Best Multimedia Laptop Under $800 – 2012

The cost of high end laptops has come down significantly in recent years, and whilst there are still plenty of laptops costing $2000 on the market, you really don’t need to spend any more than $800 to pick up a great system capable of becoming your all-in-one entertainment centre. In fact, we have already reviewed too awesome laptops in a lower budget in the article Best Multimedia Laptop Under $700!

Whilst comparing dozens of laptops for these articles we paid attention to the quality of components and filtered out laptops which don’t offer one of the many general indicators set out on the page What Is A Multimedia Laptop?; the result is this, the two laptops that we consider to be the very best multimedia laptops under $800 for 2012.

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Toshiba Satellite P775-S7236 17.3-Inch LED Laptop

Having already selected a Toshiba laptop on the page Best Multimedia Laptop Under $700, it shouldn’t come of any great surprise to anybody to see another Toshiba system selected for an $800 budget too. This laptop normally sells for $999.99 but at time of writing can be found for just $799.99 with free shipping, an outstanding price for the ultimate multimedia laptop. If you have found yourself on this page having been looking for a laptop with a $700 budget then you should without a doubt ‘up’ your budget and choose this system.

To begin, it offers a top of the range Intel Core i7-2630QM Processor at a time when most laptops within this price range are still coming with older Intel i5 chips, if you are into gaming, graphic design, or other graphically demanding software then a high specification processor can be considered essential. Of course, you also need a great graphics chip, and Toshiba have delivered here too with Intel HD Graphics and 64 MB of dedicated graphics memory. A genuine 16:9 widescreen 17.3 inch HD 720p screen is perfect for cinema quality visuals. A true multimedia laptop will always have a large HD screen.

Now for a major selling point. Many mid-range laptops will offer most of the desirable components for our multimedia age but then fail to incorporate a blu-ray player, leaving you limited to streaming or downloading HD movies in order to enjoy your laptops superior graphics properties, you normally have to move sharply up the price range in order to find a decent laptop with an integrated Blu-Ray drive; it makes little sense to buy a laptop geared towards advanced graphics and 3D gaming before being limited to software that can be packed onto a CD-Rom.

Courtesy of a built in HDMI port you can connect your laptop to your HDTV too, so that it compliments your existing entertainment system. Now you can watch those downloaded HD movies on your TV without having to transfer data or burn to disc! Any laptop which enables you to buy Blu-rays for your TV without having to buy an expensive standalone Blu-Ray player is handy in our eyes, especially for those who don’t own a PlayStation 3!

A generous 750GB SATA hard drive (5400 RPM) and 6 GB of RAM, with the ability to upgrade to 8 GB at any stage in the future, should be plentiful for all but the most demanding of users. The final feature worth pointing out is the built in Harman Kardon stereo speakers with Dolby Advanced Audio. So often a multimedia laptop will offer the world and then let itself down with quiet and tinny, sometimes completely inaudible, speakers. Leaving you to buy standalone speakers or listening through headphones. Not this laptop, the sound quality of this new wave of Toshiba laptops is awesome.

In our article What Is A Multimedia Laptop? we produced a checklist of components and features that any multimedia laptop should have in 2012, this laptop is the cheapest that we have featured to tick every box. If you want a true entertainment laptop then the least that you should spend is, as a result $800. For further information, and to read customer reviews, head over to Amazon.