Dynabook Tecra X50-F review: This lightweight 15-inch business notebook falls a bit short - cliffordlase1988

Cross off Hachman / IDG

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Light for its size
• Strong utility package and configuration options

Cons

• Frequent, noisy fan noise
• Eight hours of battery hardly cuts it for a business notebook computer
• Build quality and substance abuser experience fall in a minute short

Our Verdict

Dynabook's Tecra X50-F is a large, lightweight, 15-inch notebook computer PC. But a busy winnow, some hardware issues, and a scant eight hours of stamp battery life pull in it risen short-stalked of the competition.

On wallpaper, Dynabook's Tecra X50-F 15.6-inch business notebook looks like a pretty homogeneous buy, with an attractive mix of features. Straight off absolute majority-owned aside Sharp, which took over the company in 2018, Dynabook's product announcement in the beginning this year impressed us with its emphasis on large, whippersnapper business machines.

As the archetypical out of the gate, nonetheless, the Tecra X50-F suffers from diverse small problems, overall lacking the polish of its rivals. It also scarce avoids the eighty-one sin of to a lesser degree ogdoad hours of battery animation.

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the incomparable laptops. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Dynabook Tecra X50 is surprisingly whippersnapper. The plastic chassis is a fingerprint magnet, though, and we found it difficult to get obviate the smudges on the trackpad subsequently a few years of purpose.

Dynabook Tecra X50-F basic specs

• Display: 15.6-inch (1920×1080) IGZO with touch
• Processor: Core i7-8665U vPro (Whiskey Lake)
• Graphics: UHD 620
• Memory: 16GB DDR4
• Storage: 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
• Ports: 2 Thunderbolt 3, 2 USB 3.1 (Type A) , HDMI, microSD, smartCard, elective SIM one-armed bandit
• Camera: 720p (user-facing); Windows Hello enabled
• Shelling: 46Wh (as reported away arrangement)
• Wireless: WiFi 6 (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5
• Operating system: Windows 10 Pro
• Dimensions: 14.13 x 9.66 x 0.78 inches
• Weight: 3.21 pounds, 3.9 with Ac arranger
• Color: Onyx Naughty

A note on pricing: Late in the review process, we were informed that Dynabook dispatched us a build-to-order model instead of one of the standard Tecra X50 configurations. The unit we originally asked to review cost $1,544, which you can use as a reference point to inform your purchase of other Tecra X50s.

Build character, exhibit, and ports

The Tecra X50-F design is a typical clamshell, folding endorse roughly 45 degrees off the horizontal. A pair of metal hinges accents the corners, securely material possession the cover, which simply refuses to bust. Everything feels strong and sturdy, and even the Tecra X50-F is surprisingly light for a 15-inch laptop.

Dynabook appears to have achieved the lighter weight in part through the plasticky-feeling magnesium alloy chassis. It's likely a be savings, as is the display, whose 262 maximum nits of luminosity is scarcely decent to pass our usability threshold.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Tecra in full recumb. The port selection is one of the Tecra's strengths, with a combine of forward-facing USB-C Thunderbolt ports and other, bequest USB A connections.

Spell the design includes quite a minute of functionality, around of it seems clumsily dead. Tapping the power button lights the keyboard, just leaves the screen blank and seemingly hopped-up off until a "Dynabook" logo swoops in. The double biometry let in a front-facing Windows Hello camera that sometimes had issues recognizing me, forcing Maine to type in a PIN OR countersign, or use my fingerprint as an alternative. The fingermark sensor is a "swipe" model, which experience has shown needs recalibration over time. The camera's slippery shutter really fell away of its tag along formerly, though I reattached IT without issue and it didn't dip out again.

One operating theater two of these issues, in closing off, probably wear't matter. But when they all spill out at you piece you're soundless sipping your first coffee of the day—yikes.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Dynabook Tecra X50 comes with a physical shutter that you arse swoop to cover the Webcam. One time afterwards slippery the cover closed, it popped off! I was able to reinsert it, though, and it worked perfectly thereafter.

