Last week, we looked at one of our final Arrandale laptops in the ASUS U41JF, a worthy follow-up to the U-series’ legacy. Today we have another ASUS laptop, this time one of the first dual-core Sandy Bridge systems to grace our test bench. The K53E comes to us via Intel, and they feel it represents what we’ll see on the various other dual-core SNB laptops coming out in the near future. Unlike the Compal quad-core SNB notebook we tested back in January, this notebook is available at retail, and it comes with very impressive performance considering the price. Ah, but as usual there’s a catch.

As we just mentioned, the test sample comes courtesy of Intel; as such, it’s not entirely stock. The regular K53E starts at $625 with the i3-2310M, or $715 for an upgraded system with 6GB RAM and an i5-2410M. Our particular unit comes with the i5-2520M instead, which boasts higher clock speeds and Turbo modes, which means the starting price would be about $800 (give or take). Other than that small discrepancy, this will be a good reference point to see how the new Core i5 stacks up to other laptops.

Sandy Bridge laptops are finally starting to trickle into the market, from the usual gamut of manufacturers. Chances are, if your favorite vendor isn’t selling several SNB notebooks already, they will be by the end of April. But with all the SNB brouhaha going on, ASUS has decided to release one final update to their U-series laptops using Arrandale processors.

We’ve got the newly christened U41JF on the test bench today, though the U31JG comes with very similar specs and tips the pricing scale at a very attractive $699. Yes, Sandy Bridge processors are faster than their Arrandale predecessors at the same clock speed, but ASUS has a few tricks up their sleeves (as usual) to keep the tried-and-trusted Arrandale platform in the running. Read on for our full review and thoughts on ASUS’ latest additions to their ultra mobility U-series.

When Eurocom offered to send us their latest Racer notebook, we were mildly intrigued. Then they upped the ante by giving us the chance to put AMD’s latest and greatest HD 6970M to the test and we jumped at the opportunity. The Racer is the “little brother” of the Clevo P170HM we reviewed a few weeks ago, sporting many similarities all wrapped up in a smaller package. This puppy doesn’t come cheap, but with a matte 1080p LCD sporting a good contrast ratio, awesome performance, and a better build quality than the previous Clevo models we’re quite happy with the result.

So, just what does an HD 6790M do for performance, and how much will it set you back? What else might Eurocom have to offer to sweeten the deal? Eurocom also likes to label their notebooks as mobile workstations, and while the system we have doesn’t necessarily cater to that audience, we’ll have some thoughts on that segment as well. Read on for our full analysis.

It may have taken some time for AMD’s Fusion to finally arrive, but now it’s here and we’re starting to see a decent number of Brazos laptops. We’ve already reviewed HP’s dm1z, which set the bar that other manufacturers will have to match or exceed. Today, we add two more E-350 laptops to the mix of reviews, one an 11.6”-screen and the other a 13.3”-screen chassis.

In the black corner, we have MSI’s ultra-slim X-series laptop, the X370; in the silver corner is a smaller competitor in Sony’s VAIO YB. How do these two compare with the HP dm1z and with each other? What are the benefits and detriments involved with moving to a larger chassis?  And is the Brazos platform right for you? That’s what we’re going to discuss in this head-to-head matchup.

Last year at the iPad introduction Steve Jobs announced that Apple is a mobile device company. Just last week Steve returned to introduce the iPad 2 and point out that the majority of Apple's revenue now comes from products that run iOS. The breakdown is as follows:

Just looking at iPad and iPhone, that's 56% of Apple's sales. All Macs put together? Only 20%. Granted 20% of $26.7 billion in sales is still $5.3 billion, but the iOS crew gets most of the attention these days.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that when Apple launched its 2011 MacBook Pro lineup last week that it did so with little fanfare. There was no special press event and no video of an unusually charismatic man on a white background describing the latest features of the systems. All we got two weeks ago were a few pages describing the high level features of the lineup, a short outage on the Mac Store and five new configurations available for sale.

