Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/4616/llano-in-the-wild-toshibas-satellite-l775ds7206
Llano in the Wild: Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206
by Dustin Sklavos on August 12, 2011 12:45 AM ESTBudget DTR: The Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7206
Since Llano's introduction, the value of AMD's new APU has been the subject of some debate, even between editors here at AnandTech. With notebooks sporting the new A-series processors trickling out from vendors (and Toshiba waving the banner) it's been fairly difficult getting a good feel for what the chip brings to the table for the end user, but thankfully that's changing. Today we have on hand the Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7206, a budget 17" model that also gives us our first look at the AMD A6-3400M.
We had a chance to meet with Toshiba reps and preview their refreshed mobile line a couple of months back, and now I'm happy to say we have one of the new notebooks on hand for testing: the catchily named Satellite L775D-S7206. More than that, it's also an opportunity to further explore AMD's Llano APU and what it means for consumers at every point on the continuum as well as determine whether or not AMD's new offering can be price competitive with notebooks featuring Sandy Bridge processors and low end discrete NVIDIA graphics. Our review unit is equipped as follows:
Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7206 Specifications | |
Processor |
AMD A6-3400M (4x1.4GHz, 32nm, 4MB L2, Turbo to 2.3GHz, 35W) |
Chipset | AMD A60M |
Memory | 1x2GB Samsung DDR3-1333 and 1x4GB Samsung D(Max 2x8GB) |
Graphics |
AMD Radeon HD 6520G (320 Stream Processors, 400MHz core clock) |
Display |
17.3" LED Glossy 16:9 1600x900 (Samsung 173KT01-T01 Panel) |
Hard Drive(s) | Hitachi Travelstar 5K750 640GB 5400-RPM HDD |
Optical Drive | HL-DT-ST BD-ROM/DVD+-RW Combo Drive |
Networking |
Realtek PCIe FE 10/100 Ethernet Atheros AR9002WB-1NG 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth v3.0 |
Audio |
Realtek ALC269 HD Audio Stereo speakers Mic and headphone jacks |
Battery | 6-Cell, 11.1V, 48Wh battery |
Front Side | Speakers |
Left Side |
AC adaptor Exhaust vent DisplayPort VGA Ethernet USB 2.0 (Chargeable) HDMI MMC/SD/MS Reader |
Right Side |
Headphone and mic jacks 2x USB 2.0 Optical drive Kensington lock |
Back Side | - |
Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1 |
Dimensions | 16.3" x 10.6" x 1.1"-1.49" (WxDxH) |
Weight | 6.2 lbs |
Extras |
Webcam Flash reader (MMC, SD/Mini SD, MS/Duo/Pro/Pro Duo) USB charging Blu-ray |
Warranty | 1-year limited warranty |
Pricing | MSRP $699 |
Let's start at the top: the AMD A6-3400M APU is the second-fastest 35W mobile Llano chip available, behind the A8-3500M we've already reviewed with our introduction to Llano. AMD's Fusion initiative started grassroots with Zacate and the E-350 and its kin, sporting a single chip dubbed an APU to handle the CPU and graphics and then a single chip for the chipset, which AMD dubs an FCH or "Fusion Controller Hub." This is a major consolidation compared to what we're used to seeing from AMD in the mobile market: we've gone from a processor, northbridge, and southbridge down to just a single 35W-45W part and a low-wattage "northbridge" serving roughly the same functions as Intel's mobile 6 series chips.
Unfortunately, sacrifices were made. The A6-3400M sports four slightly-modified Stars cores with L2 cache per core bumped from 512KB to 1MB and no L3 cache, effectively putting the CPU half on par with an Athlon II. These cores are clocked at a low 1.4GHz, and while AMD has instituted a turbo feature to speed them up to as high as 2.3GHz depending on the workload applied to the chip, none of our monitoring software is yet able to actually track the processor speeds as they turbo up. We don't need to tell you the CPU half of Llano is nowhere near as powerful as Intel's Sandy Bridge, and if you've been following coverage of Llano this is going to be old news to you.
