Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530, Prices, Specs Features Performance

Pakar Iklan - Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530, Prices, Specs Features Performance : The Tecra R850 comes dressed in business black. It features a plastic chassis, but instead of using an ordinary ABS plastic enclosure, Toshiba developed a high-resin plastic for the case, which it calls a “fiberglass reinforced chassis,” that is thin and durable. On many plastic laptops, particularly larger models like this one, where there are large expanses of plastic, worrisome flex is often felt on the lid and keyboard deck. But the Tecra R850’s case feels very rigid. It’s also textured in a corduroy pattern on the lid and wrist rest, giving the laptop a unique yet still boardroom-friendly look.

Features Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530

The Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530 is based on a chip from Intel’s second-generation (Sandy Bridge) Core processors, the 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M. Other core specs include 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory and a 320GB hard drive, standard fare for a business laptop. Breaking from the basic business mold are the Tecra R850’s graphics; instead of integrated Intel graphics, the laptop features a low-end discrete graphics card, the AMD Radeon HD 6450, which brings along 1GB of dedicated video memory.

As a Toshiba business laptop, the Tecra R850 includes the company’s EasyGuard technology to help you stay protected, secure, and connected. Protection comes in the form of a spill-resistant keyboard and shock absorbers on the hard drive and display to protect those components against drops. The hard drive also features 3D sensors that can sense a rapid increase in speed and park the drive heads before impact to keep them from scratching the platter. Security features include TPM encryption and the aforementioned fingerprint reader. Connectivity is aided by the placement of the Wi-Fi antenna; Toshiba incorporates two antenna on the top of the display to increase signal strength.

The laptop also features a docking connector on the bottom, making it easy to snap the Tecra R850 into a docking station for those days when you’re not on the road but in the office. The docking station and power adapter are the same across all Tecra R840 and R850 models as well as Portégé R830 models, making it easy for large organizations to share port replicators and power cords across the various Toshiba laptops it has deployed.

Performance Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530
The Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530’s Core i5-2520M CPU is clocked at 2.5GHz, but it can scale up to 3.2GHz using Intel’s Turbo Boost feature. It also features Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, which allows the two cores to function as four virtual cores. In labs testing, the Tecra R850-S8530 acquitted itself quite well. It scored 7,705 on PCMark Vantage, which is a good measure of a system’s overall performance. The Core i7–based HP EliteBook 8560p topped the Tecra R850 with a score of 8,487 on the same test, but the EliteBook also costs more at $1,499.

Just for your reference, the EliteBook is a workstation, so we expect especially good performance out of it. We’re choosing it for comparison because it’s the only business notebook with a Sandy Bridge processor we’ve tested, since Sandy Bridge is still relatively new. So we don’t expect the Tecra to surpass the EliteBook in performance; in fact, overall, it performs exactly as it should for its processor and price. If you’d like another point of comparison, you can read our review of the $969 Dell XPS 15, which also uses a second-generation Core i5 processor, albeit at a slower clock speed of 2.3GHz.

On Cinebench 10, which isolates the CPU while taxing all of its cores, the Tecra R850-S8530 topped the 10,000 mark with a score of 10,668. That’s less than 500 points below the HP EliteBook 8560p’s score of 11,158 and more than 1,000 points above the Dell XPS 15’s score of 9,223.

The Tecra R850-S8530 did very on our two real-world media-encoding tests—iTunes in particular. On our Windows Media Encoder test, it converted a standard 3-minute-and-15-second video clip to DVD-quality format in 3 minutes 14 seconds, which was just 31 seconds slower than the HP EliteBook 8560p. On our iTunes conversion test, the Tecra R850-S8530 took 2 minutes 19 seconds to convert 11 standard MP3 files to AAC format, which was only 8 seconds slower than the EliteBook 8560p. By comparison, the XPS 15 completed these tests in 3:53 and 3:05, respectively.

The Tecra R850-S8530 features a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6450 graphics processor, which allows for a smidge of gaming and, more importantly for its target audience, a graphics boost for creative business tasks. Also, for serious multi-taskers, the Radeon HD 6450 supports up to four displays (the laptop's display plus three others through a port replicator).

To put this GPU to the test, we use 3DMark06, a synthetic DirectX 9 gaming benchmark, the Tecra R850-S8530’s score of 4,251 at its native resolution only slightly trailed the 4,283 that the EliteBook 8560p posted, though the EliteBook’s resolution of 1,600x900 is higher than the Tecra R850’s resolution of 1,366x768. For that reason, we always run this test at 1,024x768, too, and here the difference was more pronounced, with the Tecra earning 4,748 and the EliteBook earning 5,500. The EliteBook uses a higher-end AMD Radeon HD 6470M with 1GB of video memory.

We ran two 3D games, and at its native resolution, the Tecra R850-S8530 managed only 8.35 frames per second (fps) on Just Cause 2 and 18fps on Company of Heroes, an older game. When we lowered the resolution to 1,024x768 and turned off anti-aliasing, it rose to a playable 28.3fps with Company of Heroes. Stick to older games at lower resolutions with image settings dialed down, and the Tecra R850-S8530 will provide a gaming outlet for when the workday is through.

Using a standard six-cell battery, the Tecra R850-S8530 ran for an impressive 4 hours 34 minutes on our demanding DVD battery-rundown test, in which we play a DVD repeatedly until the battery dies. That outlasted the respectable 3:54 that the HP EliteBook 8560p scored on the test as well as the 3:38 from the Dell XPS 15.

Specs Toshiba Tecra R850-S8530
Processor: 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2520M (up to 3.2GHz, overclocked)
Memory: 4GB RAM
Storage: 320GB hard drive
Optical Drive : DVD±RW SuperMulti
Screen: 15.6 inches (1,366x768 native resolution)
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6450 (1GB)
Weight: 5.4 pounds
Dimensions (HWD): 1.2x14.9x9.9 inches
Operating System: Windows 7 Professional (64-bit)