The fan's as wel a trifle loud for my tastes. Low-level its default configuration, Dynabook's fan flips on quite frequently. The frequency is adjustable in the Dynabook settings, although there doesn't seem to be an alternative to enable a geographic fanless mode. Our unit also occasionally produced some faint whining standardized to a rotating a hard drive's chatter, though nary such part was installed.

Ports and the typing experience

The Tecra X50 comes provided with with a couple of Thunderbolt 3 ports, which is important if you'atomic number 75 considering adding multiple monitors. At that place's an HDMI port, though that's merely capable of driving an external 4K reminder at a minimal 30Hz refresh rate. Dynabook shipped us an extraneous Bolt of lightning dock to make up (it's non bundled with the laptop computer), with a miniDisplayPort equal to of dynamical the display at a comfortable 60Hz.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The left pull of the Tecra's frame.

Typing on the Dynabook Tecra is a miscellanea. Its small, chiclet keys were surprisingly dulcet to type upon, though I made a number of mistakes spell my fingers adjusted. In that location's scant travel in the keys, though they'rhenium bouncy and provide a comfortable landing pad. The spacebar is likewise narrower than typical, in part because of a second Ctrl key in the bottom row. I launch this in particular annoying.

Patc the Tecra's keyboard hides quite a few options, they're somewhat poorly implemented. All of the secondary function labels are faintly printed and difficult to find. Dynabook as wel made some odd or merely poor design decisions, such as placing the mass controls in the second, quantitative row of keys, rather than next to the audio "mute" key in the social occasion row. The foliate-up and -down keys, which run to wander across several laptop designs, are down near the pointer keys at the bottom of the keyboard. The backlighting is wan.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Tecra's keyboard hides a lot of complexity. Unfortunately, this is offset by the fact that the spacebar is shorter than on other keyboards, possibly hampering your typewriting.

The well-nig noteworthy addition is the traditional Tecra/ThinkPad-like pointing wedge surgery joystick in the midst of the keyboard, which can affix a mouse, touchscreen, or touchpad. Past default, though, the pointing amaze's traversal across the CRT screen is slow, so you'll have to savvy through the settings to adjust it.

The Tecra's precision trackpad is medium-sized, liquid, and mostly navigable across the entirety of its shallow. A dyad of Tecra-flair buttons at the top of the trackpad furnish additional input options, though the middle clit that appeared on 2013's Tecra Z50 has disappeared. I noticed, however, that the trackpad accumulated a peck of smudges that were hard to white off.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Tecra's trackpad is worthy of note, since IT has both a fingerprint subscriber also as discrete buttons.

Restrain reading for performance benchmarks.

Solid software, mostly

I'm commonly pro of audio enhancements on laptops, but on Dynabook's Tecra X50 it works both for and against it. Dynabook chose DTS Audio Processing, and information technology's on by default. (In that respect's a graphic equalizer, though you take over to set IT yourself.) In general,  DTs enriched some live music I played back via the Tecra's speakers. In one YouTube video, however—Kanye West's "All of the Lights"—the DTS sound muddled the valid, adding a distracting "cathedral" resonant force. In general, though, the Tecra's speakers are sufficiently loud, with a decent range of sound with DTS disabled. The speakers themselves are licensed by Harman Kardon.

Dynabook's public utility software is a strength. Patc I don't always choose to tamper with my PCs, I appreciate options to do so. Like Lenovo's powerful Vantage software, the Dynabook utilities are varied, deep, and useful. Is that buff irritation? While there's not a silent mode, an "eco" option dials go through the power consumption by downclocking the CPU, sullen the test brightness, and mostly turning off the fan—and it shows you how very much power you're consuming.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Dynabook's "eco mode" needs to be hunted down, but it's a nifty option.

You'll also have the option via the Dynabook Settings app to adjust features equivalent whether the USB ports are forever "on" to charge external devices, and more. If there's any downside, it's that Dynabook needs to employ a graphic intriguer to give the utilities a more professional reckon.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Dynabook's separate Service Place and Settings appscould make up combined into a single part of software, but there's a ton of functionality in both that's belik worth being explored separately.

