Laptop

A tiny companion. Small, light, affordable: pretty much all old-school netbooks fit the bill in that regard. To make them truly usable, they also need to be equipped with good input devices, a decent display and feature a long battery life. Despite the fact that Asus' netbook offers a good price-to-value ratio, the user has to deal with a few drawbacks as well.

Hot head. The Acer Aspire E5-473G is an inexpensive multimedia notebook with current components. Thanks to the dedicated Nvidia GeForce 940M GPU, even gaming sessions are possible. The cooling solution, however, reaches its limit pretty quickly and the display is pretty low-cost as well.

Great display.HP’s 17.3-inch device, equipped with the necessary features is supposed to replace your desktop PC at home. However, the highlight is the great IPS display, which can cover the sRGB color space by 97%.

Gaming with limits. The Asus slogan for the new 15-inch ROG device is "Gaming Without Limits", which is unfortunately not the case because of the GeForce GTX 950M. If the limited performance is sufficient for you, you get a well-balanced multimedia notebook with an SSD, great input devices and a convincing display for 1,200 Euros (~$1354), which is, however, not without some flaws.

Gaming on a tight budget. The MSI GE series is already the manufacturer's entry-level gaming series. Now, the GP series is taking that extra step to make gaming even more affordable. What exactly has been cut along the way?

Ups and downs. Toshiba's Satellite P50 might convince with its good screen and decent system performance. However, inconsistencies are noticed in the build and particularly in temperature development. Nevertheless, the stylish all-rounder is a worthy player in the multimedia category.

A new perspective. It is not long since we had the US model of the Asus UX501JW in our hands and we were impressed by the overall concept including the 4K display. Now, the ZenBook is available in Germany with a matte display. Unfortunately, not everything has turned out for the better.

On the right path. For just 600 Euros (~$667), the HP Pavilion 17-g054ng offers a modern quad-core APU including Crossfire graphics, a lot of storage as well as a great Full HD display. But how does the AMD platform perform compared to the Intel competition?

Flexible piece of gold. The new Toshiba Satellite Radius 15 is one of the few convertibles with a large 15.6-inch display. Thanks to the special hinges, you can use different operating modes, but do they make any sense for such a big device?

Disappointing screen. HP demands almost 800 Euros (~$893) for its Pavilion 15. The buyer gets a 1 TB hard drive and a matte screen among other things. However, the latter is absolutely unsatisfactory.

Kaveri done right. Faster, more frugal, and versatile – AMD's Carrizo APU is supposed to deliver what we already expected from the predecessor. We evaluate whether the new generation can compete against Intel's Broadwell architecture.

SLI and G-SYNC. Aorus may be less than a couple years old, but the manufacturer already has some of the thinnest gaming notebooks with the latest hardware and features in the market. Are the GTX 965M SLI GPUs and 2880 x 1620 resolution G-SYNC screen the perfect match?

Typewriter with a DVD drive. There are many inexpensive entry-level notebooks with a 15.6-inch display, but 14-inch models are pretty rare. Acer now offers an inexpensive alternative to professional compact devices; however, our review shows that it is not really a success.

Inconsistent office turbo. The LifeBook A514 wants to stand out from the typical budget office notebooks with an i3 CPU as well as an SSD. This works pretty well in terms of general performance, but other areas – starting with the display up to the temperature development – leave mixed impressions: Some results are great, some reveal serious drawbacks.

Good stuff. Acer has equipped its brand new 17-inch laptop, with a striking fabric-like texture, a gaming-suitable engine, an SSD and decent input devices. Our test reveals whether the other components, as well as thermals and noise justify the very high price of the multimedia laptop that is most suitable as a desktop replacement.

Silent. With the Zenbook UX305FA, Asus offers a slim, light, silent 13.3-inch subnotebook with very good battery life. A price of just under 800 Euros (~$875) also makes it affordable.