Yet I suspect AMD knew they were going to take it on the chin where the CPU half of Llano was concerned, and they dish it out royally in the GPU side. Llano sports a modified Redwood core (Radeon HD 5670) with 400 stream processors in the VLIW5 configuration, 20 texture units, and 8 ROPs. In the A8 chip, this entire GPU core is present, while the A6 is slightly crippled, sacrificing 80 stream processors and 4 texture units, putting its specs roughly on par with the Radeon HD 4650/4670 (but with DX11). GPU clocks also take a hit from the spec of 444MHz, but it's a mild one, dropping down to 400MHz.
Essentially AMD hedged their bets, trading off processor power for GPU power, and this is one of the places where our opinions of Llano start to diverge. While it's true Llano's CPU half is hopelessly outclassed in every respect by Intel's processors, and I do honestly think two faster AMD cores would've been a better call than four slow cores, the vastly more capable GPU opens new avenues for mobile users, and the processor half is going to be fast enough for general use and light gaming. Essentially what Llano does is enable laptops that can game south of $600. Llano may not make much sense on the desktop (where I still feel the CPU and motherboard are priced out of competition), but in laptops it basically serves an entirely different market from Intel. It's not direct competition, but it's a foothold.
Moving on from Llano, it's a shame Toshiba has essentially crippled the L775D from every other angle but RAM, which is a generous 6GB. There are two available mobile chipsets for the APU: the A60M and A70M, with the key differentiator being that the A70M supports USB 3.0 while the A60M does not. The L775D uses the A60M and thus is missing USB 3.0, and worse, Toshiba has even forgone gigabit ethernet in favor of ancient school 10/100 ethernet. The inclusion of Blu-ray is some consolation but not really enough, though if you need a Blu-ray-capable notebook for under $700 these sacrifices might make some sense to you. Finally, I'm happy to report Toshiba eschewed one of their own dog slow hard drives for a slightly better (though still 5400RPM) Hitachi drive.
Here's where things get difficult. All of the above would make for a fairly decent entry level laptop capable of moderate gaming, but the $699 MSRP would push into competition with better equipped offerings. Luckily, you can already find the similar L775D-S7226 for $599, which is very reasonable for a Blu-ray equipped notebook. As long as that sort of pricing holds, the L775D has plenty to offer.
Baby Steps into the Present
Credit where credit is due to Toshiba: while a lot of the design points I took issue with on their older laptops are still present in the Satellite L775D-S7206, they're still definitely progressing with each refresh. In the case of the L775D-S7206, much of the shell has been upgraded to an attractive navy blue aluminum finish. It still picks up smudges and fingerprints, but it looks nowhere near as cheap as the explosion-at-the-gloss-factory finishes of old.
I'm more liable to forgive Toshiba's design trespasses on a notebook like this one because of its low pricetag, but they're still worth pointing out: glossy plastic does not belong on the screen bezel. In fact, that's really part of the problem with this notebook: while the aluminum finish is fantastic, Toshiba has managed to put glossy plastic just about everywhere you don't want it. The screen bezel should be devoid of glossy plastic yet there it is, and worse, the keyboard is still comprised of the same flat, glossy keys that I derided last generation. There's something seriously wrong when the cheaper notebooks in your line have better keyboards by virtue of just using matte plastic instead of gloss.
What makes that more frustrating is that Toshiba's keyboard layout is honestly one of the best I've seen. While Clevo continues to be utterly perplexed by the prospect of integrating a 10-key with the rest of the keyboard, Toshiba's layout is incredibly smart and as close to ideal as you could ask for. No keys are missing, the 10-key is the bog standard layout, and document navigation keys have their own row above the 10-key. Toshiba's layout is as good as I could ask for, I just wish they'd at least upgrade the rest of their notebooks to the keyboard they're using on their Tecra and Portege lines, or at least get rid of the gloss.
You'll also notice a stunning lack of media keys or touch-sensitive shortcuts above the keyboard. I've never liked the touch-sensitive strips and I'm happy to see it gone, though a few media shortcut keys would've been appreciated even as Fn combinations.
