Ultrabooks

**Bolkonsky** · December 18, 2012, 09:22 PM

So with any luck, I'm going to be able to sell my laptop (dv6) and I want something smaller, and lighter that can still play crappy games when plugged in. (Think Team Fortress Classic, Maybe some Unreal 2 stuff, basically to bring to friend's houses) I'm gonna need it before next semester, and I'd like to stay under $1000, and have a touchscreen. I'm basically sick of hauling my laptop and charger up 6 flights of stairs and across a half mile parking lot.

What I'm looking at now is some nice Lenovo one that has a touchscreen, can fold up and function as a tablet, etc, but it is pretty expensive and rather weak hardware. Any other recommendations? Cheaper is better. Also, I can't do Linux (and refuse to do Mac) because of Microsoft Word issues. So Linux and Chromebooks aren't options, unfortunately.

**karamazovmm** · December 18, 2012, 11:00 PM

if you can wait a little bit haswell will offer around 30% better performance than ivy in terms of gpu for 17w and 10w parts

if not, have you taken a look at the refurb store from sony? their duo 11 is a great ultrabook, with an awesome touchscreen, there is also the asus taichi, but I think its more than 1k, if you want to game I do recommend going for the t430u it has at least a dgpu, albeit nothing to write home about, it has the wonderful build quality of lenovo thinkpads along the warranty options (NBD and ACD), there is also the asus u32vd, however any asus model from the zen series, or more or less, anything that they make in terms of laptops is filled with issues, involving basically their build quality and fit and finish, also their warranty is a goner, not to mention some have throttling issues, looking at you u500 you rmbp 15 clone

all of those are for ultrabooks, here is a thread I made for 11-14 notebooks that are capable of some gaming

http://forum.notebookreview.com/what...ompendium.html

from that list I will gladly say with your budget go with the vaio s13

I want something more or less what you want, except I want to play rome 2

So my plan is to wait for the rmbp 13 to get haswell and them buy pcie to thunderbolt adapter, like the sonnet echo express se or the mlogic mlink, they accept up to 75w tdp cards, they dont pack 12v cables, however the 7750 or 8770 will/should fill that need, or the 750 wont be such a heavy power consumer as it currently is.

So 1.6kg, possible quad with a desktop gpu that wont be bottlenecked by the pcie 2.0 x4 connection that thunderbolt provides is a win win for me that games occasionally.

still that would net me 1500 for the rmbp (hope that frys keep the price) and 500 for the gpu + pcie adapter, its a plug and play system btw.

**Bolkonsky** · December 19, 2012, 06:20 AM

Yeah, I'm gonna need one before school starts up again.

I really like the look of the Duo 11, they have them on the Sony Outlet for $1200, that might just be worth the extra couple hundred bucks though. I'd rather avoid ASUS, their QA has gone way way down lately, they used to be a great brand but it seems that people are having nothing but problems with them aymore.

PCI-E adapters are cool, but I still have my PC and I'm willing to sacrifice a little mobility for that kind of money. Thanks for the help!

**karamazovmm** · December 21, 2012, 02:33 AM

bolk I saw a guy buying a vaio z13 for 1300, unfortunately it doesnt pack a touchscreen, however since this model is EOL, take a look for it, remember that this is a 2k notebook, that because its EOL is now ''cheap'', also it packs a very decent punch, specially the quad version.