Performance: Solid numbers take out for battery

We expect conservative to slap-up performance dead of a business notebook, with retentive stamp battery life a key priority. Dynabook achieves the first, and struggles with the second.

Our selection of parallel models includes both of the spic-and-span 15-column inch Microsoft Come out Laptop 3 models we've tested, the Ryzen 5 and the Ryzen 7 versions, as advisable as the Lenovo IdeaPad S340-15IWL. We've also included two 15-inch HP Wraith x360 laptops.

We first run the PCMark 8 Work and Creative benchmarks. Though the test's results are becoming less relevant over time, on the other hand, we have a number of source points. Dynabook's Tecra X50 garners cardinal of the top scores among its radical.

Deutsche Mark Hachman / IDG

Though many of the PCMark 8 results are clustered put together, Dynabook's Tecra X50 does fine.

The Creative try measures light gaming, TV editing, and photo use, among others. Dynabook's Tecra X50 again rises to the top of the pack.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Nigh of the notebooks we've tested perform quite comparably to the Dynabook Tecra X50.

In PCMark 10, which combines the disparate PCMark tests into a single, updated unified whole, Dynabook's Tecra doesn't perform rather too.

Cross Hachman / IDG

Dynabook's Tecra X50 doesn't do Eastern Samoa fit in that iteration of PCMark as it does in an the aged version, PCMark 8..

We also compare how the Tecra performs in a short sprint. Cinebench, a benchmark publicized past the Maxon Corp., pushes totally of the ready processor cores while rendering a 2D scene.

Mark Hachman / IDG

This score, combined with the poor people PCMark 10 result, suggests that the Tecra May conflict somewhat with CPU-intensive applications.

HandBrake, an open-source tool, converts a Hollywood movie from extraordinary format to another, a prolonged exercise that helps stress the laptop CPU over clock. It's both a test of how the laptop computer cools itself as well as a way to measure how fit the Tecra performs a useful serious-world task. The X50's results hither are firmly midrange.

Fall guy Hachman / IDG

The performance of the Dynabook Tecra X50 isn't great, but it's not too shabby, either.

Though there's little chance that a business notebook will be used for 3D gameplay, we test the GPU exploitation the 3DMark Pitch Diver benchmark. We don't carry great things from the UHD 620 integrated GPU, and that's approve.

Mark Hachman / IDG

A numeral of notebooks with identical GPUs yield similar results. Merely the Tecra X50's 3D performance is still pitiful.

Battery life, however, is where we apply a stricter eye. No matter how you cold shoulder it, a mainstream laptop should be able to bunk more than cardinal hours, with the shield connected, performing various tasks. We utilisation a fairly easy test, iteration 4K TV at a dictated expose cleverness, with earbuds attached and book at 50 percent. Your mileage will vary, simply the Dynabook Tecra X50 barely meets our ogdoad-minute threshold, delivery up the rear of its competitive put together.

Marker Hachman / IDG

There's real no justify here: with a 1080P concealment and a modern Heart processor inside, we'd look wagerer.

We did notice that the Tecra X50 lowered its own screen brightness when examination on battery, something you could certainly arrange, too. We tuned the screen out brightness back adequate what we conceive are satisfactory working levels.

Conclusion: Sufficient clappers, needs updating

Dynabook's up against a turn of established business laptop computer lines, as well as consumer models that can be used interchangeably (subtraction the vPro management options that go with corporate models). Unluckily it fails to point of view out. While it's certainly appealing from a sizing and weight perspective, structural aspects such as the noisy fan will probably don on you over time. Performance varies, though its mainstream productivity scores are exemplary. The eight-time of day battery life? You could swing it, but we believe a business notebook computer should do better.

Correction: According to Dynabook, the bod is made from magnesium alloy. It is besides colored Onyx Blue.

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A PCWorld's senior editor, Check off focuses on Microsoft news and chip engineering, among other beat generation. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/398329/dynabook-tecra-x50-f-review.html

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