Introducing the Toshiba Tecra R850

Toshiba won't mind if we say that their previous business class notebooks looked...kind of cheap. They were bulky and unattractive, largely feeling like consumer notebooks with matte instead of glossy plastic. Yet when we visited with Toshiba to talk about their Tecra refresh, we were impressed, and Toshiba's reps were only too happy to put the new Tecras next to the old ones to demonstrate the stunning new weight loss plan the notebooks were put on. And the best part? While the Tecras have gotten a healthy refresh, their prices remain remarkably affordable. Is the 15.6" Tecra R850 the notebook you've been looking for?

I'm not sure even Toshiba was prepared for the kind of success the Portege R700 experienced. In many ways the design was a bit of a divergence from their usual fare, but it diverged in the right ways and hit a portable computing sweet spot for a lot of users. Toshiba's designers took the lessons of the R700 to heart and fashioned their new Tecra R840 and R850 notebooks after it, resulting in a pair of remarkably thin but still sturdy and classy-looking business notebooks. We have the 15.6" Tecra R850 on hand, and it offers a healthy amount of performance and value. Check it out:

For starters, it took us a long time to get Intel's fastest mobile dual-core i7 in house last generation, but Toshiba makes it available right out of the gate. The Core i7-2620M is the fastest dual-core Sandy Bridge mobile processor on the market, with a 2.7GHz nominal clock speed able to turbo up to 3.2GHz on both cores and 3.4GHz on a single core. It also sports a full 4MB of L3 cache (mobile i5s only offer 3MB). In a move that seems to be fairly common with these business-class notebooks, Toshiba also only populates one of the memory channels with a single 4GB DIMM, leaving the second one free for a future upgrade.

Graphics duties are handled by the AMD Radeon HD 6450M, and unfortunately there's no hybrid graphics solution in place: the Tecra R850 runs on the 6450M all the time; that means no access to Intel's Quick Sync technology either. Toshiba also still inexplicably continues to opt out of AMD's mobile driver program, much to the detriment of their end users. As for the 6450M, it's a welcome upgrade from the tired Mobility Radeon HD 5470. It features 160 stream processors clocked at 600MHz and 1GB of GDDR3 strapped to a 64-bit memory bus, running at an effective 1.6GHz. This is still a decent upgrade from the Intel HD 3000, and Toshiba's decision to go with AMD is predicated largely upon EyeFinity, which the R850 supports.

Storage duties are handled by a Hitachi Z7K320 320GB, 7200-RPM hard drive, a welcome change of pace from Toshiba's habit of using their own dog slow mobile drives. The Z7K320 is a single-platter drive that tops out at just 7mm in height, and while the 320GB of capacity seems slight it should still be enough for most users. Toshiba also has a hard drive impact sensor built into the Tecra R850 that parks the head when motion is detected.

Rounding things out is a healthy connectivity suite featuring both USB 3.0 and eSATA, along with sleep USB charge capability and gigabit Ethernet. Toshiba even includes an ExpressCard/34 slot for future expansion, and the docking bay port on the bottom of the notebook is identical across the Portege R800 and Tecra R840, allowing for the same dock to be used for multiple notebooks.

Build Quality: Thin is In

Probably one of the most refreshing things about the Toshiba Tecra R850 is the fact that it's frankly svelte for a 15.6" notebook. While the recently released Dell XPS 15z is a bold challenger, the R850 is a quarter of a pound lighter...and a business-class notebook backed by a business-class warranty.

Not messing with a good thing, Toshiba has opted for black matte plastic across virtually the entire chassis, with texturing on the lid and palm rest and silver glossy accents on the hinges, touchpad buttons, and the logo on the lid. Inheriting a lot of its design DNA from the Portege R700/R800, the build is incredibly slender, with a thickness that maxes out at just 1.19" and it really does feel very light in the hand.

Opening the lid, you're greeted with a matte plastic bezel and a matte screen. The interior surfaces are all similar and kept clear of excess shortcut buttons. In fact, Toshiba includes only two: a button which switches the power plan to their "eco" power-saving mode, and a button which toggles the monitor output. Everything else is handled through Fn key shortcuts. In fact, the only color you're really going to see are in the green/orange indicator lights and the blue trackpoint nub.

