Posted:2006-06-09 By notebook review Number of View:282651
TOSHIBA TECRA A6-S513 REVIEW
NOTEBOOK PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK
By :notebook review
Posted:2006-06-09
xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source
Toshiba’s new Tecra A6-S513 is the last to be reviewed here.
Notebooks from Toshiba feature a very recognizable design, so you
can guess the manufacturer without the prompting stickers. This
consistency through generations is valuable for loyal fans of the brand
that won’t be left without their favorite features after replacing
their current notebook.
Like
the notebook from Sony (see the previous section), this model offers
but few interface connectors which are also not very conveniently
placed around its case.
The intricately shaped front panel which is the result of the original
relief of the notebook’s bottom (they even had to attach feet to it to
make the computer steady) carries a Wi-Fi switch on the left…
…and headphones and microphone sockets with a volume control on the right:
Toshiba is not afraid of using such controls because their service
time depends directly on the quality of the potentiometers and the
company’s engineers have proved their quality in the numerous sold
notebooks.
The notebook status indicators are located in the bottom left corner:
They are well visible even when the lid is closed. The back panel
carries a power adapter connector, one USB port, and LAN and modem
ports.
I can put up with the latter two, but I can’t understand why you
would ever need a USB port at the back of your computer. The power
adapter connector is rather too far from the edge, so you have to get
used to it to learn to attach the adapter blindly.
The rest is ordinary enough. The right panel accommodates an optical drive and two USB connectors:
On the left panel, there is an external monitor output, one more USB
port, S-Video output, FireWire port, PCMCIA slot, and card-reader.
This keyboard should be familiar to all users of Toshiba notebooks:
The layout is classic except that the Window and Context Menu keys are
in the top row – if you are used to keyboard shortcuts involving these
keys, you have to learn them anew. There are only two additional
buttons here:
And one button of these two is responsible for switching between the displays which is not a very frequent action.
A fingerprint scanner is available:
So, the notebook is up to the latest trends in notebook-making. The touchpad looks like the one of the Sony notebook.
The same minimalism and functionality, but the cursor positioning accuracy seems a little worse to me.
The
display is average. Its maximum brightness is not very high; its
anti-glare coating is too “grainy”; its viewing angles are narrow and
color reproduction is average. This display would suit an ordinary
low-end product better than to a midrange business notebook.
There are a lot of individual compartments here, so it’s not a problem to replace a component like memory or wireless adapter.
The battery is nearly standard:
It’s a little below average in capacity, and you’ll see in the Tests section how it tells on the notebook’s battery life.
The Tecra A6-S513 is a kind of entry-level business-class notebook.
With the configuration it has, it is not a low-end product, but it is
not a normal business notebook, either. The most disturbing fact is its
price. I doubt this model can make anyone interested when it costs the
same or even bigger money than most other models in this review.
Performance
First I checked the notebooks in Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmarks
Toshiba Tecra A6-S513 winstone benchmark
And here are the results produced by PCMark04:
Toshiba Tecra A6-S513 pcmark performance
The results of the Photoshop CS are indicative of the overall performance of the CPU, platform and hard drive:
Toshiba Tecra A6-S513 adobe photoshop
The well-balanced LW40 is almost as fast as the two notebooks
on the new platform. Other notebooks are slower. The two slowest models
shouldn’t be used to run such applications at all – they are only
capable of performing office tasks like processing text and
spreadsheets, browsing the Web, etc.
The next test shows what you can expect from these notebooks in gaming applications:
Toshiba Tecra A6-S513 gaming benchmark
performed this test using the maximum display resolution of each
notebook, except for the LG T1 (I used 1280x800 with it because
1440x900 would have been too much for its integrated graphics core).
The Acer TravelMate 3222WXMi is the best and can cope with modern games
if you don’t use the highest graphics quality settings. Among other
notebooks, only models with the X600 are interesting. The Samsung X11
is second after the TravelMate 3222WXMi but I doubt it’s going to be
that fast in real games.
I also published the results of the CPU
subtest to show you that 3DMark03 favors the Centrino Core Duo
platform. This is indicated by the Samsung X11’s results. This platform
is the most promising one when it comes to games, considering that all
the leading game developers have confirmed support for dual-core
processors in their upcoming products.
And now, the results of the most important test:
I put the results the notebooks achieved in Reader’s mode and under
maximum load into one diagram because the difference between the two is
indicative of how well the manufacturer set up the power-saving
parameters. The Sony VGN-FJ1SR looks best here as it yields you its
full computing power under max load but is very economical in Reader’s
mode. Besides the Sony, there are two more leaders: LG’s T1 with a
high-capacity battery and an L series Core Duo processor which features
low power consumption, and ASUS W3H00V. The latter proved to be a bit
of a cheater, though. Even under max load with the portable/laptop
power management scheme selected this notebook never increased its CPU
frequency higher than 1.3GHz.
It’s all clear with the first two diagrams, but then there are some things I’d want to single out. The LW40 is very fast in the memory test; it’s the best Centrino-based notebook I’ve seen in this benchmark. The Acer TravelMate
3222WXMi is unrivalled in the graphics subsystem test just because it
has the fastest graphics adapter among the tested notebooks.
Nvidia’s
GeForce Go 7400 is downright disappointing. If you need fast graphics,
buy a notebook that has dedicated graphics memory. Graphics subsystems
of other kind (with such suffixes as TC, HM) are not much better than
integrated graphics and cannot ensure high performance in 3D. In the
disk subsystem test the notebooks rank up according to the spindle
rotation speed of the hard drive they use.
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