NEC Lavie Z Review **** The World’s Lightest Ultrabook

After spending time with the NEC LaVie Z, we’re ready to give you the full report. What’s obvious is the incredibly light weight of this device; it is hands-down the lightest Ultrabook we’ve seen — lighter even than many 11.6-inch Ultrabooks despite the LaVie Z being in the 13.3-inch class. Beyond the weight is the fastest CPU Ultrabook we’ve tested and a speedy SSD. In this review we’ll give you the lowdown on the build quality, aesthetics, performance, and more.

We’d like to thank Dynamism, importer extraordinaire, for providing the NEC Lavie Z for our review.

NEC Lavie Z Hardware Tour

First we like to get you familiar with the device itself:

Left: fan exhaust, full SD slot

Front: LED indicators

Right: 3.5mm headphone, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, full HDMI, power

Bottom: Fully sealed, no access to RAM, HDD, or battery

Specifications

The NEC Lavie Z that we’re testing is powered by one of the fastest processors that you can find in any Ivy Bridge Ultrabook, the Intel Core i7-3517U @ 1.9GHz, which can use Turbo Boost to clock up to 3.0GHz . Inside is also 4GB of RAM, HD 4000 graphics, and a 128GB SSD.
The display is 13.3-inches with a 1600×900 resolution. The NEC Lavie Z weighs in at 875g. This makes it lighter even than many 11.6-inch devices.

Ports

The port set includes 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, full HDMI, full SD, and a 3.5mm headphone jack