Laptop Buying Guide – Tweakers

As usual, we’ll be releasing a new edition of the Laptop Best Buys Guide on February 1st. It’s the first of 2023. We’re looking for a budget laptop up to $500, a good basic laptop we’re allocating $700 for, and a nice thin and light laptop that can cost $1000.

CES was in early January and traditionally there are a lot of new laptops announcement. This makes sense, as Intel along with AMD and Nvidia showed off their new laptop hardware. Intel came up with the thirteenth generation of its Core processors for laptops, of which no less than 32 copies were presented. These ranged from budget 15W processors for thin and light Ultrabooks, to 28W chips for medium laptops with more power, to 45W and 55W processors for powerful gaming laptops and workstations.

AMD Ryzen 7000 Series consists of a number of new chips with current Zen4 cores, including extra powerful HX models with up to sixteen cores, but also renumbered processors with a “secretly” older design. AMD also left video cards for laptops, but most laptops with a discrete video card will likely also carry one from Nvidia in 2023. At CES, five RTX4000 mobile video cards shown, from the entry-level RTX4050 to the absolute top model RTX4090. As in previous years, laptop GPUs promise to be nowhere near as powerful at the same figure as desktop models. The number of compute cores on the GPU is drastically reduced, as is the clock speed, to match the size of a laptop in terms of power consumption.

The first laptops based on new hardware are expected to hit stores as early as February. These will mainly be devices with Intel processors and possibly an Nvidia video card. AMD-based laptops traditionally arrive a little later, so from the end of the first quarter is expected. In any case, this BBG, for which we sent applications at the beginning of January, does not yet contain laptops with the latest hardware. Nonetheless, we’ve found a number of great devices that you’ll be able to use well for years to come. We will present them to you in the following pages.