Review: Sharp Dynabook Tecra A40-M Laptop
Last week I got the chance to review not one, but two laptops from Sharp’s laptop division Dynabook. The first of these two laptops is the Tecra A40-M laptop. The specific variant that I have comes with these specs:
- Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 255U
- Windows 11 Pro
- 14″ diagonal widescreen that is also a touchscreen
- 16 GB DDR5 5600
- 512 GB PCIe NVMe SSD
- Fingerprint Reader
- Thunderbolt 4
- 60Wh battery to give you up to 8 hours of battery life
- Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2
- Intel ARC Graphics
- Weighs 3.18 pounds
These seem like decent specs on paper. And they are as I will highlight in a moment. But what got my attention is the build quality. This laptop felt really solid because of the fact that it is built to MIL STD 810-H. Every part of the laptop that I touched felt like it could take a beating if required. I point that out because a lot of PC laptops that I pick up do not come even close to feeling that way. In fact some laptops from some big name companies feel flimsy at times. Thus I am often concerned about how long they would last during a trip or the like. I would have none of those concerns if I was carrying this laptop.
Speaking of the laptop, you haven’t seen it yet. Here’s a few pictures:
The one thing that stands out to me is this 14″ screen. It’s sharp and clear. The other thing that stands out is the keyboard. I liked the typing feel and touch typists will really love it. I was not as enamoured with the track pad. But that’s like a “me” problem as I am used to Mac trackpads which are not diving board designs like this one. Thus the clicks on those feel consistent unlike this one. Die hard Windows users however will not care because they are used to this sort of feel.
On the left side of the laptop is the Kensington lock slot, a power connector (why isn’t it USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 to make life easier for users who want to go USB-C all the things including chargers), a HDMI port, two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports and a headphone jack.
On the right is an Ethernet jack, USB-A port and an micro SD card slot.
What I was really interested in is how fast is this laptop. To find out I ran Geekbench 6 on it. Now synthetic benchmarks aren’t a definitive measure of how fast a computer is because how fast a computer is or isn’t is dependent on your use case. Having said that, it will give you a pretty good idea of what you can expect. I did two runs of the GPU and CPU tests. Once on power and once on battery as PC laptops perform worse when on battery to save battery. Here’s what I got. First here’s the results while on battery:
- Single Core: 1750
- Multi Core: 6928
- GPU (OpenCL): 16747
And here’s the results while on AC Power:
- Single Core: 2277
- Multi Core: 8656
- GPU (OpenCL): 18893
To put that in perspective, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro hit these numbers (both on battery and on AC power) for the CPU:
- Single Core: 1762
- Multi Core: 12431
That makes the Dynabook’s numbers more than respectable. In terms of disk speed, I ran Crystal Disk Mark both on battery and on AC power. Here’s the results that I got in both scenarios:
- Read: 5280.89 MB/s
- Write: 3072.29 MB/s
Whatever SSD that was chosen to be used in this Dnynabook, it’s a pretty quick one.
Finally there’s battery life. It’s rated for 8 hours. In testing the best that I did was 6.5 hours. Not bad for a PC laptop. Also give its size, it’s not surprising as you can only shove in so much batter for something thin and light.
Here’s the bottom line. The Dynabook A40-M is a well built reasonably fast laptop that is light and easy to tote around. It will survive your daily activities and come back for more while providing ample amounts of CPU and GPU power. The A40-M starts at around $1800, and in my opinion is well worth the money.
Leave a Reply