Best laptops 2020: Reviews and buying advice

The best laptops of 2020 are experiencing a seismic shift. With the near-simultaneous launches of AMD’s Ryzen 4000 and Intel’s Comet Lake-H mobile CPUs in January, we had a real fight for the first time ever: Ryzen 4000’s cores vs. Intel’s clock speeds.

But there’s more: In September, Intel launched its Tiger Lake CPUs for thin-and-light laptops, promising yet again that thanks to flexible clock speeds, it would hammer Ryzen 4000. Or so Intel says. 

On the gaming side (where the GPU matters more than the CPU), Nvidia has unveiled a new generation of mobile graphics technologies. Check out the latest news and reviews below. 

• Hello, Tiger Lake! Announced earlier this year, Intel staged a splashy official launch for its 10nm, 11th-gen chip on September 2, with a small army of designs from PC vendors (see below for a sampling). The company’s SuperFIN transistor is the chip’s secret sauce, enabling higher clock speeds—and Intel was eager to show how Tiger Lake performed in benchmarks. But those variable clock speeds in Tiger Lake could also make it hard to know how fast your laptop’s chip will be. 
• Intel Tiger Lake-based laptops will begin shipping in October. We already know about some of the first models to come out, including the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 9i a bevy of ZenBook, VivoBook, and ExpertBooks from Asus; and the MSI Stealth 15M with RTX graphics.
  

  Intel

• ”Evo” is Intel’s new brand name for its under-promoted Project Athena design initiative for thin-and-light laptops. The company collaborates with PC vendors and component makers to achieve its design goals. Acer claimed its Swift 5 was the first Evo laptop out of the gate, but there are plenty more coming.
• At barely four pounds, the Lenovo Legion Slim 9i is the world’s lightest 15-inch laptop with Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics. It’s no small feat to put a high-end GPU in a slender package. The Legion Slim 7i will start at $1,329 and is expected to be available in October.

• Qualcomm is doggedly pursuing the laptop market, announcing its latest 8cx chip with 5G on September 3. The Acer Spin 7 is the first laptop we’ve heard of to carry the Windows on Arm CPU, but pricing and availability aren’t known yet.

Best thin-and-light laptop

It’s official: You can have both performance and light weight in the same laptop, and Dell’s new XPS 13 7390 is here to prove it. With its 6-core Intel Core i7-10710U CPU, this thin, light machine (available via Dell.com) has actually outpaced bigger workhorse models.

And no, before we get you too worked up: The XPS 13 7390 and its Comet Lake-U CPU aren’t going to outpace a current workstation with, say, a smoking-fast, state-of-the-art Core i7-9750H. But it is the first ultraportable laptop to actually outrun older 7th-gen “H”-class CPUs in heavier laptops, including those in its XPS 15 cousins.

The amount of performance in this amount of portability was simply unheard of just, well, earlier this year. Read our full review. 

[$1,620 as tested; available on Dell.com]