Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook S6420 review

Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook S6420 Review

Reviewed by: Rory Reid

Reviewed on: 7 November 2008

The S6420's 13.3-inch display is a good one, with a 1,280x800-pixel resolution. Interestingly, Fujitsu Siemens' official spec sheet refers to this as an 'LED glare display', which is pretty apt. The glossy finish is prone to reflecting light back in your face, making it almost impossible to see what's on the screen unless you're indoors.

Storage in our S6420 review sample came courtesy of a 160GB hard drive. We're told a 64GB solid state drive is on the cards, along with models that use 120GB and 320GB drives. A DVD super multi drive capable of writing to both CDs and DVDs is supplied as standard.

Performance
The S6420 has a pretty potent CPU, so it's no surprise that it scored 5,045 in our PCMark 2005 benchmark. For reference, the Asus G50 gaming laptop scored 5,774, although it did have twice as much RAM. The S6420's graphics performance was adequate -- for this class of laptop. It racked up 806 in 3DMark 2006.

Battery life wasn't quite what we expected it to be. The S6420 lasted a mere 1 hour and 25 minutes in our BatteryEater classic test, which isn't great considering the machine is designed to be used -- to a large degree -- away from the mains.

Conclusion
We like the S6420 for its solid build quality, performance, security and mobile broadband capability. It's a little pricey, but if you require a laptop with its substantial security capabilities, it's well worth a look.

Edited by Marian Smith