An ultrabook/ultrathin capable of playing the odd game - promised land arrives (AMD)

[Husar]

http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.c...t-107/1138582/

It seems I have found something that costs a bit more (~1000€) but offers a quiet Intel solution, touchscreen and a dedicated graphics card (GT630M) that is apparently twice as fast as the HD4000 (which is apparently also faster than the 8600M GT in my old and current laptop).
It's also relatively small at 14" and has a decent battery life given at 6h 30min max.
For doing mostly office work and some light gaming on the side while still being portable it seems like a great solution to me.
Just have to get 1000€ from somewhere now...

[Tellos Athenaios]

http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.c...t-107/1138582/

It seems I have found something that costs a bit more (~1000€) but offers a quiet Intel solution, touchscreen and a dedicated graphics card (GT630M) that is apparently twice as fast as the HD4000 (which is apparently also faster than the 8600M GT in my old and current laptop).
It's also relatively small at 14" and has a decent battery life given at 6h 30min max.
For doing mostly office work and some light gaming on the side while still being portable it seems like a great solution to me.
Just have to get 1000€ from somewhere now...

To be quite honest, that looks like fantastically overpriced kit which frankly at 2kg for a 14inch machine is not doing a terribly good job on the portable checkbox either.
Worse:

1) It's an i5 ULV part. It means you do not get the i5 performance you are expected to, instead it is probably a bit better than an i3 on normal workloads but definitely a notch below a "normal" laptop i5 part. Nowhere near the desktop i5, mind you.
It consumes less power, but whether or not it is cool and quiet depends more on the engineering (layout, assembly) than anything else. For instance if you buy HP, that will sound like a leaf blower and scorch your pants given about a year or two if you put it through its paces (gaming) or just use it a lot -- HP apparently fired all competent engineers or they just fled outright.
2) The resolution. Your eyes deserve better. Trust me, even 1280x800 is better. 1366x768 sucks.
3) The thing still manages to weigh in at over 2kg. Lightweight, you say? For a 14inch unit that is not lightweight.

I dunno. Myself I am not overly keen on the touch screen and if you don't mind losing that you could buy (not really thoroughly researched, perhaps there are more compelling offers elsewhere) a 13 or 15 inch Vaio S model and kit it out for roughly €1000. The result should be lighter, and the parts a notch better for a similar run time when on battery.

[Husar]

I knew I'd forget to check something important(that's why I posted it ), 2kg is indeed a bit heavy.

Good point about the Vaio S, when you configure it online, you can get a 13" with a GT 640M LE, 1600*900 display, Core i5-3210M 2.5GHz for 1018€, still expensive but also faster, higher resolution and so on.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Exactly. Even better when you can get the machine through the education discount programme they have. Free shipping if you buy online, too. Just make sure to turn off/tone down all software options if there are any, also brings down the price significantly.

For me that pretty much sealed the deal when I got my 15inch Vaio S but then again I was specifically looking to trade graphics grunt for less need of a mains outlet nearby (I don't game on my laptop) so I picked up an entry level 15inch S for about €750, then bought a stick of 8GB low voltage RAM and a Samsung 830 256GB SDD and added them to the machine myself. With a Linux distro, it's a zippy little work machine now.

[Furunculus]

i went for the ivy-bridge samsung series 9 in the end, lovely piece of kit.

£850 + samsung tablet + £15 for a Win8 upgrade.

[Beskar]

Got any links to that, Furunculus?

[Furunculus]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-NP90...4537263&sr=8-1