The Best Budget Office Notebooks

Other benefits include good input devices and a quiet mode of operation.  Unfortunately, the included display was abysmal. While it was matte, which can be beneficial to some users, and offered decent viewing angles thanks to its IPS panel its brightness and contrast ratio were simply too low.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad E14 is a good office notebook for home use. However, looking at all available hardware options can be hugely beneficial.

We also liked the ThinkPad E14’s upgradability as well as its decent speakers. At its current price of around $800 it is a great office notebook for everyday office tasks. Thanks to its fast AMD Ryzen 4000 CPU with powerful integrated GPU it is even capable of gaming.

Honor’s MagicBook 14 (see review here) is an affordable Office notebook with plenty of oomph. Its AMD Ryzen 5 4500U offers 6 cores and 12 threads, and performed very well even under load. In addition, AMD’s Renoir APU comes with an AMD Radeon RX Vega 6, a fast integrated GPU that leaves Intel’s offerings in the dust. Most customers will be particularly excited about the device’s price. All in all, the notebook left a solid impression and scored accordingly. Nevertheless, we found a few things we did not particularly like, such as for example the display’s low color-space coverage as well as an overall relatively poor maintainability. 

The Acer Swift 3 SF314 (see review here) is Acer’s latest Office laptop based on AMD’s Renoir APU offering four CPU cores for an impressive performance in our test. Despite its low price the case is made of high-quality materials. A sleek and slim modern metal case offers plentiful connectivity, including a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port.

The Acer Chromebook 715 is a good-looking office notebook with long battery life.

Downsides include the mediocre webcam and the high price for a Chromebook. In addition, ChromeOS comes with its own set of shortcomings and limitations when compared to macOS or Windows that you will have to consider as well.

Lenovo’s ThinkBook 14 (see review here) is a solid workhorse for everyday office life. At around $700 you get a well-made high-quality device. Its robust and firm base includes a plentitude of ports that leave very little to be desired.

Lenovo’s ThinkBook 14 offers decent performance and long battery life at a comparatively low price.

Consumers will most likely be turned away by its price-performance ratio. 

On the flip side it suffers from a dim low-contrast display as well as a slow card reader. Its warranty is also limited to just one year, and its price-performance ratio is relatively poor due to Dell’s choice of SoC: a Core i3-10110U.  

The Dynabook Satellite Pro C50 (see review here) is an affordable office notebook. Our review unit was equipped with Intel’s Core i5-8250U (Kaby Lake-U). When compared to its competitors it offered a decent single-core performance. Its multi-core performance is not the best considering that Kaby Lake has been superseded by various successors in the meantime. Nevertheless, performance is more than adequate for everyday office and internet applications.

The Dynabook Satellite Pro C50 is a solid office notebook that is not going to cost you an arm and a leg.

Its largest weakness was the IPS display that was simply significantly too dim. In addition, the internal hardware is simply not up-to-date any more in 2020. If you can live with these limitations and are looking for an office notebook for home use the Pro C50 will deliver just that, and top it off with decent battery life.

The IdeaPad 3 14IIL05 (see review here) scored 79 % and secured a place in our top 10. It offers a matte display, a fast SSD, and decent Wi-Fi speeds. In addition, the 14-inch device remained very quiet and cool.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14IIL05 is a simple office notebook with limited mobility due to its small battery.

Despite the matte panel the display was simply too bright, which turned out to be our main gripe with this device. In addition, there were other downsides to this model that were, however, not as grim as the display.

The Intel Core i3-1005G1 is a member of Intel’s Ice Lake family and offers enough performance for office and internet applications.

The HP 17-fa1149ng (see review here) combines a very low price with decent hardware. It is based on AMD’s Ryzen 5 3500U SoC with integrated Vega GPU. Compared to Intel’s integrated GPUs the Vega offers a much higher performance and is even capable of gaming. Furthermore, the notebook came with 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB large SSD, and a FHD IPS display. The case was not particularly sturdy, but its surface temperatures were fairly low in return.

The HP 17s is a decent office notebook. However, it requires quite a few compromises.

If you keep your expectations in check the HP 17 can be a good companion that is even capable of running simple 3D games. However, there are quite a few weaknesses that we detected during our review. If you don’t mind the HP 17-ca1149ng can be a decent and quiet notebook for home use.

HP’s 15s-fg1556ng (see review here) offers a modern Intel Ice Lake SoC, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a FHD IPS display at a low price. The case is robust albeit visually not particularly modern. On the plus side it features a USB-C port.

HP’s 15s is an affordable device that requires quite a few compromises from its users.

If your office notebook expectations are low the HP 15s-fg1556ng does exactly what it set out to do but nothing more. A battery life of around 6 hours should suffice most users. Given the lack of various business features the device is clearly made with home users in mind.

Most weaknesses only become apparent upon closer inspection. Take for example the suboptimal fan management settings that require manual adjustment in order to optimize CPU utilization. Which, in turn, increases noise emissions.