Holiday Buyer's Guide: Notebooks

Best Mobile Workstation: Dell Precision M6500 (Starting at $1700)

Figuring out the right workstation machine to recommend actually proved fairly difficult. Lenovo offers a healthy selection, but tend to be priced fairly high (though there's something to be said for a workstation that includes a built-in second screen). HP's EliteBook series offers their well-respected Dreamcolor screens, but those add a nasty $600 to the pricetag of the notebook.

In the end we went with the well-respected, well-known Dell Precision M6500. The M6500 is compelling because it offers all the accoutrement we want from a workstation: every form of modern connectivity, the most powerful Intel processors on the market, workstation-class graphics, and best of all, a 16:10 aspect RGB LED backlit screen. It's also capable of supporting up to four DIMMs of memory (maxing out at a staggering 32GB) and has three drive bays that can be configured for RAID. You can read more about it in our full review.

Put simply, the M6500 offers everything while starting at a reasonable price (currently $500 off at the time of writing!), and for that it's easy to see why it's our primary pick for a workstation notebook. Toss in a quad-core 740QM, 2x2GB RAM, and the stunningly beautiful RGB LED display and you're still looking at a fairly reasonable $2250.

Workstation Runner Up: Sony F Series (Starting at $1000)

Of course, if you can't afford the fat price tag on the M6500, you may find your options in the marketplace painfully limited. ExpressCard and FireWire are becoming increasingly rarefied, but Sony has your back with their F series. These notebooks were recently updated with the i7-x40QM processors and 400M GeForce parts, and they offer all the connectivity trimmings.

The flipside is that the Sony F series is a consumer-grade notebook capable of handling workstation-level tasks, but you lose a lot making the downgrade. You can still get a 1080p screen, but it's going to pale in comparison to the 1920x1200 RGB LED backlit screen the M6500 can bring to the table. You're also going to be reduced to a single drive bay, less memory, and less powerful graphics. Unfortunately, it also wins by default. Sony is really the only company outside of Apple producing notebooks with this level of connectivity for this market.

Other Alternatives?

We already mentioned the HP and Lenovo brands as being viable mobile workstation candidates. Lenovo has the 15.6" ThinkPad W510 starting at $1300, with a $250 95% gamut LCD upgrade available. The Quadro FX 880M is the workstation version of the GT 330M, which is at least a big step up from the anemic 360M. The bigger ThinkPad W701 and W701ds have similar features relative to the M6500, but with a starting price of $2500 ($3300 for the dual-screen model) you can understand why these are simply alternatives. HP's EliteBook line retreads the same ground: there's the Quadro FX 880M in the EliteBook 8540w, only with a fast dual-core i7-640M, or the larger 8740w bumps up the size, performance, options, and price. Like HP and Lenovo, Dell also has the smaller Precision M4500 available in a 15.6" chassis.

If your work is buying the workstation, our recommendations probably won't matter much—you get whatever the IT department decides—but unless you have a sale or other special offer, Dell looks to win handily in bang-for-the-buck.