For better or worse, the Tecra R850 inherits the keyboard style of the Portege R700/R800, and this is probably the one bone I really have to pick with the design. The keyboard itself has a smart and easy to use layout that's really among the better ones I've seen, but the keys are a slightly glossy plastic that aren't particularly comfortable to use. There are worse things to deal with, but the keyboard isn't great, and the surfaces of the keys feel too smooth, the travel too shallow. On the plus side, there's virtually no flex in the keyboard to speak of.

Likewise, the touchpad below the keyboard is comfortable to use. I do get frustrated whenever I see the touchpad as part of the same piece of plastic as the palm rest because it looks chintzy, but the difference in texture is at least welcome and again this is an issue that's more about look than feel. The touchpad buttons also have the right amount of travel, and there's a toggle to enable or disable the touchpad just above the trackpoint buttons.

As a whole, I'm mostly impressed with how well-built and slender the R850 is. It's proof that 15.6" notebooks need not be bulky, overweight monstrosities, and that you can still have a sizable screen and keyboard without having to pack so much weight behind it. And despite being so thin, the body doesn't really bend and the screen and lid have minimal flex.

Application and Futuremark Performance

I'm anxious to see how well Intel's fastest dual-core mobile Sandy Bridge performs, but the scales aren't quite as unfair this time as they were between Arrandale and Clarksfield: Sandy Bridge is a more efficient architecture, and the mobile quad-core chips scale impressively.

As Jarred has mentioned before, we've updated our benchmarking suite somewhat. PCMark05, 3DMark03, and 3DMark05 are no more. In their stead we've added PCMark 7, 3DMark 11, and Cinebench R11.5.

Since we don't really have any comparison points in PCMark 7 just yet, there's no sense in posting a graph with just one or two values, but the Tecra R850's score there was 1472 for reference.

As for everything else, the i7-2620M is clearly at the top of the dual-core heap, but while last generation's i7-620M and i7-720QM were able to tangle, the budget-minded i7-2630QM is generally a healthy upgrade from the 2620M--the exception being single-threaded workloads where the higher single-core puts it 17% ahead of the closest 2630QM. There are just some things a quad-core can do that a dual-core can't, and with Turbo Boost the advantages of dual-core are largely negated. Still, the Tecra R850 ranks very high on most of our charts.

Unfortunately the Radeon HD 6450M seems to have a hard time hanging with Intel's HD 3000 integrated graphics in 3DMark, and worse, it takes a substantial performance hit from the 6470M in HP's EliteBook 8460p. Neither of these solutions are ideal, but the 150MHz deficit on the core clock going down to the 6450M hurts, and it's likely that the 200MHz deficit on the memory hurts even more so considering the 64-bit memory bus. It's worth noting that Intel still lacks support for DX11, so we can't generate a 3DMark11 score, but we'll see if 3DMark correlates with actual gaming potential next.

Gaming Performance

As I mentioned in the HP EliteBook 8460p review, 3DMark isn't often a good indicator of how well graphics hardware will perform compared to actual gaming. AMD has years of experience producing gaming hardware and drivers while the Intel HD 3000 is still relatively young, and hopefully that difference will bear itself out in our gaming tests. We've highlighted the K53E with its slightly slower i5-2520M CPU and HD 3000 graphics as a point of reference.

Unfortunately, in our "low" preset testing it seems like the AMD Radeon HD 6450M in the Tecra R850 has a hard time distancing itself from the Intel HD 3000 graphics. It's important to note here that Toshiba's rationale for including the 6450M was the triple-monitor EyeFinity support that comes with it (hence the included DisplayPort), but we do have to wonder how relevant that will wind up being for many users. StarCraft II is the sole title where the 6450M has a commanding lead over the HD 3000, while Intel ekes out small leads in Metro 2033 and Mass Effect 2.

Instead of being vindicated by bumping up to our "medium" preset, the Radeon HD 6450M is ultimately damned by the increase in demands. This is a low-power, low-performance part, and we have to wonder how many users might have been better served by the Intel HD 3000 graphics hardware. The discrete AMD GPU simply isn't enough of a performance increase to really come out as meaningful (other than in SC2). How many will want to run three displays off of a notebook, and will the 6450M be fast enough to handle such a workload? Either way, something like the 6630M would have been a far more interesting dGPU.

Battery, Noise, and Heat

I've mentioned this before but it bears repeating: if you want great battery life and you want to really see just how efficient modern hardware can be, you have to buy business-class. The R850's running time was a very pleasant surprise, especially for a 15.6" notebook.