The touchpad is much easier to use, and thankfully it isn't a part of the chassis the way most inexpensive notebooks make it. You can see clearly in the photo that it's a different piece, and it's smooth and easy to track. The action on the mouse buttons is a little stiff, but not a huge deal: if you don't have an external mouse handy, you could do a lot worse than Toshiba's touchpad. The pad itself could be a bit larger, and the buttons are perhaps too large, but it works well regardless.
Honestly my biggest gripe is that Toshiba is still futzing with flat glossy keys and bulbous shell designs on their consumer notebooks. My experiences with Toshiba notebooks, barring design decisions, have typically been very positive, and anecdotally I have yet to see one actually die, no matter the age. Toshiba offers great options for budget users, and the navy blue aluminum panels are a major upgrade, but the overall curvy design still feels unattractive to me.
Oh My Stars: Application Performance
Most of the more informed of our readers are already going to have a pretty good idea of how the CPU-based tests are going to shake down. The Stars core at the foundation of the Llano APU was mostly competitive with mainstream Intel CPUs the day it released, but it hasn't aged well, and the cripplingly low 1.4GHz nominal clock rate of the A6-3400M powering the Toshiba L775D-S7206 is going to look pretty dire on paper. What's important to keep in mind is that this processor is still fast enough for most basic tasks, though: you can still edit video and photos with it, but it's definitely going to take longer than a comparable Intel chip. There's also that potential 2.3GHz Turbo Core available; we can't measure how often the cores are actually running above 1.4GHz, but look at the results.
You can see in PCMark 7 that Sandy Bridge pretty much dusts the A6-3400M (noting that the quad-core Sandy Bridge test systems do benefit from SSDs), and it basically trades blows with Arrandale. The dual-core i5-2520M with an HDD is in the ASUS K53E, and outside of the storage test it also pummels Llano. What's particularly interesting, though, is that the A6-3400M is barely slower than the A8-3500M, at least in these synthetic tests. That makes sense: only 100MHz separates the two processors, but at least as far as the CPU goes you can make that sacrifice fairly comfortably since the A8 is much more rarefied in the wild than the A6. The Athlon II P520, meanwhile, boasts two cores at a nominal 2.3GHz and trades blows with the new Llano chips.
There's an awful lot to digest here. First, two of Intel's Hyper-Threaded cores running at a high clock speed basically run roughshod over four slow Stars cores: no surprsies there. But the Phenom II P920 in the Toshiba A665D-S6049 is a 1.5GHz quad core with 512KB of L2 cache per core instead of 1MB as in Llano, though the cores are otherwise almost identical. In most cases the AMD chips bunch together while the Intel chips gum up the top of the chart. The takeaway is brutal, though: Trinity, with its Bulldozer cores instead of Stars cores, can't get here fast enough. The i7-2820QM in our Sandy Bridge testbed is nearly three times faster than Llano, and the i5-2520M is about 60% faster on average.
Things brighten up a bit when we get to 3DMark, where Llano's modified Redwood GPU core is able to hang fairly well with discrete-class GPUs. The A6-3400M may be closer to the bottom of the charts in each case, but it's still producing impressive performance compared to the string of dedicated graphics parts. It's easy to understand why AMD's PR splits hairs about calling Llano's graphics core an IGP and prefer to call it an "iGPU" or Fusion GPU, because while it's an IGP in the strictest sense, it doesn't necessarily deserve the negative connotations that have stigmatized the term as a result of Intel's pre-Sandy Bridge integrated graphics parts. Also worth pointing out in case you missed it is the lack of 3DMark11 results for any of the Intel IGPs; as a test that requires DX11, even Sandy Bridge can't run it without a dedicated GPU.
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.
Running 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.
