Laptop

One of Dell's fastest gaming laptops is down to a respectable price point without needing to cut back on storage, display or graphics.

The first Intel Tiger Lake-H processor has been spotted online. Seen on UserBenchmark, the processor has eight cores and is expected to feature a 96 EU Iris Xe GPU. The CPU may offer up to a 65 W TDP, too.

Canalys is reporting a second quarter of growth in the international personal computing category during the third quarter of 2020. This growth was likely driven by an increase in people working or schooling from home with overall growth up 23% compared to the same period last year.

Microsoft has issued a document outlining the dates on which its own-brand convertibles or laptops run out of software updates. It shows that the Surface Pro 3, despite launching in 2014, will get them until November 2021. Oddly, the Pro 4 will also see the end of its service on the same day.

The processors that power our phones have become so powerful that they are now designed with the kind of cooling historically only expected from high-end PCs. This involves heatsinks, thermal paste and even vapor-chambers on a mobile scale these days - to such an extent there are now signs that insulation might also start to play a role in next-gen phones.

Apple fans are rightly excited about the transition to Apple’s new in-house silicon for Macs. However, in transitioning from Intel to chips like its new M1, the popular Windows on Boot Camp feature has been lost. Parallels, however, says it’s on track to bring support for OS virtualization back to the Mac in a future release.

The Lenovo ThinkPad L15 is an affordable office laptop based on AMD's new Renoir architecture that impresses with its good workmanship and keyboard in particular.

Another example of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700U mobile APU has been spotted, this time being tested in an HP Pavilion laptop on Geekbench. The Lucienne Zen 2-based part showed good improvements over the Renoir Ryzen 7 4700U and includes SMT. However, the difference fades considerably when the Ryzen 7 5700U is compared with the Ryzen 7 4800U.

TSMC's 5 nm production is mostly focused on Apple's A14 Bionic SoCs and apparently cannot meet the projected order volume for the M1 chips. Since Samsung is the only other foundry to have operational 5 nm nodes, the South Korean foundries could once again become an Apple supplier. Nevertheless, the low yields on Samsung's 5 nm nodes might lead to sub-par performance on some M1 chips.

Apple's new M1 SoC combines different components such as an 8-core CPU, an 8-core GPU, a 16-core NPU, and memory and storage controllers onto a single chip fabbed on the 5 nm process. Leaked Geekbench scores of the M1 SoC in the newly announced 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac Mini indicate that Apple's tall claims about the M1 may be true to a large extent.

A new listing on Geekbench 5 for the M1 MacBook Air posts impressive numbers. The machine handily beat the Core i9-9880H 16-inch MacBook Pro in both single- and multi-core tests by a wide margin. More impressively, the M1 MacBook Air uses a 10 Watt CPU that is passively cooled and still beat the most powerful laptop in Apple's repertoire.

System76 recently updated its popular Galago Pro and Lemur Pro thin-and-light laptops with Intel Tiger Lake CPUs. However, the upgrade comes at a slightly higher cost. Still, System76 continues to sell compelling Linux laptops by integrating the latest hardware.

Without any formal announcement, Lenovo releases two new ThinkPad laptops onto the market: The ThinkPad L13 Gen 2 and the convertible brother ThinkPad L13 Yoga Gen 2 are the first business models with Intel Tiger Lake. At the same time, they also are the first L series ThinkPad with Thunderbolt 4.

The Dell Latitude 7410 Chromebook Enterprise 2-in-1 is one of, if not the, best Chromebooks we have ever tested. However, for ~$1580 and up, it is far too expensive for a Chromebook.

At just 989 grams, the Tiger Lake-powered Dynabook X30W-J is over 300 grams lighter than the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 or 200 grams lighter than the LG Gram 14 convertible.

Don't want to wait a few more months for the Zen 3 mobile APUs? How about some custom laptops with desktop-grade Ryzen 5000 CPUs like the NS-15 AMD workstations from Origin PC? They sure are pricier, but you are essentially replacing your desktop PC. You can choose among all four new Ryzen 5000 CPUs, including the Ryzen 9 5950X flagship.

A well-known Weibo leaker now claims that OPPO - an OEM mostly known for its smartphones and wearables - is planning to also move into the tablet space. Similarly, it is also now said to start making its own laptops, much as Xiaomi and Huawei do now. Examples of these new product categories for the company might emerge as soon as 2021.

With a suggested price of just 30 Euros, the new Sharkoon RUSH ER30 USB gaming headset comes with a rich and attractive set of features and technical specs that includes RGB illumination, 50 mm drivers, a generous cable with gold-plated connectors that measures no less than 2,2 meters, as well as two sets of ear pads.

