Holiday Buyer's Guide: Notebooks

Best Mainstream: Dell XPS L501x ($980 with 1080p)

This one should really come as no surprise: it seems like Jarred fell in love with the L501x the moment he laid eyes on it. While some commenters found Dell's styling on their reinvigorated XPS line less than appealing, it must be said: the L501x has a great personality.

Our review unit brought the usual Core i5 along with some new hotness in the form of Nvidia's GeForce GT 420M graphics. While the GeForce GT 430 may not be a very exciting desktop part, it seems to shine a lot brighter in a mobile form factor, as the 420M brings 96 of Nvidia's shader processors to bear and is able to produce gaming performance that can finally catch up with ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 4650/5650 and even scrape or beat the GeForce GT 335M. That kind of advance was a long time coming.

But wait, there's more! The L501x offers an incredibly tantalizing upgrade at a reasonable price: a WLED backlit 1080p screen that ranks among the best we've ever seen. At a time when we'd gotten frankly depressed by the idea of having to test yet another dismal TN panel, the L501x's upgraded screen blew away our testing by producing a staggering 692:1 contrast ratio and 98.3% of the AdobeRGB color gamut, well above the usual 45%-60% we're used to seeing. Oh, and did we mention the speakers are among the best we've heard on a notebook?

Those looking for a well-rounded [Ed: pun intended?] laptop are going to have a hard time doing any better than the Dell XPS L501x, and we gave it our Gold Editors' Choice award.

Mainstream Runner Up: HP Envy 14

You know, it's frustrating because we'd really like to be able to lay hands on the mythical HP Envy 14 that regularly gets recommended in our comments and deliver the final word, and that's part of the reason it hangs out in runner up territory.

HP's Envy 14 brings a Mobility Radeon HD 5650 to the party along with the usual Core 2010 series of processors, and it does this in a unique 14.5" chassis. The performance and high quality design have become the stuff of myth around here, and we'd likely be crucified not to bring up the HP Envy 14, so here we offer it as a potentially worthy alternative to the L501x. We're still waiting on our review unit (we expect it to be personally delivered by Godot), but our comment boards light up each review with glowing endorsements of the Envy 14. It looks great on paper, great in pictures, and everyone loves it, and that's enough for us to tentatively recommend the Envy 14.

Mainstream Alternatives

This one is a bit more difficult, as you need to define the target audience and decide on what classifies as "mainstream". For us, mainstream means that a laptop can do everything reasonably well, even if it doesn't excel in any one area. The XPS L501x works great for music, movies, and even moderate gaming, and the same goes for the Envy 14. If you're looking for something similar but you're willing to give up build quality and features, there are other options of course.

Acer/Gateway are the quintessential budget laptops everyone sees at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CostCo, etc., and while they may not win any beauty pageants they certainly are affordable! Toshiba also has some viable notebooks in the realm. For those who want it all, the minimum you can spend while still covering your bases is around $750. That will get you a reasonable CPU and dedicated GPU, with switchable graphics giving you better battery life when you don't need the GPU. The Acer 5742G-7200 gives you i5-460M with GT 420M and Optimus, or the Toshiba A665D-S6059 gives you Phenom P920 and HD 5650 with a backlit keyboard; for pure performance, the Acer 5742G definitely has the edge, particularly when you consider the 450MHz clock on the Toshiba's GPU and the fact that even an i3-330M CPU manages to beat the P920 in nearly every benchmark.

If you're willing to sacrifice battery life and give up switchable graphics, a few other alternatives show up. Acer's Aspire 5551G starting at $630 can certainly play games with its dual-core P520 CPU (2.3GHz) and HD 5650 graphics, but again you have to live with the keyboard and overall aesthetic. Toshiba's L655-S5111 gives you a faster Intel i3-370M CPU with the same HD 5650 GPU for $70 more. If you don't mind last-gen DX10 graphics, the Gateway ID49C (i3-370M and GT330M) and ASUS N82Jv (i5-450M and GT335M) also include Optimus and reasonable prices. None of the alternatives really manage to knock it out of the park, with various compromises in each case, but they can all handle just about any task you might want to throw their way.