Notebooks Thin and light Notebook recommendations

Hi there,

After hinge failure on my Toshiba Radius 12, I have been running and old Vaio E from 2010, its been fine and works for all my needs really but the thing weighs a ton and 15.6" is just too much laptop to sit around with and to carry around when needed, its battery is more of a UPS these days at ~40mins life so not very portable.

So I am looking for recommendations that I should consider as a replacement for the Radius.

FYI, I have done a hinge fix on the Radius but the hinge attaches to so much broken plastic that it is not going to last unless I go mad with some bonding, shame as spec wise the Radius is perfect for me, lovely screen but its touch pad was a bit hit and miss and so its time I think to try something new.

I don't really have a budget, if I think I am getting a good bit of kit for the dough I will pounce. Ideally I wanted to wait for the next gen of iGPUs from Intel but being tethered to mains is bugging me a lot more than I thought it would and I don't know when those might drop. The radius was under £700 which appears to be a bargain for what it was, most laptops of comparable spec appear to be a lot more these days >1k

Spec wise I'll take anything that is compact and light, I like high res screens for clarity, would be nice to have a matte screen though I haven't had that for a while. I would like at least 7hrs battery life when needed, happy to run low power modes to achieve. I do like the 2 in 1 mode of the Radius but happy to go without I think if the hinges are an issue due to this, the Dell 2 in 1s look to have almost the same design as the Radius.

Current contenders are

Huawei Matebook X Pro 13.9 (old spec has some reasonable deals)
Dell XPS 13
Razer 13

Anything else I should be looking at in the sort of ~ <1.5kg ~300mm width range.

 

Dell XPS
HP Envy/Spectre 13
Surface Laptop
Lenovo Thinkpad X1

 

Completely forgot about Microsoft and HP will take a look thanks.

 

Just a heads up if you interested in Dell XPS 13 they 20% off on their outlet site but it ends today.

 

Thanks for the heads up, looks like I have missed the 20%, it shows 14%, Still quite pricy mind you when you have things like the matebook pro for 1k with mx150 and nice screen. This is the lead contender currently as the screen is a good aspect ratio and GPU is slightly stronger.

Still I am drawn to 2 in 1, as I do find tent mode useful, I noticed the HP X360 Ryzen 2700 with vega 10 which is a bit of a step up from UHD 620 and it's cheap, I play my god sims quite slowly on the HD 520 in the Radius, that got me thinking about are there any better GPUs in this class of laptop that can trump the MX150/MX250. ​

Did any small laptops ever get made with the Intel chip that had the big Vega graphics on same package?

 

Never seen one that is really small , HP only put it in the 2kg 15" Spectre (and has since ditched it in favour of a 1050ti), there is also the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 9575, but it ain't really smaller and thats almost it.

Those are the two that had at least some availability to speak of, there is a third one that does also promise to be a bit lighter than the other two, but you would have to wait until an unspecified time for it to become available, plus it is an Acer:
https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/conceptd-series/conceptd5

 

That does looks nice but would be too big @ 15.6"

The radius is already bigger than I would of liked and the Matebook I am looking at is 5mm wider at 304mm same as the XPS but due to 3:2 aspect ratio it is deeper by 15mm and I wonder if it is too much hence not hitting the buy button already I know sad

 

I'm guessing the Gigglebyte Aero 14 would be too big as well

 

I'm going to do a bit of CAD (cardboard aided design) see how I feel about a little extra for my portable machine but yup the Aero 14 would be out.

I would love its specs in something smaller, the Aero is about the same size as my other old laptop which I tried before using the Vaio, it's a 14" elitebook 8470p, sure not as big as the Vaio but couldn't work on it, the Vaio has a lovely high quality 1080p screen versus the 1600x900 washed out crap in the HP (only ever got used docked for hotdesking so screen was never a consideration in that purchase)

 

If you're intending to keep using it until the heat-death of the universe one of the thin variant Thinkpads (T4xxS or X series), and if you can do without warranty a business surplus can be had for much less than new. If you're intending to resell it at some point and can stand an OK-ish keyboard, a Macbook or Macbook Air is probably best (the fruit logo on the back will treble to quadruple your resale value even if it's spent its life running Windows only). If you can stand an OK-ish keyboard and don't need to use it in your lap, then a Surface Pro with a Type Cover is extra compact.

