Alienware m15 R4 Review: A GeForce RTX 30 Series Invasion

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...

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371 Review: Tiger Lake Bite, OLED Pop

by Ben Funk - Wed, Sep 30, 2020

The last few weeks has been full of exciting product launches, and it seems like it might not let up for the next couple of months. One mammoth release among them is the emergence of Tiger Lake, Intel's 11th-generation Core processor lineup for notebooks and 2-in-1 laptops. We've already looked at Intel's reference platform, and the performance was impressive. It wasn't just single-threaded processing power that set Tiger Lake apart from the competition, either. Its graphics performance, which comes from an integrated GPU based on Intel's Xe graphics architecture, was pretty stellar.  We were...

Lenovo Flex 5G Review: Incredible Battery Life With Caveats

by Ben Funk - Tue, Sep 29, 2020

While we are still in the early stages, more and more PC manufacturers have jumped aboard the Windows on Arm train. First we had Microsoft's initial offering, the Surface Pro X. Then Samsung joined the fray with the traditional-looking Galaxy Book S, with battery life that lasted for days. Now Lenovo has crashed the party with the Flex 5G, a machine with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx 5G system on a chip (SoC) stuffed inside a versatile, a do-it-all convertible 2-in-1 design.  Reviewing an Arm-based Windows PC every few months gives us a glimpse into the evolution of the Arm ecosystem. At first,...

Intel Tiger Lake And Xe Graphics Benchmarks: Laptops Will Roar

by Dave Altavilla - Thu, Sep 17, 2020

Intel has been showcasing its forthcoming Tiger Lake mobile processor line-up since its public debut in January of this year at CES. However, more recently the company disclosed the architecture powering the 11th Gen Core series CPUs at its Architecture Day 2020 event and then followed-up quickly with a full product stack unveil. To say anticipation is high for this product would be an understatement. Intel has a lot riding on Tiger Lake, with its Willow Cove cores and more importantly perhaps, its 10nm SuperFin transistors and Xe Graphics technologies that will underpin a whole new family of products...

Samsung Galaxy Book S Shoot-Out: Intel Lakefield Vs. Snapdragon 8cx

by Ben Funk - Thu, Sep 03, 2020

Windows 10 on Arm is starting to gain more traction, thanks to a bevy of new systems based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx high-performance mobile SoC, and its second-gen follow-on which was just announced. Those laptops have all been defined by two common traits: exceptional battery life with still a few lingering app compatibility issues. Some app developers have been reticent to get on board the Arm-64 express and Microsoft is yet to enable emulation for 64-bit x86 applications, which limits overall compatibility. However, when an app does have a native Arm binary performance is solid, and the...

Intel Unveils Entire Tiger Lake 11th Gen Family, Smokes Ryzen 4000 In Gaming And Creation

by Brandon Hill - Wed, Sep 02, 2020

Today is Tiger Lake's big day, Intel’s 11th generation Core architecture destined for thin and light laptops (read our Intel Architecture Day 2020 coverage of Tiger Lake here). Tiger Lake has been a long time coming and represents a huge leap in performance over the previous generation Intel Ice Lake family, and it's built on a more advanced Intel 10nm process node too. Straight out of the gate during Intel's virtual launch event, Intel came out guns blazing for AMD. AMD has gained market share and clout with its 7nm Zen 2-based Ryzen 4000 mobile processors, which have been very competitive...

Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Review: A Fantastic Ryzen-Powered Laptop

by Ben Funk - Wed, Aug 26, 2020

We've been looking forward to this day ever since we first got our hands on a trio of high-powered gaming notebooks powered by AMD's Ryzen 4000 processors. We already know the Renoir-based CPUs could deliver excellent performance at an attractive price in higher power envelopes where the Ryzen 7 4900HS and Ryzen 7 4800H reside. But how would AMD's lowest-power chips, like the Ryzen 5 4600U and Ryzen 7 4700U handle their constrained thermal budgets? And could AMD's typical budget-conscious pricing keep system costs low? Lenovo's ThinkPad X13 Gen 1 notebook will answer those questions for us today....

