Ten... Core i5 laptops
Sandy Bridge computing on the go
Product Round-up After a slight hiccough with its Cougar Point 6 chip-set, Intel’s spiffy new Sandy Bridge Core i5 chips are finally starting to arrive in laptops from all the usual suspects. To herald their arrival Reg Hardware has donned its Phil Drabble cap and rounded up ten of the new breed, poked them with a benchmark stick or two and generally abused them to ensure they don’t fall apart as soon as you get them out of the box.
In the line-up there are machines from a wallet-friendly £500 to an eye-watering £1,300 and screens with 13, 14 and 15 inches between the corners. These include machines for the home, machines for work, machines with BD players, even machines with touch screens. If you can’t find what you want here, well there is just no pleasing you.
By way of housekeeping all the tests where performed using Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage and 3DMark applications. To test the power packs I ran PCMark Vantage in a loop until shutdown. It’s a brutal test - a bit like sleep depriving the suspect in the incident room - so you can comfortably double the number shown for every day use as long as you are not running the optical drive continuously.
It's sign of how far laptops have come in the last few years that all the machines on test, even those without discrete graphics cards, ran Crysis smoothly after a quick fiddle in the settings menu.
Next page: Acer Aspire 5750G
COMMENTS
p**s poor screen resolutions
What is it with this new fad of crippling every new computer with a 1366x768 screen resolution? Seriously - a resolution that low should be limited to netbooks and screens <12". By law.
Not everyone is so blind as to need their desktop icons to be the size of their fist - and some people actually like having a bit of screen real-estate to work with. When will the manufacturers realise this?
I don't care if I have to pay a (small) premium to get a proper screen, but the option should *always* be given.
(yes, I know the Dell E6420 does give the option - but that doesn't excuse the fact that it is crap and is a total disgrace to the Latitude name.)
And any manufacturer that thinks 1366x768 is ok on a 15" screen should be banned from making any more computers. Ever.
For the record.
If any of the machines had given me a metrosexual wank-spasm I'd have automatically awarded them 100%.
Whiny crybaby fanbois
What a surprise, a flock of whiny apple fanbois up in arms like insulted scientologists because their overpriced underspecced shrinetop doesn't have the reviewer quivering in a post review metrosexual wank-spasm.
IPS Panel
Macbook Pro's use a TN panel, not IPS. Plus I also find the glass really annoying in terms of reflections (probably why I bought a 15" Macbook Pro with AG screen).
Not unreasonable of Acer
Unlike CRTs, LCDs have a native resolution, the resolution that has a 1:1 mapping between your desktop resolution and your display's resolution. The display physically can't go any higher.
Even if your OS allowed itself to be set to a higher res (there may even be hack tools for the GPU which allow this) it would still have to downscale to fit the physical resolution. And yes the answer is to plug in an external monitor or buy some hulking 17" laptop to get a higher res. At the end of the day, it's a tradeoff, although 1366x768 is still perfectly adequate for 720p content and video players would downscale 1080p content to the output window size too.
I am not surprised by your other concerns. Few laptop manufactures bother providing physical OS disks any more. Most stick the OS in a "recovery partition". Yes it is cheap of them and petty. Perhaps you can back the partition up with with a burner or they provide a tool to do it.
What you're asking from the HDMI port is never going to happen. HDMI is a client / server protocol. No laptop manufacturer is going to bother implementing some kind of multi purpose HDMI port. Just copy the videos from your phone onto the computer via an SD card or USB cable and play them that way.