Seventeen Inches of Mediocrity
The more notebooks I review, the more I find that the bog standard resolutions available for many of these form factors just aren't enough. 1366x768 in a 15.6" notebook borders on offensive, but 1600x900 at 17.3" really isn't a walk in the park either. The overall resolution is an improvement from the 1440x900 that old 17" notebooks used to run at, but dot pitch is still high. It seems like if you want a good screen, you need to find a notebook that supports 1080p.
Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206 sports a middling 17.3", LED-backlit 1600x900 screen that's serviceable but as you'll see, utterly unexciting. This is to be expected given the price tag and resulting market the notebook is aimed at.
Poor black levels keep the Satellite's Samsung panel from achieving a decent contrast ratio, and while the color gamut is alright, accuracy is in the toilet. Overall the screen is bright enough, but we're most definitely in budget laptop territory.
Viewing angles don't fare much better. This is a TN panel through and through and while notebooks like the substantially more expensive Alienware M17x R3 prove TN panels don't have to suck, it's still frustrating to see technology this mediocre continuing to run wild.
Conclusion: Price Above All Else
I won't lie, I was looking forward to doing this review as an opportunity to weigh in with my peers on Llano, and that's largely because I do think we've been a bit unfair to it and I see the value in it. Jarred's concern regarding AMD's Fusion APUs is a fair one: released right now they're alright, but they're really a year or two late. It's true, but I'm not convinced it's entirely fair. I'm a huge fan of Brazos because to me it soundly and squarely beats and replaces Atom, at least in the form of the E-350, and this is something we've needed for a long time.
Llano is a bit different. First, as I said before, it doesn't belong on the desktop. It just doesn't. For the price of a decent Llano chip and accompanying motherboard, you can get a comparable Athlon II X4, motherboard, and strong dedicated GPU. As a builder there are just too many alternatives, and worse, there are still no Mini-ITX motherboards for it to at least consider shining in. Hybrid CrossFire is also severely handicapped with it's lack of DX9 support, almost to the point where I wonder why AMD even bothered. Jarred did receive a BIOS update to the original Llano laptop that addressed most of the corruption issues experienced in our not-for-release hardware, but with Llano already having more GPU than CPU power, Hybrid CrossFire merely puts an even greater load on the anemic Stars CPU. We're running some additional testing of Hybrid CrossFire and will discuss the results in the near future, but let's just say it's not quite worthy of the praises some are singing.
Despite some flaws and the weak processor core, however, Llano carves out its own niche in the mobile space, a space where AMD has desperately needed a winner. It's not the winner we were looking for, but it does something else entirely. On a budget but still want something portable you can play Left 4 Dead 2 on? Now we're talking. Llano helps democratize PC gaming and lowers the price of entry. When I was stuck in a godawful lecture at school 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, and while I think prices could stand to be a little lower and industry support for AMD products could always be better, you're just not going to beat the value proposition. Llano is a great alternative south of $700, and absolutely thrives south of $600.
Where the Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7206 comes in is simple: there is a cross-section of needs that get met by this product. I know a lot of people aren't fans of notebooks this big, but since travelling to CES I've been able to recognize their value: I used a big, comfortable desktop replacement in the hotel room, and I took my ThinkPad X100e with me on the show floor. I don't like Toshiba's styling, and I don't like the corners cut (10/100 ethernet and no USB 3.0? Seriously?), but I do like seeing a 17" Blu-ray equipped notebook with a spacious hard drive that can still game for under $700.
Office Depot has the similar L775D-S7226 on instant rebate for $599 right now, with the only difference between the S7226 and S7206 being the lack of Bluetooth support on the former. There's something of a price premium with this form factor, and a visit to NewEgg proves you'd be hard-pressed to find a good alternative to what Toshiba offers with this notebook. The price is right, and the performance is exactly adequate. While the Stars cores in the A6-3400M are hopelessly long in the tooth, they still offer enough oomph to handle most tasks, and the A6 can even play less demanding games at the notebook's native 900p. On top of that, it's quiet, cool, and offers decent battery life.
Is the L775D-S7206 a homerun? No. But if you're part of the niche that can take advantage of its combination of features, and you know who you are, it's going to be tough to do much better than this.