I might not have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself, but even with the Radeon HD 6450M and no hybrid graphics solution, the Tecra R850's 66Wh battery allows it to place at or near the top of all of our charts. Toshiba rates the R850 for roughly seven-and-a-half hours of running time, and using their "eco" mode while still leaving the screen at 100 nits, we're actually able to beat that record...even under regular use.

As notebooks are prone to doing, the Toshiba Tecra R850 does run its processor on the warm side. What will impress you (or at least it impressed me) is that it's doing so in a slender chassis and without ramping the fan up to obscenely high speeds. The fan does produce a high-pitched whine under load, but it's still easy to drown out. Also notable is the remarkably cool-running hard drive; I'm used to seeing these hit around 40C in laptops, but that low temperature is on par with my desktop. The HD 6450M, meanwhile, runs incredibly frosty...probably because nobody's asking a whole lot of it. Do these relatively cool temperatures translate well to the user experience?

Why yes, yes they do. The Tecra R850 runs surprisingly cool and could be comfortably used on your lap without roasting your swimmers and taking you out of the gene pool. The typical hot spots are accounted for—the top left near the exhaust vent and the bottom center at the memory hatch—but these aren't that bad. You can definitely stress the R850 without your hands getting sweaty from the heat.

At Least the Viewing Angles are Good

We get tired of griping about LCD quality, but what more can we do? This is a 15.6" notebook with only one screen option: a matte screen with a 1366x768 resolution, and as expected that's a TN panel. As far as overall quality, it ranks among the worst we've tested. Even after calibration I'll admit I found it had an impressively difficult time actually producing accurate color. The nicest thing I can say (at least until we talk about viewing angles) is that it's bright...even on a dark image.

You'd think someone forgot to tell Toshiba's engineers that you don't want a high score on the black level and delta-E, as it ranks dead last in our charts for those areas. The R850's screen is usable, and mercifully matte, but its results rank among our worst and are very poor. But there's at least a silver lining to this story.

The R850 may have horrible color and contrast, but the viewing angles are actually pretty good. I didn't find myself having major sweet spot issues with the screen like I'd expect to, and you could probably safely have one or two people crowd around the screen without too much trouble.

Conclusion: Money Talks

Before I start talking about the very compelling price of Toshiba's Tecra R850, I want to tip my hat to Toshiba for the design of the notebook itself. While the screen may be abysmal and the keyboard leaves at least a little something to be desired, the rest of it is incredibly thoughtful and smart. When my best friend called saying her boss needed a 15.6" notebook for work, but one that was still portable, the R850 was the first one I thought of. Connectivity is excellent across the board, and it's just damned sleek and light. After testing the Tecra R850 and the HP EliteBook 8460p, I really am forced to conclude that notebook shoppers who want something of quality (both aesthetically and practically) would do well to spend up on a business-class machine.

And how about that price? To get one of HP's new beauties you're looking at spending an extra $150 to get comparable specifications in this form factor, and that's for a notebook that's both bulkier and heavier. While I'm a huge fan of HP's new styling, if someone wants something that's simultaneously easy to use and portable, the Tecra R850 is going to be an excellent choice.

What about Dell? Well, Dell is more competitive. The Latitude E5520 starts at $979 for the same processor, which is a great deal. But start adding upgrades to get performance competitive with the R850, and you wind up spending an extra $50 for a system that's still heavier and bigger, and that's with a smaller battery to boot. I hesitate to also ding the Latitude E5520 for not having dedicated graphics since the AMD Radeon 6450M in the Tecra isn't exactly a big winner, but I do think that's at least a minor point in Toshiba's favor. Admittedly Dell has one excellent competitor here, the Latitude E6520, which features a 1080p screen, quad-core processor, and NVIDIA's entry-level 512MB Quadro NVS 4200M. At $1,299 that's a great deal, and if you're willing to sacrifice running time and bulk for it, we wouldn't fault you.

Ultimately the Tecra R850's combination of performance, price, and build quality makes it an easy recommendation, though, and if you're willing to take a small hit to processor performance and don't mind forfeiting the Radeon, you can get it down to $1,129 from Toshiba. That's an excellent deal for a laptop that runs cool, runs quiet, and won't break your back. If they could fix the screen and change the finish of the keyboard they'd be in Silver or Gold Editor's Choice territory, but we do like the overall design and feature set, and coming up with a Bronze isn't half bad.