Packard Bell EasyNote TS11 review

Packard Bell’s EasyNote TS11 might not rival Apple’s Macbook Pros for svelte style, but it leaves them for dust in the value for money stakes. Packing a quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU for just £729, it delivers serious processing power on the cheap.

Our first sight of the TS11 was tinged with a strong sense of déjà vu. It’s clearly based on the same chassis as the Acer Aspire 5750G, which was the first Sandy Bridge laptop to arrive in the PC Pro Labs. Despite a slightly jazzier appearance, the TS11 doesn’t exactly look like a speed demon, with its ubiquitous gloss-black lid and a black interior broken up only by a silver patterned wristrest. It isn’t an ugly look, but it’s also far from stylish.

Instead, this laptop is all about performance. The 2GHz Core i7-2630QM processor mercilessly ripped through our new benchmarks, and an overall score of 0.84 puts it right up with the fastest laptops money can currently buy. Unlike a few of Apple’s sleek offerings, that performance doesn’t make the Packard Bell uncomfortably warm on the lap: its CPU idled at 45°C and, after more than five hours at maximum load, peaked at a manageable 85°C. The hottest point on the chassis itself was right next to the exhaust port, which peaked at 53°C.

Admittedly, there’s no dedicated graphics chipset belching out heat, as the TS11 makes use of the HD Graphics 3000 chip built into the processor. But the gaming performance of these chips is getting better with each new generation: the TS11 dispatched our Low quality Crysis test at a playable average of 32fps. Bumping up the quality to Medium slowed the action to a juddery crawl, so don’t expect to play the latest titles in all their glory, but there’s plenty of power here for casual gaming.