Llano in the Wild: Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206
by Dustin Sklavos on August 12, 2011 12:45 AM ESTRunning Cool and Quiet
One of Jarred's big takeaways and certainly one of the things AMD representatives are the most proud of is the vast improvement in power consumption and heat that Llano brings, and that's where you're really going to see the difference with the Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7206.
The A6-3400M unfortunately still has trouble keeping up with Sandy Bridge and Optimus, but it's a massive improvement on AMD's last generation. The A8 test laptop also performed much better in battery life, a combination of the smaller 14" panel and higher capacity battery. Despite the meager battery Toshiba equips the L775D-S7206 with, it still manages to produce solid running time, keeping in mind that many of these competing notebooks aren't saddled with having to power a 17" screen on top of everything else.
As for noise, the L775D-S7206 is actually blissfully quiet even under sustained load. At a meeting with HP and AMD in San Francisco a couple of months back to discuss the impending Llano launch, the AMD rep was keen to have the press touch some of the Llano-equipped laptops there just to feel how cool they were running, and he was right. Toshiba's notebook barely warms up, and the fan barely has to spin up. This, at least, is a major coup and step forward for AMD.
Those temperatures are incredibly frosty. The "THRM" temperature at the top is actually the overall CPU temperature, and it runs as cool as or cooler than I've seen Arrandale or Sandy Bridge run in most of the notebooks I've reviewed. The 17" chassis certainly does a lot of the work for Toshiba, but the end result is a notebook that's both cool and quiet.
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elrui - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
At 450 bucks Asus offers an A3400 with 1gb discrete graphics. I bought one and am amazed at how capable it is.Novaguy - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
I think I just saw a Toshiba with a A4-3300M out there at Best Buy. I think it was priced at $399, so it was brushing up against E-350 pricing territory.I have not heard anything about this chip, though. Would like to get some reviews.
Baffo - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
I noticed in the laptop specs, only mention was made for 1x2GB and 1x4GB configurations; is that simply as tested (in which case, was it tested with 2GB or 4GB RAM? Can be big difference for Win7 depending on what is running..), or as available from Toshiba? Since we are talking about an IGP (sorry, iGPU ;-) ), you are contending for memory bandwidth for GPU and CPU access, adding memory bandwidth can only help both. Or is the memory controller not sophisticated enough to accomplish what even early gen Athlon CPUs could do? If so, is DDR-1600 the only way to free up RAM access bottlenecks? Could be a real cheap upgrade and cost savings to buy the 2GB version, and buy an extra 2GB chip to boost performance both due to physical RAM exhaustion and interleaving for collision reduction.Valitri - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 - link
Just wanted to give my 2 cents to the value of the A6 and why I just purchased one. I grabbed a Samsung 3 series from BestBuy yesterday for $399. It has the A6 3420m, 4Gb ram, 500GB 5400rpm hard drive, 1.3" thick and about 5 lbs. My reasoning for buying this was to take on an overseas deployment where it very well could not make it back. I wanted it cheap, able to skype, but also use it to play some games as my time sink. I've got WoW and about 15 games in steam loading on it as we speak, I'll repost when I can give more input on the performance. So far in windows, just loading webpages in chrome, downloading avast, steam, wow client, it all seems just fine. I'm really curious to see how well it will launch these games.