 

A touch larger than your specifications, but as small as it's possible to get at the screen size, I recently managed to get the Asus ZenBook S UX533FD with the i7, 16GB, 512GB, GTX1050, matte FHD non-touch for a tidy £999 brand new from AO.

It's smaller (and much shallower) than most 14" models and packs a surprising punch with all day battery life. Worth considering.

 

I will typically keep until dead or has been dropped one time too many like this Radius, bloody kids, no doubt the main contributor to hinge failure as they can always be repurposed for other uses.

I see that Lenovo comes top in build quality ratings, so I'll check them out, my last experience`was a x131e which I broke in half a day, cracked screen on opening, which put me off as customer service was atrocious.

trying to decide if I should spec 16Gb, never felt I have needed more than 8Gb in my laptop but a lot of the laptops don't appear to be upgradeable due to soldered ram and all being well I'll be using it for years.

 

General consensus seems to be that: Lenovo consumer laptops are about as well made as an Acer product, while the Enterprise stuff is fine.

 

HP is the same... consumer stuff = garbage, enterprise and their ultrabooks tend to be fairly solid though.

 

Well as I suspected the hinge repair did not stick, not enough of the original laptop screws and supports to carry forces, being a super tight git I have attempted a last ditch bit of a bonding exercise with some 2 pack araldite see if I can save it, unfortunately I may have made it worse as I manage to crack the screen clamping parts together as I left a screw not fully screwed in on the hinge and there is no margin for error on these thin machines for that....Aaaargh.

So will see what I am left with after it is cured it appears to work as a display but whether the hinge will work any better than last repair I can't say, fingers crossed it has not broken touch, the number of times I hit the screen on the Vaio and go Grrr is amazing, you don't realize you use something so much until its gone.

After that I will likely have to bite the bullet, I will probably take an MX150 laptop as the running theme with all my machines when they last is CPU kind of unimportant, more feels good sure, but I'm quite happy with the 2010 arrandale for example, but GPU struggles with Web and media stuff overtime as codecs and content changes etc

Fortunately I have just been paid a bonus I wasn't expecting so that takes the pain away a little.

My list is currently

13.3 Razer Stealth - 4k, 8565, 16Gb, 25w MX150, 512Gb - £1700. Appear to be best you can get in the size, throttles less than others etc. but you pay for it and it's not really that much faster for the dough.

13.9 Matebook pro X - 3000x2000, 8550, 16Gb, 10w MX150, 512Gb - £1250, a bargain for what is inside, seems to beat XPS on performance and battery in standard mag tests so I could probably extract huge life out of it.

​

And if I cannot stomach the blowing the dough the HP seems hard to beat.

13.3 HP Envy x360, 1080p, R7 2700, 8Gb, Vega10, 512Gb - £850 - 2 in 1 form factor I have come to enjoy, none of the Intel performance sapping bug issues to deal with, would have preferred a higher res screen and more RAM but its priced low because it doesn't have these things. Only question on this is battery life, reviews seem 50 -50 so I imagine there are HP config issues to deal with, I'm pretty good out routing out issues and got my Radius from 5-5.5hrs to around 9hrs with tweaks.

 

Its not pretty but the bonding exercise has held up, I should have done this in the first place as I thought the hinge looked too weak, it would have saved my accidental screen crack, hopefully this will do until the newer chips drop with stronger low power GPUs for a compact machine as I can't help but feel I am not getting much GPU performance for the dough.



It looks like Ice Lake laptops aren't far off, liking the look of the new xps 13 with 16:10 screen

https://liliputing.com/2019/05/dell...1-with-intel-ice-lake-cpu-bigger-display.html

Razer also have a new stealth with it in coming along, is it good enough on its own to topple mx150/mx250? here use google translate.

 

Found a nice little site for ultra book reviews

https://www.ultrabookreview.com/

Also this one

https://laptopmedia.com/

After a bit of CAD could see that I could live with a 330x230 footprint with out running out of desk space which opens up a couple more laptops, size should be fine if I can keep weight low.

