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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medi01 - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
Let me guess. It slows down your web surfing experience, right? I mean pathetic 100Mb LAN socket on a device which 90%+ of the users would never ever use and the rest will use it only because there is no wlan. Shameless...Dustin Sklavos - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
The issue is that it's a checkbox feature that shows up on absolutely everything these days, and if you're sharing media over your network as people are doing more and more, it's going to make a difference. The omission is silly.nitrousoxide - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
Yeah, without this review we are already aware how awful Llano's CPU is. That is a truth given how low the frequency is. I own an Acer AS5560G with A6-3400M and I've done several tests on overclocking and undervolting the Llano.The A6-3400M can be safely undervolted from 1.05V to 0.90V without failing LinX stress test. This results in 2W power reduction in HD video playback and internet browsing, 3.5W power reduction in 3D games and up to 8W reduction in stress test. Peak temperature also drops by 12 degrees.
If you want to trade some battery life for performance, just overclock it to 1.8GHz and it runs stable at 0.95V. Then you get a 30% faster processor without consuming more power than stock A6-3400M. In fact, in stress tests, the overclocked A6-3400M consumes 4W less than stock. What about overclocking at stock voltage? At 1.05V you can bump the frequency to 2.4GHz, but this results in overheating.
As far as I know virtually every Llano can be massively undervolted or overclocked. It appears to me that AMD is too conservative with Llano's voltage and clock speeds, perhaps due to the fact that Llano is released in a hurry. They could've get a much much faster Llano just with some more tweaks.
Novaguy - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
There are a lot of people overclocking and undervolting their HP dv6zqe's into the 2.2 and up ghz range. Apparently the chips are unlocked.I have the dv6zqe and it is going well, except the 6750M (yeah, I did the crossfire) sometimes runs hot/noisy. I have not tried overclocking/undervolting but probably will sometime in the future (probably after it goes off warranty).
I think AMD could have tweaked voltages and clocks on the better chips so that there was model that had a 2.4 stock/2.8 turbo cpu with maybe a 550 or 600 speeds on the gpu portion - that could eliminate the need for a crossfire or perhaps improve the timing so that it is a bit more symmetric. An A8-3550MX or A8-3570MX, if you will.
The other issue - for those that got MX chips, HP is only using 1333 memory chips, when it looks like 1600 mhz is supported (for the MX llano's) and would give better graphics results. This toshiba looks like it doesn't have MX chips, so 1333 is probably the max memory speed. I wish laptop manufacturers had a 1600 option.
Roland00Address - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
It is the newest version of k10stat, correct?Novaguy - Saturday, August 13, 2011 - link
Yes, it's one of the recent versions of k10stat. Maybe the last two versions, as I vaguely remember reading that a new version came out. There are a whole bunch of tables of volts/speeds on various forums using this program.I have not personally tried undervolting/overclocking as I have not installed anything that needs more performance. So far I am just doing browsing and playing early 2000's rpgs (diablo II) and the stock speeds are sufficient. But once I finish that I might move on to something that needs more fps....
R3MF - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
"I'd've killed for a Llano-equipped notebook that could run something like Guild Wars on the battery with good performance. There is a market for this"True, 3D battery life is a standout for Llano, but I want to see a 35W A8 Llano sporting 400 shaders shoe-horned into a 12" chassis.
Now that would be made of WIN!
Anato - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
At the price point i5-2520M is out of the league. I'd like to see i3-2310m in the chars. Tho results AMD-Intel would be the same, Intel wins CPU-tasks AMD Graphics.oceanrock - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - link
I can tell you that the i3-2310 w/o dGPU (ACER timelineX 5830T), was faster, but not as smooth (responsive and enjoyable) as an ACER Aspire AS5253-BZ849 equipped with an E350!The i3 was constantly shifting its speed and spent most of the time at ~800 mhz and 20%utilization, the E350 spent most of the time at 1.2/1.6 ghz with 50-80%utilization. it still lasted 4-8 hours and kept real cool the whole time. the i3 was a bit louder, jerky, not as cool, but lasted 8-12 hours. Also, it cost $100 more...
Go figure???
gc_ - Friday, August 12, 2011 - link
Anandtech, could you please find a way to label laptop comparison graphs with the relevant HD/SSD model or specs? In some benchmarks the HD or SSD is more relevant than the GPU, yet the graphs seem to give all the credit/blame to the CPU or GPU. These days the CPU is often fast enough for many office/school tasks and the storage system is the bottleneck.