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?

The past week shook up the whole computer industry with Intel’s announcement that a potential flaw in their Cougar Point chipset required a respin to fix. In the ensuing chaos, we’ve had quite a few reviews put on hold or pulled altogether as we await the revised chipset. We also have a few other items to discuss in regards to the mobility sector, so if you’re debating purchasing a new laptop/notebook vs. waiting for “fixed” hardware, we hope to shed some light on the situation.

The entities formerly known as AMD—namely, AMD and GlobalFoundries—are both here in Vegas for CES, and we had an opportunity to stop by and discuss their current and future technologies. 2011 is set to be a major year for both companies, with new process nodes, new CPUs, and new GPUs targeting all segments of the computing spectrum. Judging by the amount of AMD laptops scattered around the various booths, this could be something of a comeback for the “little” guys. Why the excitement, and what’s coming this year?

Just four months ago, NVIDIA released their top-to-bottom 400M lineup. Since the announcement, it took about a month but we then got the ASUS G73Jw (460M), Dell XPS L501x (420M), Clevo B5130M (425M), and ASUS N53JF (425M) in rapid succession. All of these were decent offerings, with a nice blend of performance and features at reasonable prices. Of course, Core 2010 products are last year’s news, and with the launch of Sandy Bridge the whole industry is moving to 2^nd Generation Intel Core Processors (aka Core 2011). With an improved IGP threatening low-end discrete GPUs, what better time for NVIDIA to refresh their mobile parts?

Unlike the desktop GTX 580, the new 500M mobile parts are all using existing architectures; there are even a couple of new 400M parts to round things out. The major change is that we’re getting higher clock speeds, both on the GPU cores/shaders as well as the memory. In a few cases we also have additional shaders available, as well as clearing up some potentially confusing part names (really!). Read on for details on this year’s NVIDIA laptop offerings—coming soon to a Sandy Bridge laptop near you!

With CES 2011 upon us, we must acknowledge that 2011 could well be the “Year of the Tablet”. Everyone—Motorola, Dell, HP, HTC, Acer, you name it—is releasing a tablet or three. If you’re ASUS, you’re announcing four different tablets today. If you are ASUS, I’d like to offer my congratulations and best wishes for this full-on assault of the tablet market. Chances are though, you’re not ASUS, so here’s the rundown on the four new devices.

Three of them are Honeycomb-based tablets, joined by a traditional Windows slate. Looking at the Android-based Eee Pads, we have the MeMO, a 7” Snapdragon slate, the Transformer, a 10” Tegra 2 slate with an optional keyboard docking station, and the Slider, a 10” convertible tablet with a sliding, tilting keyboard. The Windows tablet is called the Eee Slate EP121 and features a 12.1” display with an active Wacom digitizer and Core i5 UM power. It’s a pretty impressive looking bunch, so read on for more details and analysis.

Ever since the Sandy Bridge preview, we’ve been waiting to see what Intel’s new architecture could do for mobility. No longer would quad-core notebooks require discrete graphics solutions, and performance would improve as well. While many of the desktop parts make do with a trimmed down graphics controller, nearly all of the mobile Sandy Bridge processors are packing a full set of 12EUs. Combine the improved efficiency of Intel’s new HD Graphics solution with double the clock speed of Core 2010’s IGP, and you have a recipe for mainstream graphics that may finally move out of their parents’ basement. We’ve been vigorously testing our Sandy Bridge notebook for the past couple of weeks, throwing everything we had available at it. Processor and graphics performance are markedly improved over Arrandale and Clarksfield, and battery life shows promise as well. Sandy Bridge may be a nice upgrade on the desktop, but for laptops and notebooks it’s nothing short or revolutionary. Read on to find out why!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a 15.6” notebook walks into the AnandTech labs, sporting NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 425M and a 1080p display…. Yes, for the fourth time in under two months, we have a midrange 15.6” 1080p notebook on our test bench. So far, we’ve praised the displays as being universally great, though other design elements have been lacking. Now ASUS offers up their N53JF, with a Blu-ray combo drive and Bang & Olufsen ICEpower speakers. On paper at least, this looks like a notebook that could even topple the Dell XPS 15 L501x from its lofty perch. As always, the devil is in the details, but let’s see if this devil is willing to make a deal.

Periodically the Compal NBLB2 (and its predecessors) has popped up on our comments as an alternative 15.6" notebook with a 1080p screen, and people have been asking for a review of it for a while. As an OEM machine, the NBLB2 is only available from mail-order outlets, and unlike the Clevo units we frequently review, Compal's build is a much lesser known quantity. So today we're happy to bring you a review of the NBLB2 courtesy of CyberpowerPC, packing an AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650, a 1080p screen and a fast Core i7 dual-core processor. Is this another midrange notebook we can recommend, or does it cut a few corners in attempting to keep prices down?