Llano in the Wild: Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206

Bringing Gaming to the Masses

Where I honestly believe Llano shines is in its ability to bring a usable CPU and solid if unspectacular gaming performance south of the $600 price point. Similar configurations to this 17" Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7206 can be had for around $549 or less if you don't mind going down to a smaller, more portable form factor; Toshiba even offers a 14" notebook with the same APU and 4GB of RAM for just that price.

Low Detail Gaming

While Mafia II and Metro 2033 continue to punish most any notebook that dares to try and run them, and StarCraft II remains staggeringly poorly threaded and CPU limited, the A6-3400M and its Radeon HD 6520G graphics hardware are able to provide playable gaming experiences in almost every case, oftentimes even at the notebook's native 1600x900 resolution. It isn't ideal, but it's a big improvement over even Sandy Bridge's IGP, although the loss of four TMUs and 80 shaders going from the A8 to the A6 is definitely felt. Interesting to note is that the 6520G in the A6 typically handles 900p slightly better than Intel's HD 3000 handles 768p.

Medium Detail Gaming

Llano continues to put in a reasonably strong showing at medium settings, though the relative weakness of the four slow Stars cores is felt here. Much like with Brazos, it seems like AMD has crammed just a little too much GPU into these chips, more than the CPU halves can handle. Still, if you want to game on the cheap, the A6 can largely make it happen, with even 1600x900 gaming not entirely out of its reach in some instances. At our Medium settings, Intel's IGP also starts to fall off quite a bit, with very few titles in our suite managing to break 30FPS.

High Quality Gaming

Just for the heck of it, I figured I'd punish the A6-3400M all the way by running our suite of gaming benchmarks at our "high" preset.

900p proves largely to be too much for this class of graphics hardware; even NVIDIA's dedicated GeForce GT 540M struggles with it. Still, the results are notable and not wholly academic: Llano brings integrated graphics essentially on par with low-to-mid-end dedicated graphics hardware, and that's an achievement. The A6 takes a definite hit compared to the A8 in the GPU, but it still grossly outclasses Intel's HD 3000.