Fujitsu LifeBook A514 Notebook Review

It is easy to identify the A514 as an office notebook with its completely matte black and slightly roughened plastic surfaces. Slightly angled edges result in a pretty angular design, which is a visual contrast to the more rounded mainstream design.

Despite the changed appearance, the chassis quality of the A514 is actually similar to the predecessor A512, which includes the same pros and cons. The build quality is very good in general and the base unit convinces with a high torsion resistance. It is the opposite for the display: You don’t need a lot of force to twist the cover and even slight pressure on the back will create picture distortions. The hinges can keep the display in position, but they are still very smooth and it is no problem to open the lid with one hand, even though the base unit only weighs around 2 kilograms.

4 GB RAM is standard – which cannot be said about a multi-DVD burner nowadays anymore. It is therefore almost a small highlight of the A514. The connections are not very surprising; you get one USB 2.0 port as well as three USB 3.0 ports. One of them can be used to charge external devices when the device is turned off. All USB ports are located pretty far to the front, which could limit the usability in some cases. The multimedia section consists of a VGA and an HDMI port as well as two stereo jacks. The physical connectivity is completed by the SD-card reader at the front as well as a slot for Kensington locks. The Internet can either be accessed via Gigabit-LAN or Wi-Fi according to the 802.11n standard.

You only have to remove one single bottom cover to access the internals of the device. It is secured by six screws and it is therefore no problem to replace the SSD or clean the fans. Even simpler is the access to the two memory slots (one occupied) – the bottom cover has a hatch at the corresponding position, which is only secured by one single screw.

Remarkable is the fact that Fujitsu ships the A514 with Windows 7 Professional besides Windows 8.1 Professional, both in the 64-bit versions. Our review unit was preloaded with Windows 7. The scope of delivery also includes a full version of the picture editing application Corel Draw Essentials X6.

The anti-reflective display of the A514 measures 15.6-inches with a resolution of 1366x768 pixels. This is not a lot, but it seems that this resolution is still the standard for budget devices – office notebooks with Full HD panels carry a significant premium, which is evident when you look at the similarly equipped Acer TravelMate P256-M-39NG.

A look at the specifications already suggests that the tested LifeBook wants to be more than "just" another slow office device. Thanks to the combination of a current i3 CPU and SDD, it is more of a versatile all-rounder, which can also be used for HD video playback besides working. Still, it is not enough for a multimedia notebook because of the missing dedicated GPU. The otherwise similarly equipped Asus X555LD-XX283H with its GeForce 820M has a clear advantage in this respect.

The i3-4005U with a clock of 1.7 GHz inside the A514 is pretty fast for an office notebook – inexpensive devices usually only use Pentium or Celeron chips. Contrary to those chips, the Haswell i3 supports Hyper-Threading, so the two native processor cores can execute up to four threads simultaneously.

This has a big effect on the benchmark results, which are on the expected level for this CPU but clearly ahead of all comparable systems.

Our system benchmarks show that the hardware of the A514 is well-balanced. The LifeBook can beat many of its direct competitors: The Asus X555LD-XX283H falls behind by one-third, despite the dedicated GPU. But even devices that also have a faster CPU besides an SSD fall behind the A514 in the PCMarks. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch 20A8-003UGE from Lenovo, for example, is 10% slower despite the Core i7 (Haswell).

You might think that the SSD is a high-end drive considering such good scores. The numbers that we determine with AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark, however, do not support this. It actually seems that the Samsung drive with the slightly confusing designation MZ7LN128HCHP is average at best, and the performance is between eMMC drives and the familiar SSDs like Samsung’s 840 models, for instance. But the performance is obviously good enough to ensure a fast working device in practice, and the difference to conventional hard drives is still big enough.

There is one perfect phrase for the integrated HD 4400 graphics card of the Haswell processor: It gets the job done. The GPU performance is more than sufficient for office and less demanding entertainment applications (like the playback of HD videos), which are the main usage scenarios of the A514. The benchmark results are not surprising; the Acer TravelMate P256-M-39NG with the identical processor is on par. Higher clocked i3 CPUs like the 4030U inside the HP Pavilion 13-a000ng x360 perform slightly better in 3DMark, and even an entry-level dedicated GPU like the GT820M in the Asus X555LD-XX283H is faster than the HD 4400.

There are obviously limitations if you want to play some games to relax from work. Less demanding titles like The Sims 4 just run smoothly with medium details, and the display resolution of 1366x768 pixels is a sensible limit. The graphics performance of the Intel HD 4400 is, however, sufficient for casual gaming or classics that are already a couple of years old.

All in all, the LifeBook A514 is a really quiet system. You cannot really hear the 29.6 dB(A) on average while idling – except when the fan suddenly spins up (without a load increase, for example), where it can reach 35 dB(A) for short periods. This almost corresponds with the maximum value of 35.1 dB(A) under full load. However, this does not affect the good overall impression: The HP 350 G1 reaches almost 39 dB(A) under load (values higher than 40 dB(A) are clearly audible for a user with average hearing), despite the slower CPU.

The results of our temperature measurements are a bit surprising at first: The values only surpass 30 °C at one spot during idling (at the front center of the bottom), so nobody will start to sweat. But the temperatures increase significantly under load. Up to 46.5 °C (at the bottom around the fan) is definitely too much for use on the lap – just like the maximum temperature of the power adaptor (45 °C). For comparison: The Asus X555LD-XX283H never reaches the 40 °C mark, despite the similar CPU and the additional dedicated GeForce 820M.

Such high temperatures were not only the result of long benchmark sessions; one hour with The Sims (see below) was already enough to reach a bottom temperature of 40 °C. This is the price for the virtually silent fan under load.

The internal stereo speakers of the LifeBook sound – independent of the volume – pretty dull over the whole frequency range. In combination with the (as expected) missing bass, you get an inconveniently tinny sound characteristic. The sound chip from Realtek does offer some improvements via "DTS Sound" that can reduce the rattling a bit, but the result is still not satisfying, particularly during music playback. Even clever equalizer settings in the media player did not really help.

The results of the A514 are better in this section. While idling at the highest luminance and with the activated High-Performance profile, the review unit hardly consumes more power than the majority of comparison devices at the most frugal setting (energy-saving mode and minimum luminance) – we measured up to 6.4 Watts with a minimum consumption of just 3.8 Watts. The maximum value under load is also quite low at 27.9 Watts, but the LifeBook is on par with other devices like HP 350 G1, which basically consumes the same amount of power.

The A514 manages 350 minutes in our Wi-Fi test with its very compact 48-Wh battery. This test uses a script that changes the website every 40 seconds, while the energy-profile "Balanced" is active and the display brightness is adjusted to around 150 cd/m². Based on the assumption that no one just clicks through websites, the determined runtime should be sufficient for a whole business day. Other low-cost office laptops like the HP 350 G1 are not as enduring, despite the weaker CPU. The result of the LifeBook is therefore very good compared to the rivals.