Laptop

Box of Curiosities. After a longer hiatus, Metal Gear Series 2014 with Revengeance and Ground Zeroes once again returns to the PC platform. The newest offshoot, called "The Phantom Pain" is - in line with the previous installment - a rather unusual title. We check out the new stealth game and look at how it performs on notebooks.

Cute top-seller. Acer's little 11-inch convertible features a new Braswell CPU and a 360-degree hinge. However, contrary to the manufacturer's touting, the Aspire R11 is not a jack of all trades.

Limited performance. HP advertises its new business detachable as: "The one device you need...". In fact, the Elite x2 is a versatile multi-talent, but it ultimately misses a better rating due to minor flaws in details.

Business made affordable. Among professional users, Lenovo have built up a good reputation with their solid ThinkPad-line. The E-series consists of affordable business notebooks, but lacks the premium name. Is the series truly an affordable alternative?

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.