Dynabook Tecra A65-M review: Cheap but not so cheerful

Dynabook's AMD-powered Tecra A65-M aims to offer enterprise users maximum connectivity and reliability at a significant discount compared with the best ultraportables and the manufacturer's own higher-end Portégé line of business laptops. Since it's armed with a mid-range AMD chip and integrated graphics, as well as an underwhelmingly basic 16-inch IPS HDR panel, we aren't expecting fireworks – but we are looking for pure functionality among the compelling security, connectivity, and software-related reasons that you might be tempted to pick it up.

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Dynabook Tecra A65-M review: Design and display

Although the chassis boasts a certification for MIL-STD 810H standards – safeguarding it against environmental stress, shocks, vibrations, extreme temperatures and humidity, as well as other conditions – it doesn't feel premium or durable when you pick it up and hold it. That's largely due to the matte polycarbonate material it's constructed from, instead of a metal alloy. In reality, it can withstand quite a lot, as can all Dynabook laptops, and the one benefit is that it's much lighter than a string of other similarly sized machines.

Weighing 1.69kg, it's fairly light for a 16-inch laptop – a fraction heavier than the 15-inch MacBook Air (1.5kg), for example, and certainly lighter than several more premium notebooks, including the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 10 Aura Edition (1.93kg). This makes it much easier to fit into your bag and travel with it, especially if you need a large screen. Unfortunately, it's not the slimmest machine, with a depth of 19.9mm – a little larger than the aforementioned Lenovo (17.9mm), but understandable given the vast array of ports at your disposal.

There are plenty of neat touches to the laptop, including rounded corners that converge with straightened edges along the sides and the panel. The indented keyboard, meanwhile, does carry some character – especially with its textured keycaps. But the touchpad, on the other hand, looks far too skewed to the left.

The screen itself has fairly narrow bezels, with a thicker upper border to account for the webcam. That's where the praise ends, unfortunately, given there's very little else redeeming about it. With a 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution, the 16-inch IPS HDR panel lacks sharpness (its pixels per inch ratio is a dismal 141.5), while colors are washed out. Testing further underlined how underwhelming it was.

Testing with a display calibrator produced a below-average brightness of 300 nits, alongside abysmal color accuracy scores. We registered 57.4% coverage of the sRGB color spectrum, which is poor considering it's easy for most laptops to score above 98% these days. The Dynabook Portege Z40L-N, for example, scored 97.9%. Don't even think about using the Tecra for image-based work, with 42% and 45.5% coverage of the Adobe RGB spectrum (for photo editing) and DCI P3 spectrum (for video editing), respectively. If you don't really need much from a laptop screen, then you can feasibly grit your teeth and bear it – but it's otherwise a machine we'd recommend avoiding if the quality of your work depends on the quality of your laptop screen.

Dynabook Tecra A65-M review: Performance and battery life

The Tecra A65-M is pitched at handling demanding tasks in the realms of finance, engineering, data, and creativity. Given where this machine is priced, its components do punch a little above their weight. Powering this machine is an AMD Ryzen 7 250 processor alongside AMD Radeon 780M Graphics and 16GB DDR5 RAM.

In our performance testing with Geekbench 6, we measured a single-threaded score of 2,461 and a multi-core score of 9,193. While objectively unimpressive, they aren't too far away from what you'd expect from the latest Intel Core Ultra 200 Series chips, which are usually found in laptops vastly more expensive. For comparison, the Dynabook Portege Z40L-N registered 1,762 and 8,337, and Lenovo's ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition, too, scored 2,718 and 10,684. Both featured the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V (8 cores) processor. Last year's HP ZBook 8 G1ak 14 (AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360) also scored 2,797 and 10,809, respectively. For markedly better multi-threaded performance, you should consider a machine with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip – or Apple's M Series CPUs.

Its graphics performance, too, is comparable to these machines, with a modest score of 20,339 in our OpenCL test. This is perfectly in line with expectations from the Intel Arc Graphics GPU and Qualcomm Adreno GPU you'll find in most high-end machines.

The NPU, however, is slightly underpowered with just 38 TOPS – a shade lighter in punch than the 40 TOPS you'll need to categorize a device as an "AI PC" or "Copilot+ PC" – but, beyond a handful of local AI tasks you might struggle to run, the biggest downside is its effect on efficiency. The more TOPS a machine has, the generally more power efficient it proves to be. Battery life, in that vein, is middling, lasting 11hrs 19mins – a reasonable result for a 16-inch laptop. The SSD, meanwhile, is very zippy, with above-average reads and writes of 7,041MB/s and 5,851MB/s. Reads are about as high as you'll find, and writes are also above average.

Dynabook Tecra A65-M review: Features

We couldn't gel with the keyboard in the Tecra A65-M for a number of reasons. Firstly, although the textured keycaps offer a nice contrast with the chassis, they feel rough to the fingers and inhibit the satisfaction you should expect from smooth and rapid touch-typing. Each keystroke is a little shallow and doesn't offer much feedback, further diminishing this experience. We also struggled with the key spacing – they feel too small and crammed together to make room for a number pad.

The touchpad, on the other hand, is much better in terms of how it feels to use. It's perfectly sized, its surface is smooth without being too slippery, and each click gives you a decent amount of feedback. What we found jarring was its placement to the far left of the palm rest. This makes sense relative to where the main keycaps are placed (off-center), but takes some adjusting to.

Its connectivity options, both wired and wireless, encapsulate almost everything you would ask for from a business-forward laptop. You get two USB-A 3.2 ports (one includes power off and charge support), two USB-C 3.1 ports (with Thunderbolt 4.0 support), a 3.5mm headphone and mic jack, HDMI, an Ethernet port, and a MicroSD Card slot. This comes alongside the latest wireless standards of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Although the NPU is underpowered against the best AI PCs, you still benefit from a handful of AI-assisted features like noise reduction technology that eliminates unwanted background noise in calls, while preserving speech clarity, as well as the Realsight AI Function that boosts webcam image clarity. There's also a webcam privacy shutter and an optional fingerprint reader on the security side.

Dynabook Tecra A65-M review: Is it worth it?

Dynabook machines tend to be sturdy, reliable, and business-focused – meaning that while you might not get the flash and appeal of ultrabooks or more premium-looking machines, you will, at least, expect functionality. In that vein, the Tecra A65-M doesn't disappoint.

We found plenty of appeal given its price, especially when you measure how its performance stacks up against more premium rivals, but also found plenty to be wary about. Its display is very poor – about as poor as we've seen in a recent business notebook – and it's not a deal-breaker but something you should consider if you need a machine for any visually-oriented work. If so, however, you always have the option of connecting this machine to an external monitor.

Given you're likely to find this machine at around the $1,000 mark, we'd certainly recommend it if your number one priority is budget, and if you need a light, portable, functional 16-inch Windows machine that does the job effectively. If you can push your budget a little more, however, there's a much better array of options available.

Dynabook Tecra A65-M review: Specifications