No frills and a terrible webcam, but this is one of the most affordable AI laptops around
Dell’s Inspiron 14 Plus is currently the cheapest Copilot+ PC around, but if that’s still too much and your heart is set on an AI PC, then the PCSpecialist Lafité AI AMD may be the answer.
Rather than featuring one of AMD’s new Ryzen AI 300 series chips, PCSpecialist saves a chunk of cash by opting for last year’s AI hotshot, the Ryzen 8845HS. Its NPU offers 16 TOPS compared to the 55 TOPS of the Ryzen AI 370 HX in the trio of Asus laptops on review this month, which means no Recall or Cocreator built into Windows, but you can take advantage of third-party software enhanced for NPUs. So far, that mainly means video-editing and photo-editing software (think removing background noise), plus blurring effects in video calls.
You’re also buying an eight-core, 16-thread processor, and one that typically stands up well compared to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H. You can see that in the single-core performance in Geekbench 6, with a result of 2,532 above the 2,349 of the LG gram Pro. I saw the same in Cinebench 2024, where the Lafité scored 105 to 99 of the LG, and it also performed in the multicore section: 871 versus 660. It was only in Geekbench 6’s multicore test that PCSpecialist’s machine came second, with 9,875 to the gram Pro’s 12,646.
PCSpecialist provides 16GB of RAM, leaving one SODIMM socket free.
