Lenovo ThinkPad W510

You'd never describe Lenovo's Thinkpad W510 as "thin and light." It's a bulky, heavy beast--a laptop with a 15.6-inch, LED backlit display that weighs as much as some 17-inch laptops. What you get with that bulk is a high-performance, workstation-class CPU, nVidia Quadro midrange mobile graphics, and workstation-style features such as built-in color calibration, complete with sensor.

As a general-purpose laptop, the W510 is something of a mixed bag. While the Quadro FX880 M mobile GPU is capable for a unit this size, it's no gaming powerhouse. Modern games tend to stagger a bit at the full 1080p resolution. The Stalker: Call of Pripyat benchmark eked out 14.4 frames per second in DX 10 mode at default settings. Far Cry 2's test fell just shy of 18 fps in an action scene.

Similarly, DVD playback was unexceptional. Even after tweaking the nVidia control panel, DVD upscaling still resulted in a soft image with the two DVD movies I viewed (Lord of the Rings: Return of the Kind and Serenity). Even 1080 WMV HD content looked a little washed out. But audio output quality was surprisingly good. Bass, as usual, is lacking, but stereo imaging seems reasonably accurate, and the overall sound quality has a pleasant, neutral sound.