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Best Buy Laptop Computers

Best Buy, as one of the biggest retailers of consumer electronics which sells all kinds of devices, gadgets and home appliances that run on electricity. Amongst other useful digital equipment it also sells desktop and laptop computers, and these are the products we’re interested in.

The most interesting laptop available at Best Buy is Toshiba Satellite C655-S5082.

It’s a relatively old model, but worth $300 without a doubt. Its major drawback is the Celeron M900 2.2GHz processor, which has only one Conroe-L core, so it doesn’t run well two or more active applications at once. By active I mean full load on the processor, for example if two programs use 50% each, tree use 33% each … and so on. Other applications, which don’t need much processing, run just fine. 2GB on DDR3 are installed by default, but it can be easily upgraded to 4GB, as DDR3 module prices are dropping compared to DDR2. The display panel is 15.6” wide (diagonal) with 1366 x 768 native resolution. It uses TruBrite technology which means traditional backlighting instead of LED. The integrated Intel GMA 4500 graphics chip is not much slower than the latest Intel GMA HD integrated nto Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, but hopefully the upcoming Sandy Bridge processors will have a much stronger built-in GPU. 128 to 829MB of the system memory is dynamically allocated for the graphics chip, as it has none of its own. For internal storage Toshiba installed a standard 2.5” 250GB 5400RPM hard drive, more than enough for everyday computing. A super multi DVD burner handles removable optical discs while there’s also an integrated memory card reader for faster reads and writes. According to Best Buy the battery offers 4 hours 35 minutes of wireless productivity, which is a decent period of time, but ar from impressive as the most capable laptops feature up to 12hours of battery life. In the $300 price there’s also a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 license included.

Another affordable factory-refurbished laptop is based on an AMD platform. It costs $350 at Best Buy.

It’s a Compaq Presario CQ62-209WM laptop with a highly efficient Athlon II X2 P320 2.1GHz processor and ATI Radeon 4250 graphics. Manufactured on 45nm technology and having such high frequency, the Athlon II X2 P320 is an impressive accomplishment for AMD specialists, consuming only 25Watts max while offering a true dual-core experience. In terms of total system performance I would say that is twice as fast as the previous laptop based on the Intel Celeron M900 processor and Intel GMA 4500 graphics.

It has 3GB of DDR3 memory installed, but it can be upgraded to 8GB to truly unleash its multitasking power. The graphics chips helps out while watching HD video content, thanks to its integrated UVD2 (unified video decoder) technology developed by AMD. The 15.6” screen is LED-backlit, so the 1366 x 768 resolution display panel is also much better than what the previous laptop has, but one troubling thing is that they both lack DVI or HDMI input, featuring only one VGA output. Unfortunately, this type of analog monitor connection is about to be completely abandoned by manufacturers soon, because of its poor quality when compared to DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.

Compaq Presario CQ62-209WM also comes with Windows 7 Home Premium x64, barely enough for the maximum installable 8GB of memory. Only Professional and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 support more than 8GB of system memory.

Now let’s look at a $600 17” high-end laptop, also based on an AMD processor.

Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7052 has a much more powerful AMD Phenom II N640 dual-core processor running at 2.9GHz, while not going over the 35Watt power consumption limit. Too bad that for graphics there’s only the Radeon 4250 GPU, the processor would work much better with any high-end graphics card that has its own dedicated memory. The 17” LED-backlit screen would also appreciate a much better graphics card, so it could run 3D games in 1600 x 900 resolution and high detail quality. 4GB of memory is installed by default, but the laptop supports up to 8GB. Recognizing the potential of the processor and system memory, Toshiba ships this laptop with a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive. Windows Home Premium x64 is included in the $600 price. This relatively expensive laptop is recommended for users who need high performance in applications, but don’t need very powerful 3D processing.

The most expensive computer at Best Buy costs $2,500. It’s made by Rain Computers and it’s called “LiveBook Studio Quad-Core Mobile Audio + Video Workstation”.

Interestingly enough, the diagonal of the screen is of only 15.4”, while its native resolution is slightly bigger than the minimum for this size, 1680 x 1050. For all your processing needs an Intel Quad Core processor has been installed, the Core i7 720QM model, running at 1.6GHz. The frequency is very low, but when the integrated graphics is not used and there’s some power left within the processor, the processor clock is automatically increased to 1.73GHz, to 2.4GHz if two cores are active or to 2.8GHz if only one core is active. The total power consumption of the processor is of 45Watts, theoretically many times as efficient as the previous Phenom II, but in reality unfortunately power consumption of the processor may go as high as 100Watts (peak) or up to 80Watts at full load (sustained). This is what makes Intel chips faster than AMD ones. AMD chips always under the official maximum TDP limit. The nVidia Geforce GTS 250M graphics card adds little to the total power consumption, only 28Watts according to Notebookcheck.net. For gaming and HD video processing this is the laptop you need, but be aware of the fact that there are much faster solutions available from Clevo for example, a manufacturer that puts high-end desktop processors and laptop graphics card into mobile workstation, laptop-like portable computers.