Toshiba Satellite L50D-C-13G

A laptop with a screen that’s distinctly off-colour

At an original price of £430 and currently discounted by £100, this mid-range laptop looks excellent value on paper – not least because rather than a compact 11 or 13in screen it has a full 15.6in display, the largest size you’ll generally see on today’s laptops. Add a quad-core processor and 8GB of memory, and you’ve got the makings of a PC that might be able to handle all your everyday jobs and show you a film or two in the evening – not just a second PC to carry around.

Sapphire Radeon R9 380 ITX Compact OC 2GB

As its name suggests, the Sapphire Radeon R9 380 ITX Compact OC has a small PCB, with an overall package that’s designed to fit into a compact mini-ITX chassis where space is at a premium. It measures just 171mm long, making it just 1mm longer than a mini-ITX board. Its height of 107mm means it’s quite short too.

With no room for a substantial cooler, the default overclock only raises the clock frequencies by a small amount, with a 980MHz core and 5.6GHz (effective) for the memory, mere increases of 1 per cent and 1.8 per cent respectively.

Asus Radeon R9 380 Strix 2GB

Asus’ Radeon R9 380 Strix 2GB is both the longest and tallest AMD card on test, with its 272 x 138mm dimensions throwing out any notion of squeezing it into a small case. The upside of this size, though, is that you get enough space for good heat dissipation, along with a quiet, efficient and semi-passive cooler.

Asus hasn’t gone wild with its out-of-the-box overclock either. In fact, it isn’t much faster than the smallest R9 380 card on test. The GPU core sits at 990MHz, just 20MHz over the stock speeds, which is the equivalent of a 2 per cent boost. Meanwhile, its memory frequency is the same as the reference R9 380 spec, 5.5GHz (effective).

Pi-Top laptop kit

Always hungry for Pi, Les Pounder gets hands-on with an education-focused Raspberry Pi laptop kit that promises to make the class green with envy…

Right now the Raspberry Pi sports a plethora of portable options. September 2015 saw the release of the new touch-screen, and other companies such as Kano are working on their own portable setups. Pi-Top started life as a crowd-funded project and combines both hardware and software. The hardware is a sturdy plastic laptop shell (supplied as a kit) and includes a 13.3-inch HD (1,366x768) LCD screen with eDP interface, an 8GB SD card, a battery with a claimed life of 10 hours, and a Wi-Fi dongle. It comes with or without a Pi 2. The kit is fairly simple to assemble but may require adult supervision for a few fiddly bits, such as attaching the LCD screen to the driver board.

Vivaldi 1.0 Beta

Nick Peers discovers whether new browser Vivaldi offers enough tweakability and innovative new functionality to put the wind up Chrome, Firefox et al.

The appearance of a major new web browser is a noteworthy event, even more so when it’s as disruptive as Vivaldi plans to be. It’s not interested in battling the big boys, but instead has targeted a specific niche of user: those unhappy with the direction Opera took when it relaunched itself as a Chrome-based browser with the emphasis on simplicity rather than customisability.