Ten... Core i5 laptops

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.