Conclusion
Whatever size of laptop you’re after, one of these four should suit. Starting with the smallest, the 11.6in Lenovo can be used as a traditional laptop, but as it has a touchscreen and a hinge that allows the screen to be folded all the way back under the keyboard, you can use it a bit like a tablet. It’s available in silver or black, and it’s small and light enough to carry around with you when you need it. Overall, a great little notebook – as long as you don’t need lots of ports and slots.
The two 13.3in laptops here are both excellent choices. The Asus is prettier, but the Acer is a fantastic all-rounder with a great screen (higher contrast than the UX310UA), keyboard, touchpad and long battery life. Really, though, it’s hard to separate these two, and you won’t be disappointed by either one.
Lastly, we come to the MSI GL62-6QC. It’s cheap compared to most gaming laptops, but even though it’s £50 more than the other three here, it’s well worth the extra outlay. For a start, it has the most powerful CPU and graphics chip – and it also has a bigger 15.6in screen. As long as you’re not primarily after portability, it’s one of the better choices for a laptop that will mostly be used at home.
How we test Application performance
We test with Futuremark’s PCMark 8 benchmarking suite. The, results are divided into Home and Work tests. The Home benchmark reflects command tasks for typical home use with lower computing requirements such as web browsing and low-end gaming. The Work test is geared towards office work tasks such as creating documents and web browsing, spreadsheets and video conferencing. This test does not stress the gaming and multimedia capabilities of the laptops in this group test. In order to compare performance across different platforms, we also run Geekbench 3, which tests both single- and multi-core performance.
Minimal gaming
We’ve tested the systems in this group test by running two games – Thief and Alien: Isolation. This is enough to reveal differences in gaming performance.
Display quality
We use DisplayCAL with a colorimeter to measure colour gamut and accuracy, contrast and uniformity across the surface of the screen. We also take into account each panel’s viewing angles.
Subjective assessment
It’s not all about speed. We also pay close attention to the physical characteristics of each device, its noise output and build quality, and take note of important features such as the quality of components.
Warranty and support
Differences in warranty terms can affect our verdict. Obviously, longer warranties are better, but we also look at the terms and conditions – whether faulty systems must be returned to the vendor at your own cost, and if both parts and labour are included.