Mid-Year Round Up: Our Favorite Laptops In 2021 So Far!

It’s the middle of 2021, and we’ve reviewed a sizable amount of laptops and so we thought, hey, why not do a short round-up of some of our favourite laptops and why we like them, and perhaps help with your purchase decision as well.

Now, we’ll keep it simple, just a few.

Let’s start with arguably our favourite laptop, the Legion 5 Pro from Lenovo. This laptop has so many things going for it, it’s actually kind of insane.

It all comes down to the specs, in which it sports a Ryzen 7 5800H, a GeForce RTX 3070 with a TGP of 140 watts, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of PCIe SSD storage. But here’s the kicker, the price. This laptop comes in at just under S$2700, which is roughly US$2000. That is quite an insane price especially when you consider the fact that it has a 140 watt RTX 3070.

In games, the RTX 3070 can easily power your favourite titles at 2560 x 1600 with all the settings maxed out. Coupled with that 165Hz display, it makes for a really enjoyable gaming experience. Temperatures are also pretty well controlled for the GPU, usually hovering just about 80 degrees celsius during gaming. The CPU on the other hand is a tad warm, at 90 degrees celsius or so, but still within reason.

Overall, it’s just a really good package that you’re getting here. A clean design, a great display, awesome performance. All of that, for a really good price.

Next, we have the Flow X13 from ROG and this is a pretty unique laptop. It’s an ultraportable laptop that can game and can become a more powerful desktop replacement should you pair it with the XG Mobile.

For specs, you get a Ryzen 9 5980HS, a GeForce GTX 1650, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of PCIe SSD storage.

Of course, a GTX 1650 at this point in time might be a little lacklustre. Even so, it can still power games relatively well at 1080p, with most games at least hitting near 60 frames per second.

But what makes this laptop really interesting is the fact that you can pair it with the XG Mobile, which will contain up to an RTX 3080 with a 150W TGP. Not to mention that it’s also the power adapter and will provide numerous more ports.

So, the idea here is that you can have an ultraportable laptop that can still game relatively well whenever you’re out and about, but that very same laptop will become a beast of a machine once you have it back on your desk, docked to the XG Mobile.

If that’s the lifestyle you want, this is definitely interesting.

But now arguably our favourite display on a laptop thus far has to be the one on the HP Spectre x360 14 2-in-1.

This laptop sports a 13.5-inch display in a 3:2 aspect ratio but unlike most others in the market today, it’s OLED. That, along with a high resolution of 3000 x 2000 and covers 100% DCI-P3 really makes the display pop, be it watching videos on YouTube, editing photos in Lightroom or Photoshop, or even just plain browsing. The experience is really really great. OLED offers true black and the colours are just so vibrant.

Now the display is what makes this special in our opinion, but you can of course opt for the standard IPS panel as well, and the laptop would still be great as performance is good, keyboard and trackpad are good, ports are decent and it’s a pretty unique design.

Not to mention, you also get a pen. Overall, it’s just a good 2-in-1 laptop, though it is a little pricey so just take note of that.

We then have somewhat of an iconic laptop by now. The Razer Blade 15.

If you’re familiar with the design of the Razer Blade, well this… isn’t any different. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad, because it’s not.

The Razer Blade is as minimalistic as you could want for a gaming laptop but yet despite the form factor, packs a ton of hardware. You can now get it specced up to the latest 11th-Gen Intel Core i7 and a GeForce RTX 3080 with a 105W TGP.

Now yes, we have to mention that for the Razer Blade 15 in particular, you’re definitely paying a premium for the design and form factor, and with that, you’re also getting a weaker RTX 3080 per se. But even so, it’s still going to perform admirably in games and paired with your display of choice, it’ll still be a very satisfying gaming experience.

In short, this is probably the sexiest gaming laptop you can own.

Finally, we’ve got something that’s really interesting but unfortunately, isn’t available in Singapore. I’m so envious of you guys in the US now.

It goes without saying that I’m of course talking about the Strix G15 Advantage Edition from Asus ROG. It’s been a long time since there’s been this much hype about an all AMD gaming laptop and understandably so. While AMD has since upped their game on the CPU front against Intel, they still weren’t doing so great on the GPU front against NVIDIA.

That changes this generation.

The combination of the Ryzen 9 5900HX and the Radeon RX 6800M is now certainly right up there against the top offerings from NVIDIA. We’re talking performance that’s pretty much better than the RTX 3070 and just slightly below the RTX 3080 in most cases. Not only that, but you do actually get superior battery life compared to GeForce equipped systems.

Who would’ve thought that AMD would finally be the one to offer a gaming laptop with better battery life?

But what makes this really interesting apart from all the benefits that come with an all AMD system, is the price. This laptop retails for less than the RTX 3070 counterpart, but yet, again, you’re getting equal or more performance in comparison.

More for less.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, it’s not available for those of us in Singapore. Here’s to hoping the next-gen refresh makes it here.

Well, that’s basically it, a few of our favourite laptops thus far. Hopefully, you guys found these laptops as interesting as we did or perhaps you might already be using one of them right now. Who knows?

In any case, that’s it for now. Look forward to our end of year round-up where we’ll probably be able to cover a whole lot more by then.

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Content by Soon Kai Hong