Trend of laptop hardware this year

Laptops using Core i Sandy Bridge chips cost between 10 and 14 million, while Pentium P6200 and B940 processors are mainly applied to low-cost machines.

The beginning of the new school year is one of the two most exciting laptop market times of the year. Most students, students want to choose a laptop with affordable price, affordable, good configuration just enough to serve the needs of learning and entertainment with prices from 10 to 14 million.

In order to buy a laptop with good performance / cost, the buyer must first learn about the hardware trends of the models that are on the market to avoid confusion or buy the configuration from the previous year at expensive prices. It was then to find out how to buy laptops for money.

Some trends in laptop hardware this year.

Appearance, design style

Trend of laptop hardware this year Picture 1
The embossed design is gradually becoming mainstream in affordable and cheap laptops.

Compared to 2010, this year, big companies like HP, Dell, Toshiba or Acer have gradually shifted from glossy plastic casing to lumpy, embossed or metallic plastic casing. This new design often keeps the machine cleaner, less dirt and fingerprints. Typically, Acer Aspire 4750G, 4740G, HP ProBook 4430s, 4420s, Dell Inspiron 14R .

This year, many companies also began to launch ultra-thin laptops, but this trend hardly applies to mainstream or mid-range. However, thick models also have the advantage of better heat dissipation, such as Asus K43E .

Screen

Screen technology on cheap or mid-range laptops in 2011 has little change. Most of the models imported to Vietnam have a mirror screen, LED backlight and a general resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels.

The advantages of mirror screens are sharp images and high brightness, however, it is easy to get the ball, narrow viewing angles and difficult to use outdoors like anti-glare screens. This type is often used on business laptops.

Processor

Trend of laptop hardware this year Picture 2
All laptops have switched to Intel Core i Sandy Bridge processors.

Most laptops in 2011 have migrated to Intel Core i Sandy Bridge processors. Many stores still sell Core i 2010 chips, but prices don't drop much compared to the previous year. Users need to know how to avoid buying "gimmicks". Core i generations first use a three-digit character and a suffix (for example, 520UM). Meanwhile, Sandy Bridge chips use CPUs with 4-digit symbols and a suffix (for example, 2820QM).

Meanwhile, Pentium P6200 or B940 processors are also new series from Intel but are cheap. In actual reviews, the Pentium P6200 offers better performance than the old Core 2 Duo T series if the same processing speed.

RAM memory

Even though the world manufacturers started to put 4 GB RAM trend into laptops, including their mid-range, in Vietnam, this is not yet a trend. Most machines distributed in the domestic market have an average RAM of 2 GB and is DDR3. Users need to pay attention to the amount of available RAM slots to be able to install because this is the most easily replaceable and upgraded hardware in the machine.

Graphics card

The number of machines using integrated graphics chip is more and very popular because the type that comes with Core i Sandy Bridge processor has very good performance. In the Digitization tests with these machines, the 3D Mark 06 graphics rating is usually from more than 2,000 to 3,000 points, much higher than the older generation Core i chip of just over 1,000 points. Therefore, choosing an integrated graphics chip may have been a very good solution with many needs.

Hard Drive

Most hard drive capacity this year are large, popular at 500 GB in laptops costing from 10 to 14 million VND and read speeds of 5,400 rpm. Some models with higher prices have a higher reading speed of 7,200 revolutions per minute, but the capacity can be reduced to 320 GB. Models of 250 GB capacity can be located in low-cost models under VND 10 million or in configurations from the previous year.

The battery

Trend of laptop hardware this year Picture 3
The battery life of Core i laptops has increased significantly to more than 3 hours this year.

The popular models still have constant capacity batteries compared to last year from 47 to 48Whr. However, thanks to the new Core i Sandy Bridge chip configuration with better performance, the battery life this year is much higher. Most laptops using Core i Sandy Bridge have a minimum battery life of more than 3 hours while in this test the 2010 models only reached more than two hours.

Connect

The most interesting connection this year on laptops is USB 3.0, which is not popular yet but due to the long life of laptop use, buying laptop models with USB 3.0 is a very good preparation. In addition, other connections are of interest and need attention such as HDMI and VGA.