Recently, reports of a fire breaking out at MSI's plant in Bao'an, Shenzhen arose on social media and on news sites. Now, the OEM has officially stated that these reports were true, although the incident in question was immediately met with appropriate action. No harm to workers at the factory was reported.

The sale is expected to last for only a week. Unlike most other cheap configurations, this particular offer doesn't skimp on RAM, storage, or display quality even though it comes with the fast GeForce RTX 2070 GPU.

At a whopping 200 W when gaming, the PS5 demands as much power as some of the fastest gaming laptops you can buy at the moment. The Asus Strix Scar 15 with the GeForce RTX 2070 Super, for example, consumes 201 W when gaming.

Square Enix has published its earnings report for the last 6 months (ending on September 30, 2020). It claims to have made 172.7 billion yen (~US$1.7 billion), or 46% more in sales year-on-year (YoY), for this period. This was attributed to strong performance in areas of its business such as its games (mobile titles including) and merchandising arms.

The Your Phone facility in Windows 10 is Microsoft's answer to syncing an iPhone with a macOS device. However, it has been rather restrictive in that it only allows 1 Android app open on a given phone to be mirrored on a PC's screen at any one time. A new version now gradually rolling out from the Insider Preview addresses this issue, although there are caveats to the new solution.

Large display, fast processor, sufficient storage, and an aluminum case - for around 900 Euros (~$1,054), the Honor MagicBook Pro actually offers everything that a multimedia laptop needs.

It's worth spending a bit more on the G512LW not just for its 2x faster graphics performance, but also for its significantly better display. The ghosting and poor colors on the G512LI display are disappointing for a dedicated gaming laptop.

Eluktronics will be one of the first to offer Advanced Optimus on its MECH-15 G3 and MAX-15 Ultra laptops this month for a starting price of $2100 USD. The reseller promised in September that it would begin shipping the systems before the end of the year.

An Acer Aspire 5 powered by the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 5700U Lucienne APU has popped-up on Amazon Italy. The laptop features a 15.6-inch FHD display, 8 GB RAM, and a 512 GB PCIe SSD. The chassis and port selection seem to be unchanged from the previous generation. Though now listed as not available, the laptop was initially indicated to be priced at €779.

The first alleged benchmark of the Apple A14X SoC has leaked and it underscores why Apple dumped Intel for its own silicon. If accurate, the Geekbench result puts the A14X ahead of the Intel Core i9-9880H found in the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro.

It may look like a Blade Stealth at first glance, but the Razer Book 13 is so much more. The new business laptop includes features not found on the Blade Stealth including HDMI, MicroSD, 16:10 display, and even per-key RGB lighting for a starting price of $1200 USD.

The finalized PCIe 6.0 specs should be released in late 2021, a timeframe coinciding with the first consumer implementations of the PCIe 5.0 standard from AMD and Intel. This means that we can expect to see the PCIe 6.0 consumer implementations only by 2023. PCI SIG is planning to double the PCIe bandwidth every two years, even though AMD and Intel will most likely not move that quickly.

The Predator Helios 300 brings all modern computer games smoothly onto the matte screen (Full HD, IPS, 144 Hz). Since Acer only uses one RAM module, memory runs in single-channel mode.

Powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and Radeon RX 5600M GPU, the Dell G5 15 Special Edition can offer GeForce RTX 2060-level gaming performance for the price of a typical GeForce GTX 1650 Ti laptop.

AMD's overall X86 market share at the end of Q3 2020 reached 22.4%. The desktop CPU market share is already higher than 20% and, with the launch of the Ryzen 5000 CPUs, it may quickly climb to new all-time-highs in the next few quarters. Thanks to the success recorded by the Renoir APUs, AMD's notebook market share also reached an all-time-high 20.2%, while the server sector is not doing that great with only 6.6% market share.

ARM unveiled the Cortex-A78, a new core likely to form part of flagship mobile SoCs in 2021, recently. Now, the company has revealed that it is in fact part of a family of such products. One of them is the A78C, which has been modified for specific, demanding applications that may include mixed reality (MR).

You'll have to really exploit Thunderbolt and single-threaded applications to justify owning the more expensive Intel ZenBook UX425 over the less expensive AMD ZenBook UM425. Both models utilize the exact same chassis powered by different processors.

Dell charges almost 2000 Euros for the base model of the XPS 17 9700. You still get the great chassis and a very good FHD panel, but also a slow quad-core processor from Intel with an outdated iGPU.

The Lenovo Legion 5 powered by AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and NVIDIA RTX 2060 will be available in Germany on Black Friday, according to a Lenovo customer rep. This information comes in the wake of an ongoing patent dispute between Nokia and Lenovo wherein the former sought an injunction against Lenovo resulting in a nationwide sales ban. Lenovo has since challenged the injunction and has resumed laptop and tablet sales in the region.