Fujitsu Celsius H710 – Review

We recently reviewed a 13.3-inch Fujitsu Lifebook S761 and we liked what we saw. Let us take a closer look at Fujitsu Celsius H710 notebook.

The 15.6″ 1920 x 1080 pixel full HD screen aims at the sort of technical task possible with this machine – whether Computer-Aided Design (CAD), medical imaging, engineering – you get the drift? Connecting to the Internet is either through wireless, Bluetooth or UMTS (SIM card).

The 2.3GHz core i7-2820QM CPU is paired with a titanic 2GB NVidia Quadro 1000M graphics card – the graphics card itself contains 96 cores, albeit limited in functionality in comparison with the main processor. Fujitsu Celsius H710 offers a 265GB SSD for lightning-quick reading and writing of data.The 8GB RAM is expandable to 16GB. The H710 is available for a mere 1600 euros. The chassis is black and white, mostly plastic, which strikes us as cheap for a professional and not so cheap workstation. Nonetheless, build quality and stability are first class. There are even leather patches here and there, either for support or to help with heat dissipation. Very professional, and very durable, all in all.

Quality build comes with a weight cost. At 372 x 255 x 36mm it’s not much larger than other 15. 6″ laptops, but H710 weighs 2.8kg.

Connectivity-wise Fujitsu Celsius H710 excels, yet there’s just a single USB-3 port, with three USB-2 sockets. Otherwise there is an eSATA port, VGI and HDMI ports, headphone and mic jacks, and an ExpressCard54 and a PCMCIA slot. A port replicator can be bought for about 120 euros adds such connectivity options as serial and parallel ports, and a DVI socket. The 3G connectivity option requires you to insert a SIM card in a slot under the SSD drive of H710. Carrier-hopping is therefore difficult. There’s a CompuTrace-enabled BIOS and Trusted Platform Module security chip. Disks are the order of the day – Windows 7 is supplied in both 32- and 64-bit versions, then there are Nero 9 Essentials and drivers and System Instructions, all on disk. The Premium Suite 2011 includes Corel Home Office, and an assortment of Corel and Serif graphics programs.

The 86-key QWERTZ keyboard of Fujitsu Celsius H710 lacks a separate number pad . Typing is a pleasure. And there’s one of those dome-type trackpoint things. The arrow keys are so small. Hot keys lock the OS or open power-saving mode menus. One button opens an interface for network management. The touchpad is simply cramped. Sliding is good, however, and at least there are separate trackpad buttons. A 2 MP webcam is perched above the display. The LED-backlit display gives almost no reflections.

With these specs, the sockets can be used set up a multi-screen workstation. DisplayPort offers a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels for externally connected devices. In truth, all is possible with Fujitsu Celsius H710. Contrast, brightness, spectrum, blacks, everything is top notch, though artist grade AdobeRGB is just beyond even this display.

Dell, HP and Lenovo similarly engineering-tier workstation all use a more powerful Quadro 2000M GPU, and their graphics cards are switchable, but not so on Fujitsu Celsius H710. The system writes at 168MB/s. Current demanding games should only be played at 1366 x 768 resolution, but the rest are no problem at native resolution.The system noise, at 29db, is lower than general ambient office noise, so quiet operation is assured.The speakers are also quiet, though without distortion, even cranked to the max. Bass is lacking, of course. With every last power-saving adjustment in force, the battery gives almost five hours of moderate use (WiFi surfing, occasional video, chat, Twitter) or two hours with normal settings. Quite satisfactory for such a beast. There are more capable notebooks out there, but for the price Fujitsu Celsius H710 notebook is hard to beat.

Enjoy this quick look video of Fujitsu Celsius H710 courtesy of notebookcheck:

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