laptopreview
Latest
The new Razer Blade Pro trades gimmicks for 4K gaming power
When Razer made its first laptop, it was a company best known for selling third-party gamepads and high-performance gaming mice. Premium gimmicks were the name of the game. The company routinely released products with 17 buttons, adjustable tension analog sticks or retractable parts. This flair for novelty carried over to Razer's first gaming notebook, which featured a set of 10 customizable keyboard buttons that each housed its own tiny LED display. It was neat, but the flagship laptop was soon overshadowed by a smaller, more powerful model. Now, the company is finally giving its original notebook the upgrades it deserves: a screaming new processor, the latest in graphics technology and a keyboard without the hindrance of the original's silly "Switchblade" interface. This is the new Razer Blade Pro.
MSI GT70 Dominator review: everything it's supposed to be, not much else
Thin and light gaming notebooks may be a new trend, but they're by and large the exception. Traditional gaming rigs look more like MSI's GT70 Dominator: large, heavy and questionably portable. It's an old-school gaming laptop, one that truly fits the term "desktop replacement." It's also the complete antithesis to the sleek gaming notebooks that have swept the market in recent years. Is bigger still better? Let's find out.
Sony's budget-friendly VAIO VGN-NR160E laptop gets reviewed
Sony sure got the price right with its new NR Series VAIO laptops, and the folks at Laptop Magazine seem to think the company got quite a bit else right as well, with them bestowing their Editors' Choice award on the VGN-NR160E model. Winning the laptop the most favors is, of course, its $829 price tag, which buys you a 15.4-inch WXGA display, a 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5,400 rpm SATA hard drive. They were also especially impressed by the laptop's battery, which lasted 2 hours and 19 minutes in their DVD rundown test and a full 3 hours and 41 minutes during their general productivity test. On the downside, all the "crapware" pre-loaded on the laptop resulted in a drag in performance (removing it boosted the PCMark05 score by 139 points), and they were also somewhat disappointed by the laptop's lack of 802.11n capability. That only proved to be enough to knock a half a star off the five star rating, however, which would seem to make this laptop a fairly solid bet for anyone looking to keep things under the $1,000 mark.
