Gaming

A technological Swiss Army knife for the living room. Razer's Core V2 makes anything possible, transforming a slim, unprepossessing ultrabook into a serious gaming PC in seconds. With its dedicated bandwidth, the additional TI82 controller lends the graphics card even more power compared to the previous Razer graphics enclosure. But is it worth investing your hard-earned cash in this device? And how smoothly do games run on the dock? We used several benchmarks and two graphics cards to answer those questions.

12 pounds of pure power. We end the year with the most powerful consumer gaming notebook currently available. Its Core i7-8700K CPU, GTX 1080 SLI GPUs, 4K UHD screen, 1 TB NVMe RAID 0 storage, and 64 GB of DDR4 RAM are astronomical specifications regardless of form factor.

Off beat. The Defiance IV is a stylish 17-inch gaming notebook that is equipped with a Core i7-7700HQ, a GeForce 1060 and a 120-Hz display. Find out whether the CPU's clock rate problems under higher loads impact the gaming experience in our detailed review.

New entry. PC Specialist, a hardware reseller based in the UK, has recently started selling its gaming notebooks in Germany via pczentrum.de. We have got our hands on the Proteus V, a 15-inch gaming notebook for roughly 1400 Euros (~$1660), and are putting it through its paces.

Deceptive Packaging. A notebook with the dimensions of an XPS 13, the latest quad-core CPUs from Intel and the MX150 - you might think this is a recipe for sure success. The IdeaPad 320s-13IKBR, which we present in this extensive test report, shows this is not necessarily true.

Christmas tree in UHD. A fully configurable RGB keyboard backlight is one of Razer's most distinctive features. In time for the holiday season, Razer has released a UHD variant of the Kaby Lake and GTX 1060-powered Razer Blade notebook, best to be showcased with opened lid underneath the Christmas tree.

Omen II. Our second review gaming notebook from HP's updated 15-inch Omen series features almost the same hardware as the previous system, but it's equipped with a 4K display with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. How the theoretically less frugal display affects performance and the battery life is the subject of our review.

Dancing at two weddings with one laptop. With the Blade Stealth, Razer aims to attract gamers during the night and office workers during the day. In order to gain a performance increase compared to the predecessor, the Ultrabook is equipped with an i7-8550U of the 8th Intel generation. We took a look at the Kaby Lake refresh.

Lighter, slimmer fireball. The slim MSI GS63VR 7RG can run all the modern games smoothly on its matte Full HD screen. Here, MSI goes for a 120 Hz TN panel with fast response times. The rest of the hardware is also in good order: NVMe SSD, HDD, Thunderbolt 3.

Family Matters. The XZ1 is the successor to the Sony XZ, Sony's initial high-end smartphone. As such, it seems to have inherited the latter's bias for incorporating some flaws. Nevertheless, the XZ1 is truly a member of the high-end squad.

An all-round device with some point deductions! The Acer Aspire 7 offers a good performance for an acceptable price. Thanks to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050, the 15-incher also offers appropriate gaming performance. However, the case and the display lose some points.