This brings a couple of the 14" Thinkpads into play, looks like they now have some decent quality Ryzen 3700U laptops, the x395, t495 and t495s that actually have 400 nits screens to match my current machine, which I find only just acceptable. quite why laptop screens are all so poor on brightness these days I don't know, annoyingly, small Thinkpads don't go beyond 1080p with Ryzen whereas the T490 with Intel and mx250 can get a1440p 500nits screen. Whilst screens are reasonable, sounds like the business orientated thinkpads fail on Audio, good connectivity though.

Also managed to find a 1050MaxQ within foot print thanks to this article on Max Q laptops, a 14" Zenbook Pro it's not perfect, a 1080p 300 nits screen is a bit lame but such a compact machine with a bit more GPU is nice, 70Wh battery, it's funny how you start getting greedy for power when shopping, or is that only me, initially I only wanted something a bit stronger than a UHD620 as it wasn't really much of a bump from my HD520 and now I'm getting all power crazed and considering compromising other areas like the all important screen quality, nutter

If it wasn't so heavy I might of jumped on this Aorus v3 plus] Aorus x3 £1300 with a 1060, that's decent, old spec.

 

Well, I’ve opted for the Zenbook Pro, bought purely on spec as I couldn’t find it in the shops, hoping the screen downgrade and extra size/weight won’t be too bad and the positives like jump in battery from 42Wh -> 70Wh will give this machine some staying power and the GPU upgrade will give it some improved light gaming chops when whiling away the hours in hotels rooms etc.

As I typed that it arrived so initial thoughts whilst it is doing all of its updates.

- It’s quite a bit bigger in all dimensions due to the fact it has 2 screens and a dedicated gpu, but fits fine in my little space for the office, just, doesn’t taper to the front like most ultrabooks so doesn’t looks so cool from side profile.

- 1080p screen blows, at 100% scaling the text looks naff, I can see all the pixels of the fonts etc I have added a few percent custom scale that has aliased things better so that helps fortunately still it was on a hiding to nothing as Radius screen was regarded as best you could get so tough act to follow.

- 300g is a heck of a lot of extra weight over the radius, this plus power pack in bag will be more noticeable than I thought it would be. I almost opted for the Auros as it seems like a bargain but thats another 200g and an even heavier powerpack, so I am glad I did not get too much power crazed

- The touchpad has a lovely glide, so responsive and nice to use, the one failing of the Radius shame about the clickyness of the buttons, cheapens the experience.

- Keyboard is not a patch on the Radius, will take some getting used to, slightly shallower travel but keys are well spaced.

- It’s loss of brightness over the Radius 400nits vs 300nits is noticeable but acceptable, would prefer more to be honest though, whites looks like A4 paper on the radius and the text like high quality print on it, this is not quite there.

- With the i7 8565, my laptop probably has a more powerful gaming CPU than my gaming PC which is gen 1 Ryzen bit OTT really.

I ‘ve done some initial benchmarks of the machine to see if I was getting what I wanted and sure enough as I expected UHD620 is barely more than 5-10% better than HD520 in synthetic benchmarks and that probably comes from increase memory speed of 1600 vs 2400 so that would be a clear disappointment as my only option to go forward with for next few years, in actual games I play on the laptop like Theme hospital, surviving mars and anno 1800 the performance seemed identical.

With the 1050MaxQ switched on though my Anno 1800 game (1080p low) goes from ~15fps to ~100fps if I turn vsync off which is a nice bump, I might actually turn some graphics details on now.

So if you are doing some light/casual gaming but want to stay ultrabook wait for ice lake and gen 11 graphics or buy one with an MX150 or at least Ryzen 7 with Vega if you want all integrated, UHD620 is still poor.

I wouldn’t really call this zenbook an ultra book, it’s a bit big, a nice compact notebook, it's a good compromise if you want that bit more power on the road, lovely and quiet even with a lot of tabs open, when gaming whilst the fans do crank up it is a reasonable sound.

Can’t make much comment on battery life but can’t imagine it is going to be bad with screenpad off, I haven’t done any optimization and am streaming video from it just to see how it would do and it reckons 10hrs left so it’s a good start as its been up for 2 already.