Two performance lightweight notebooks reviewed

By Darren Yates - December 24, 2011
Feature

Ultra-slim ultrabooks such as ASUS's Zenbook and Acer's Aspire S3 are hitting the market, but there are still other options if you're looking for a lightweight notebook. In fact, while these more traditional notebooks might be a bit bigger than an ultrabook, they have one advantage: performance. That's if they use standard versions of Intel's second-generation Core i-series processors, whereas ultrabooks use low-voltage versions – which are more power efficient, but slower. Here we review two sub-2kg, 14in notebooks that pack plenty of punch.

MSI X460 reviewed

By Darren Yates – December 24, 2011
MSI X460
Rating: 
8

MSI's X460, like Dell's XPS 14z, isn’t quite ultrabook grade when it comes to size and weight, but it’s not a long way off. For a 14in notebook that weighs just under 2kg, it delivers an awful lot of performance. Not too many notebooks offer Intel’s 2.2GHz quad-core Core i7-2670QM and certainly not at this weight. Couple it with 8GB of RAM and it cranked up our demanding Userbench Encode HD media-encoding benchmark to over 85, which is one of the fastest scores that we’ve seen from a notebook.

Dell XPS 14z reviewed

By Darren Yates – December 24, 2011
Dell XPS 14z
Rating: 
8

While MSI’s build quality left us with questions, Dell’s XPS 14z looks to be a reasonable compromise between battery life, weight and strength. It packs in Intel’s dual-core Core i7-2640M along with 8GB of DDR3-1333 RAM and a 14in LCD panel. Its weight falls just over 2kg, but its chassis feels strong and solid. The compromise here is that Dell has built the battery inside the chassis. We think that’s resulted in a smaller battery, too, given it only lasted 3 hours 21 minutes, which is nearly an hour less than the X460.

Sub-2kg, 14in notebooks: test results

Two performance lightweight notebooks reviewed
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