Dell XPS 15 9500 Review: A Case Study In Laptop Excellence

by Paul Lilly - Thu, Jul 02, 2020

Remember when Coca-Cola reformulated its popular soft drink in the mid 1980s? The so-called New Coke formula barely lasted a few months before it failed and the original was brought back. The company already had a good thing on its hands and it was a valuable real-world lesson in not trying to reinvent the wheel when the one you have spins well. On the surface, soft drinks and laptops like Dell's new for 2020 XPS 15 9500 don't have anything in common, so why bring it up? Generally speaking, this concept also applies to what Dell has done with its XPS 15 series of laptops, or not done, as the case...

ASUS TUF Gaming A15 Review: Ryzen Power With GeForce RTX Pop

by Ben Funk - Fri, Jun 12, 2020

It's official: from what we've seen so far, AMD's Ryzen 4000 series of mobile APUs are a hit here in the HotHardware labs. It started with the svelte ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming notebook, which impressed us with excellent performance at a reasonable price point, all packed into a lightweight 2.7-pound 14" chassis. After that came the Dell G5 15 SE, which brought together Ryzen and Radeon in an exclusive (for now) combination with similarly excellent performance and an even lower, more entry-level starting price. Talk about a strong showing for AMD yet again, with both Ryzen 4000 and Radeon RX...

Dell XPS 17 9700 Review: The 17-Inch Laptop Gold Standard

by Chris Goetting - Tue, Jun 09, 2020

Dell’s premium XPS family of notebooks is growing, literally. The company recently announced the all-new XPS 17, and as the name implies, this new Dell laptop features a spacious – and gorgeous – 17-inch display. It also features the updated design language introduced with the company’s redesigned XPS 13 9380, and the new 2020 XPS 15 9500 carries that DNA as well. A 17-inch laptop may sound cumbersome to some folks that might travel a lot with their notebook. Fortunately, Dell did more than simply scale up the previous generation XPS 15. The new design language features...

Samsung Galaxy Book S Review: Thin, Sleek, Big Battery Life

by Ben Funk - Fri, May 29, 2020

Always-on, always-connected PCs like the Samsung Galaxy Book S -- the kind of machines that are ready to go first thing in the morning and last all day and night, while never losing an internet connection thanks to cellular connectivity -- are a potential game changer for some users. Manufacturers have tried to make this happen with tablets, but haven't entirely been successful. Half-computers like the iPad Pro may have been "blessed" with $300 keyboards, but iPadOS can be pretty limiting for real work. This seems like a job for full-blown Windows and a proper clamshell, but x86 notebooks...

Lenovo Yoga C940 Review: A Great Ice Lake 2-In-1 Laptop

by Ben Funk - Wed, May 27, 2020

Variety is the spice of life. Nobody would be happy with just one flavor of ice cream, a single car, or the monotony of a single video game. Thankfully, we don't live in a world like that, so even premium 2-in-1 laptops come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Today we're going to take a look at Lenovo's Yoga C940 convertible notebook, which is a bit different than some of the other foldable computers we have evaluated over the last few months. You see, the C940 is one of the bigger convertibles around. It's got a full 14-inch display and ample bezels, all of which make it larger than the Dell XPS...

Dell G5 15 SE: Testing AMD Radeon Vega 7 Integrated Graphics

by Ben Funk - Mon, May 25, 2020

When we reviewed the Dell G5 15 SE, an all-AMD gaming laptop that features an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor and a Navi-based Radeon RX 5600M, we didn't have a chance to dive into integrated graphics performance. The gaming battery life with powerful discrete graphics left something to be desired of course—the system lasted just an hour on battery with a gaming workload—but bypassing the discrete GPU should give a bit more time away from the wall socket. Folks wanted to know how this integrated AMD GPU performs, and come to think of it, so did we. So now it's time to find out.  If...

Dell G5 15 SE Laptop Review: All-AMD Gaming With SmartShift

by Ben Funk - Thu, May 21, 2020

AMD is in an enviable position in the gaming laptop world. Not only does the red team arguably produce some of the fastest mainstream mobile CPUs around in its Ryzen 4000 series, there's also formidable graphics horsepower in the same camp. As a result, AMD can control the whole platform, hardware and driver stack in a PC with its CPU, GPU, and accompanying chipset, if a manufacturer chooses to use those components. The first of these gaming laptops to hit the lab with an all-AMD bent comes from Dell. The G5 15 SE launches today with a feature set, performance target, and price point that makes...