PRO LAPTOPS TO REPLACE YOUR DESKTOP
Nathan Taylor tests six grunty laptops that can replace a traditional desktop PC.
Nathan Taylor tests six grunty laptops that can replace a traditional desktop PC.
You’re looking for a new laptop and you’d like something with a little meat on it. Not one of those fancy ultraportables or convertibles: something with a decent screen and enough power under the hood to get things done (even if those things are games). Portability isn’t the priority: performance and screen size are.
If that’s the case, you’re looking for a desktop replacement laptop. That’s a device with enough juice to reasonably replicate the desktop experience. They have powerful processors, screens of 15 inches and up, as well as far better graphics chips than most laptops.
This month, we’re going to take a look at half a dozen of those, to give you a taste of what’s on the market.
HOW WE TESTED
We tested the laptops with a variety of benchmarks. We used PCMark 8 from Futuremark ( www.futuremark.com), which runs the laptop through a scripted set of tasks common to a particular activity, measuring how quickly it performs those tasks and giving a comparative score. We ran through both the home and work sets.
PCMark 8 also provides a battery rundown timer, running the benchmarks on a loop until the battery kicks it. Note that this is best used as a comparison — PCMark hits the laptops harder than most users will, so the battery life listed is likely lower than you’d get in the real world.
Also from Futuremark comes 3DMark. We ran through a graphical sequence called Fire Strike, and 3DMark provides a comparative performance score.
Another 3D test is Cinebench R15 from Maxon ( www.maxon.net). It uses OpenGL to run through a 3D rendering and provides a final average frame rate. It also uses ray tracing to perform a test of the CPU’s 3D rendering capabilities.
Finally, we have Crystal DiskMark 3 ( crystalmark.info), a hard drive performance test. We listed the sequential read/write speed of the primary storage device which gives you an indication of the peak performance of the device. We also listed the read/write speed when the data was transferred in 4K chunks. And finally, there’s the 4K QD32 test, which creates a queue of 4K read/write operations (as opposed to handling them one at a time), letting devices with caching and queuing smarts to use those smarts to optimise the read/write operations.