Llano in the Wild: Toshiba's Satellite L775D-S7206
by Dustin Sklavos on August 12, 2011 12:45 AM ESTConclusion: 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.
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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.