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Avita Pura laptop review: An ultra light laptop with all the features you need for gaming, movies, or work

Written by Eileen Brown, Contributor
Avita Pura laptop review an ultra light laptop with all the features you need for gaming, movies, or work zdnet

Avita Pura Laptop PC

7.8 / 5
Excellent

pros and cons

Pros
  • Lightweight design
  • Long battery life
Cons
  • Lag when running resource-heavy applications

The Avita Pura is a sleek looking lightweight laptop with a 14 inch screen that is suitable for a range of work and gaming environments.

Inside the box there is a power supply, Pura laptop and an HDMI-micro HDMI adapter. There is also a user guide which you will need to read if you want to learn about all of the features of the taskpad or the function keys.

The Pura's external dimensions are 320mm x 220mm and it is thin too at 17mm thick. It weighs 1300g. Outside, its pared down design and slender curved form factor look good, and its ports are situated on either side of the device towards the simple hinge.

It comes in five colours; Crystal Blue, Glossy Purple, Metallic Black, Silber Grey and Sugar Red. It is lower spec than the Avita Admiror I looked at in December but this is reflected in its sub-$400 price.

Externally the Pura has a USB, USB type-C and a mini HDMI port on the left hand side of the PC along with a power jack. On the right hand side there is a USB 2.0, a 3.5mm jack and a slot for an SD card.

Inside the Pura there is an AMD A9 9400 chip running at 800MHz and an AMD Radeon R5 graphics card. It has 8GB of DDR4 memory and 128 GB of SSD SATA M2 storage.

According to Avita, its battery will last up to 8 hours. It easily managed 5 hours of Office 365 applications for me so would certainly cope when you are out and about for the day.

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Its 14 inch FHD screen has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and delivers 16:9 aspect ratio. Colours and brightness are good – even when running on battery power, and its 178 degree viewing angle is useful when you need to tilt your screen to work.

The Pura runs 64-bit Windows 10 home in S mode, build 19041. Windows setup has a few extra screens so you can customise your laptop for gaming and education amongst others.

Once Windows has been installed, you can tweak the Radeon settings to optimise your video display profile for home video, outdoor or cinema. You can also tweak aspects of your displays.

You might have a challenge in using the Pura in S mode. This means that you can only run apps that you can download from the Windows Store. Any app you happen to have on a memory stick will not work when your PC is in S mode.

If you run lots of non-app-store apps, or have apps supplied directly from your employer then you might want to disable S mode. This is a one-way switch that will switch S mode off.

The pared-down Pura is not as blisteringly fast as a high-spec laptop, and this is reflected in its price.

There is some system lag when running several Office 365 apps at the same time, but this is to be expected with an entry level affordable laptop.

The Avita Pura is a decent workhorse and would suit your kids' educational needs, as well as the home worker.

Suitable for consumers and road warriors who needs a long lasting battery life and a decent spec PC that is light to carry around, the Avita Pura notebook is worth a try.