We've been working non-stop since the launch on our review of the new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros. Despite the lack of fanfare, this is a pretty serious upgrade. Read on for our in-depth analysis!

While the drought of Sandy Bridge notebook hardware is thankfully approaching its sweet, merciful end, there are still a healthy amount of AMD-based notebooks on the market at good prices awaiting happy homes. Toshiba was kind enough to send us their L645D, a 14" notebook sporting a mobile Phenom II dual-core processor running at a speedy 3GHz, Radeon HD 4250 integrated graphics, and a Blu-ray drive: all yours for a potentially exciting value proposition of just $619. Is it worth it?

I've been working with MSI for nearly as long as AnandTech has been around. So when MSI came to us with a giveaway opportunity we jumped on it. The grand prize? A Sandy Bridge equipped MSI GT680R Notebook. The notebook is powered by a quad-core Core i7-2630QM which runs at 2.0GHz by default but can turbo up to 2.9GHz with only a single core active. 

The GT680R includes three USB 3.0 ports and a pair of 500GB 7200RPM drives in RAID-0. The system will ship with 8GB of DDR3 memory making it a pretty beefy desktop alternative. The integrated GeForce GTX 460M is paired with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory and it drives a high resolution 1920 x 1080 15.6-inch panel.

Read on for the full specs as well as details on how to enter.

With the Cougar Point chipset glitch starting to fade away, we’re starting to get Sandy Bridge systems in for testing. ASUS sent us over an earlier version of their updated G73, the G73SW with i7-2630QM and GTX 460M—still with the B2 chipset stepping, but it won’t matter for our testing, and the B3 versions should be shipping any time now. If you’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on a new gaming notebook, there are a lot of fast, new offerings to choose from.

We’ve already looked at the G73 chassis twice now, and the latest version only makes a few minor tweaks other than the CPU/chipset. We’ve also previewed the same hardware combination with MSI’s GT680R. This is going to be a somewhat shorter review, then, but we did take some time to do a bit of extra stress testing, and we’re happy to entertain other requests at this point. Read on for the full rundown.

When we reviewed the Clevo W880CU and, by extension, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480M, we were perplexed. Certainly NVIDIA had reclaimed the mobile graphics crown and no one could dispute that, but at what cost? The 480M was a cut-down mobile version of the already dire desktop GeForce GTX 465M. We even begged the question: "Wouldn't the prudent thing to do have been to let ATI have their cake for the time being and try and push GF104 into laptops?" Today we have a better answer. AVADirect has been kind enough to send us a Clevo P170HM notebook outfitted with NVIDIA's latest and greatest, the GF104-based GeForce GTX 485M.

It's fair to say the refreshes HP announced for their consumer computers earlier this month seemed fairly lackluster. While nobody can complain about improved notebook speakers and the triumphant return of dedicated mouse buttons, there wasn't anything else remarkably fresh or exciting about their spring line. When we got a chance to meet with HP representatives in San Francisco to see their new business lineup, however, we saw very nearly the complete opposite.

You can't buy it from Sony's website. If you blinked you might have missed the news popping up on a couple of different sites about its existence. If you were on the phone with me when I called Jarred about it, you might even have shared his reaction: "Sony makes a budget AMD laptop?" But sure enough they do, and we have a  budget Sony EE34 notebook on hand that's liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Around $600 for a Sony Vaio AMD-based notebook with a Blu-ray drive standard? They make those?

HP's been on board AMD's ultraportable bandwagon since the chipmaker first shipped the underwhelming Congo platform, and HP continued to produce reasonably compelling not-quite-netbooks with the Athlon/Turion II Neo-equipped Nile platform. But now that AMD has made a concerted effort to dethrone Intel's Atom with Brazos, HP has been able to produce a true netbook competitor. We have the shiny new dm1z equipped with the AMD E-350 in our hands: is this the netbook we've been waiting for?