Choosing a laptop can be a pretty confusing experience, because even if you have a good idea of what features and components you’d like, finding a laptop with them isn’t always easy. Once you do find the right features, you have to decide if you like the way the notebook looks, and in the mobile gaming world that often means living with a lot of gloss and bling, or going for the polar opposite with a dull black plastic shell. We have two gaming notebooks that happen to fall squarely into those categories, but there’s a lot more to the packages than that simple description.

Can MSI or CyberPower (Clevo) put together a midrange notebook that will wow us and walk away with your gaming dollar? If not, where do they come up short? Read on to find out.

Ever since getting to visit with HP back in February, we've been anxious to get one of their refreshed enterprise-class notebooks in house. The aluminum styling is such a smart blend of professionalism and straight up good looks, it's almost a shame we aren't going to see it on consumer-oriented notebooks. Now we have one of their new 14-inch models on hand, the EliteBook 8460p, featuring a dual-core Sandy Bridge processor and new AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics. Is it everything we hoped for?

As a matter of course we tend to spend a lot of time focusing on the gaming potential of the hardware we review. Boutique desktops get a lot of love, and it's always interesting to see just how much power you can pack in a portable solution. Many users simply don't game, yet they still need a powerful machine for other tasks like video or photo editing. In the world of Intel's first-generation Core i7 line, that meant getting a notebook with a battery eating graphics card you just didn't need. Sandy Bridge changes all that with integrated graphics suitable enough for most tasks, and today, CyberPower has offered us a notebook targeted to a slightly different segment than usual: the IGP-powered, 1080p and quad-core-wielding Xplorer X6-9100.

We've already looked at both dual-core and quad-core Sandy Bridge laptops with IGP graphics, but how does this laptop stack up in other important metrics like battery life, design, and build quality? Read on to find out.

Toshiba has spent the last half a decade carving out an interesting niche as a notebook manufacturer, with many consumer-grade notebooks that are ostensibly budget offerings but often feature a markedly different look and feel from the kinds of laptops vendors like Dell, HP, and Acer produce to serve this market segment. Oftentimes they can feel stylistically behind the curve, but every so often they produce a big winner as they did with their Portege R700 series.

Now, a trickle-down of style couples with modern hardware in a respectable new entrant in their venerable Satellite line: the M645. Our review unit features a shiny new Sandy Bridge mobile dual-core processor along with a healthy amount of memory, an Optimus-enabled NVIDIA GeForce 500M series GPU, and a Blu-ray combo drive, all in a reasonable 14-inch chassis. But it threatens to set you back a grand: is it worth it?

One of our favorite mainstream notebooks last year was Dell’s XPS 15—provided you purchased the upgraded 1080p LCD. It managed to hit the market before talk of Sandy Bridge completely eclipsed the outgoing Arrandale offerings, and it provided a good blend of performance, battery life, build quality, and most important price. There are other laptops with good LCDs floating around, but try finding a high-quality 1080p LCD in a laptop for under $1000. That’s what the original L501x provided; now Dell has upgraded the design with Sandy Bridge processors.

Outwardly, very little has changed, so if you liked (or disliked) the original then you’ll probably feel the same with the L502x. However, the CPU change brings quite a few other tweaks along for the ride. Previously, the XPS line had versions with dual-core Arrandale CPUs and an Optimus-enabled GPU, or you could upgrade to a quad-core Clarksfield processor and get a GPU upgrade as well, unfortunately losing out on Optimus in the process. Sandy Bridge CPUs come in both dual-core and quad-core varieties, and since all of them come with Intel’s latest IGP they all support Optimus. That’s the good news, but is there a downside? Read on for our full analysis.

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!