A few years ago a $900 budget wouldn’t have been considered a high end budget for a laptop, but times have changed. Rapidly improving technology coupled with the financial crisis making everybody much more prudent has pushed prices down significantly, a $900 budget is easily enough to pick up a fantastic entertainment laptop.
In fact, the Toshiba Satellite selected on our page dedicated to the Best Multimedia Laptops Under $800 is probably the best value laptop that we have reviewed on this site so far and you could do a lot worse than to consider that laptop alongside the two featured on this page.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Lenovo Y570 08622KU 15.6-Inch Laptop
First up we have a fantastic laptop by Lenovo, a brand which specializes in providing superior components and mid and low range prices! This Lenovo Y570 08622KU laptop currently sells for $899.99 plus free shipping on Amazon, the best online price that we could find when taking into consideration postage costs. When shopping in this price range you really need to be looking at picking up a laptop with a powerful Intel i7 processor, and this laptop delivers on that. The Intel 2nd Generation Core i7 2630QM processor is geared towards those with advanced graphics needs, whether that is 3D gaming or watching HD movies.
A genuine 16:9 widescreen HD display (1366 x 768 pixels) offers crystal clear cinema quality visuals, whilst a NVIDIA Geforce GT555M Discrete Graphics card offers the 1GB of dedicated graphics memory that a multimedia laptop ideally needs. A generous 750 GB hard drive offers plenty of space and will suit the needs of all but the most extreme of users, most people invest in external drives now for their movie and music collections anyway! 6GB of system memory (DDR3) is consistant with what you can expect from a machine within this price range.
The Lenovo Y570 also passes the sound test, so many laptops offer full HD functionality but are ruined by a failure to incorporate decent speakers. It has long been a problem with laptops, but who wants to watch their HD movie downloads and play their advanced 3D online games through headphones? This Lenovo comes with some decent JBL speakers and SRS Premium Surround Sound audio enhancement. Nice bonus features include a USB 3.0 port for high speed downloads, as well as a generous three USB 2.0 ports, and an HDMI port to enable you to watch the HD movies on your laptop hard drive, or indeed streamed from the internet, on your HDTV.
We have written less about this laptop than we have most others, and with good reason. We love Lenovo laptops, they look great and represent decent value for money. But, we don’t think that this is currently the best laptop for your money with a $900 budget. The Toshiba Satellite P775-S7236 featured on the page Best Multimedia Laptop Under $800 offers significantly more for less money. It has a larger screen to start, 17.3 inches, and that will appeal to movie buffs and gamers. The biggest selling point however is the integrated Blu-Ray player. If you can get a larger screen and a Blu-Ray player for less money, with all other specifications remaining constant, then you would probably be silly not to.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
ASUS N53SV-XE1 15.6-Inch Versatile Entertainment Laptop
There is however one laptop which could persuade you to keep your $900 budget and that is the fantastic ASUS N53SV-XE1. Before telling you why this specific laptop is awesome, we will tell you why ASUS as a brand are awesome! A huge study which saw 30000 laptops tracked over several years found that ASUS laptops were the least likely to experience hardware failure within the first three years of their life, ASUS laptops are even more reliable than Toshiba laptops, and that is saying something!
Besides from being ultra-reliable, ASUS laptops also represent great value for money, and at around $850 with free shipping on Amazon (by far the best price found for this laptop online), you are buying a laptop which could easily justify a price tag of in excess of $1000. Perhaps the biggest selling point is the top of the range Intel i7-2630QM Quad-Core processor, a chip capable of handling even the most demanding of graphic intensive games and software applications, this is the same processor used in the Lenovo featured at the top of this page.
It’s not just us who think that the ASUS N53SV-XE1 is one of the best laptops around for it’s price, the consumer does too, this machine is one of the top rated laptops under $900 on the market. A sufficient 4GB of RAM may not sound like much, but when the time comes to upgrade the capability is there, in fact you can upgrade multiple times as this laptop has 4 memory slots with a capacity of some 16GB! A generous 500 GB SATA hard drive (7200 RPM) should be plentiful for most, whilst the powerful Nvidia GT540M Graphics (1 GB of dedicated graphics memory) supports that i7 processor in the delivery of stunning HD graphics.
Multimedia laptops often fall at the final hurdle by failing to provide a decent pair of speakers, that is certainly no concern with this ASUS however which uses ASUS SonicMaster Technology (co-developed by masters of sound Bang & Olufsen) to deliver a superior sound clarity. A super speed USB 3.0 port offers download or transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than those offered by USB 2.0 ports, whilst other convenient features include a built in 2 megapixel webcam and a high quality microphone for networking. The only feature missing is a blu-ray player, if you really need one of those then you should check out the Toshiba Satellite P775-S7236 which also has a larger 17.3 inch display.
All ASUS systems come with a unique free 1 year accidental damage warranty, alongside the standard 1 year general warranty, there aren’t any other laptop brands offering to repair or replace your laptop through damage which has been caused by you! In fact, even your insurance company would be highly unlikely to cover you for things like coffee spills or general water damage and such a policy only goes to show just how much confidence ASUS have in the quality of their products, they would do of course – they have already been confirmed as the most reliable laptop brand on the planet! Head over to Amazon if you want to read more or to buy.
