Holiday gift guide: Best sub-$1500 notebooks

10 great all-round notebooks that won't break the budget
  • Elias Plastiras (PC World Australia (online))
  • — 26 November, 2010 11:38

Years ago, $1500 wouldn't have bought you a notebook with much speed and many features. These days, a $1500 notebook is full of great features and also offers plenty of performance. Sub-$1500 notebooks equipped with Intel Core i5 or Core i3 CPUs can tackle toughest of tasks, whether it is video editing to upload to YouTube, or converting video formats so that you can watch movies on your iPhone. Furthermore, some can even be used for gaming!

In this roundup we've listed some of the best sub-$1500 notebooks we've seen; most have 15in screens, but all offer great performance and can be used at home, at school or even in the office. Don't forget, we've listed the recommended retail price of each model, so if you shop around you should be able to find them much cheaper, and maybe even with more hard drive space or more RAM!

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Item:
6 / 10
MSI FX600

MSI's FX600 possesses good speed and is a reasonable model to consider if you want a gaming laptop. It also looks good and is comfortable to use -- its touchpad is among the best we've used. However, it only has 2GB of RAM and NVIDIA's Optimus dual graphics card technology doesn't always automatically pick the best graphics card for the job.

  • Review Date:
  • Reviewer:
  • Manufacturer:
  • 8th Sept., 2010
  • Elias Plastiras
  • MSI
  • Rating:
  • Price:
  • 3.50
  • $ 1,399.00
  • Pros:
  • Nice styling, excellent touchpad, dual graphics cards, good speed
  • Cons:
  • Only 2GB RAM, screen has poor vertical viewing angles, no easy way to manually switch between graphics cards

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