Laptop

Laptop Editor's Choice Awards Q1 2020. During the last three months we had a total of 59 laptops of different categories in review. Time for a summary. What notebooks scored highest? Which ones are we recommending and why? What are the best offers right now? The answers to these questions and much more can be found in the following laptop comparison.

Chromebooks are typically seen as cheap pseudo-laptops that are only fit for typing notes and browsing the web. While that was certainly the case years ago, Chromebooks and Chrome OS have rapidly matured over the past few years. Modern Chromebooks are capable machines, and while Chrome OS still has its limitations, the devices are more than glorified web browsers. Case in point: Chromebooks are now able to competently game, though there are still some caveats.

Working from home might require an investment in some computing power. There are clear advantages and disadvantages in choosing either a desktop or a laptop. From a bang-for-your-buck perspective desktops are usually the champs while offering other benefits. From a flexibility perspective, laptops clearly come out on top. So which do you choose -- a desktop or a laptop? It might come down to the work that you do.

After a brief announcement earlier at CES 2020, Intel has now detailed the 10th gen Comet Lake-H processor lineup that is expected to make its way to more than 100 laptop designs this year. Comet Lake-H finally breaks the 5 GHz barrier at 45 W with four out of the six SKUs in the lineup touted to have a single-core boost at 5 GHz or above thanks to Thermal Velocity Boost. How well this works in real life depends on a lot on the OEM's cooling implementation and chassis construction.

We have exclusively obtained the first 3DMark synthetic benchmark results of NVIDIA's newly announced RTX 2070 Super and the new RTX 2060 Mobile GPUs. We find that the RTX 2070 Super Mobile trails behind the desktop RTX 2070 Super by about 10% overall. Interestingly, we find the new RTX 2060 Mobile to be appreciably faster in most tests compared to the original version and even outpacing the RTX 2070 Max-Q ever so slightly.

NVIDIA is doing a revamp of its mobile Turing offerings today with the introduction of the RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2080 Super along with their updated Max-Q designs. The new Max-Q design offers features such as Dynamic Boost, Advanced Optimus, low-voltage GDDR6 memory, and more. NVIDIA is now positioning the RTX 2060 mobile as the GPU of choice in the hotly contested US$999 gaming laptop segment while also introducing a new GTX 1650 Ti SKU.

We got exclusive access to first benchmarks of the Intel Comet Lake-H Core i9-10880H, Core i7-10750H, and the Core i5-10300H. We compared single-core and multi-core performance of these chips with contemporary offerings from AMD viz. the Ryzen 9 4900HS and the Ryzen 7 4800H, and also 9th gen Coffee Lake-H Refresh CPUs. Although the scores further re-iterate Intel's lead in single-core performance, we see that AMD has successfully managed to narrow the gap significantly while maintaining good leads in multi-core tests.