count could mean big things for the kind of multi-threaded workloads that are increasingly becoming more common among content creators and heavy multi-taskers....

Lenovo Yoga 7i Review: Premium Intel Evo Laptop On A Budget

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Dec 22, 2020

As time goes on, Intel's 10-nanometer Tiger Lake processors will pounce on more laptop designs, given that it has only been a handful of weeks since the chip maker launched its latest mobile CPUs (which replace Ice Lake). Lenovo was quick out of the gate, however, and the company sent us an interesting sub-$1,000 Tiger Lake configuration from its rather plentiful 2-in-1 lineup. Specifically, the Lenovo Yoga 7i that arrived on our doorstep, and it's a flexible 14-inch convertible which is also the first to land in our lab armed with an 11th Gen Core i5-1135G7 processor in tow. Our dalliances with...

Dell XPS 13 2-In-1 Review: A Stylish Tiger Lake Convertible

by Ben Funk - Thu, Nov 19, 2020

Intel's 10-nanometer Tiger Lake processors have one of the fastest CPU architectures available in Windows notebooks today. That's not to say they've got the fastest overall CPUs, though. There are competing mobile processors available with more cores and support for additional threads that are better suited for complex, multi-threaded tasks. It does, however, mean that right now Intel's single-threaded performance in Windows notebooks is king. It only makes sense, then, that Dell would want to bring Tiger Lake to its XPS 13 2-in-1 family as quickly as possible, because fast single-thread performance...

Acer Aspire 5 A515 Laptop Spied With Ryzen 7 5700U Lucienne APU

by Ben Funk - Sat, Nov 07, 2020

On the desktop, AMD's Ryzen 5000 family is quite remarkable. These CPUs thump anything available from Intel in the single-threaded performance department. Not only that, they also bring the multi-threaded hurt on loads that can handle it. All around, they have amazing performance at attractive prices. The only thing that's missing is Ryzen 5000 in notebooks. Now, some mobile Ryzen machines are starting to peek their heads out of hiding.  AMD's newest, still unannounced CPUs will apparently make their way into Acer's Aspire 5 family of notebooks. According to this listing on Amazon's Italian...

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 Review: A 14-Inch 4K Convertible

by Ben Funk - Thu, Oct 22, 2020

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 series, the company's flagship notebook lineup, is no stranger to our offices. The various iterations of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon are some of our favorite ultra-light notebooks. In recent years, Lenovo has pushed the X1 family into 2-in-1 convertible devices as well, and we've very much liked these types of systems in the past as well. Today, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 has returned to us, with a 360-degree hinge and a punchy 14-inch 4K display.  The updated ThinkPad X1 Yoga arrived with an Intel 10th-generation Core processor. However, Intel's product naming recently...

Surface Laptop Go Review: Microsoft’s Value Play Delivers

by Ben Funk - Tue, Oct 13, 2020

Lots of HotHardware readers love to learn about, look at, and experience high-end portable PCs with their sturdy build quality, luxurious materials, and high-end specs, but not everyone has the budget to buy one for themselves. An interesting subgenre of premium ultra-portable PCs is the upscale Chromebook, like Google's Pixelbook Go or Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook. Those machines have some gorgeous hardware with nice-enough specs, but can't run Windows apps. What if there was a premium middle ground with good performance at an attractive price? That's right where Microsoft has aimed its Surface...

Alienware m15 R3 Review: A Quieter, Powerful Gaming Laptop

by Paul Lilly - Tue, Oct 06, 2020

Thin and light gaming laptops are no longer a novelty, as practically every PC maker offers their own take on the category. Some of them don't always stand-out from the crowd, however, and can push the envelope on thermals in ever-tighter chassis designs. That is most definitely not the case with Dell's Alienware m15 R3 though, unless you want to compare it to last year's Alienware m15 R2. At a passing glance, this year's refresh looks just like last year's model. That is not a bad thing, as the new m15 R3 is a head-turning laptop with some notable improvements to this newest iteration, including...