Tecno MegaBook T1 14inch 2023-11th

The entire available SSD capacity is allocated to the system partition. We received the device with the Windows 11 Home operating system; there is also the OneLeap utility, which provides a wireless connection between a laptop and a smartphone within the Tecno ecosystem. A set of Microsoft 365 applications is installed, for which you will have to pay to fully operate.

The product is packaged in a well-designed cardboard box with a carrying handle.

In addition to the laptop itself, the kit includes a power adapter with a replaceable output cable 1.75 m long, an instruction booklet in Russian (the font could have been larger, but saving paper was clearly a priority), as well as a sheet with much easier to read information about certification

Appearance and ergonomics

The device is offered in a steel-gray color, the texture of the surfaces is matte with a slight roughness, handprints on them are not particularly noticeable. The device looks quite elegant, although the design is quite standard, except that the radius of rounding the corners is noticeably larger than what is usual in modern laptops.

In fact, the open lid of the Tecno Megabook T14TA laptop leaves a somewhat negative impression due to the abundance of multi-colored stickers, although they may clearly indicate some of the device’s features. From an aesthetic point of view, such a solution is most likely not attractive.

However, both body panels and the upper part of the lid with the screen are made of aluminum alloy, which gives them decent rigidity. Despite this, they do flex slightly under moderate pressure, but overall there are no creaks or clicks during use. The torsion strength of the LCD screen cover is also quite good despite its thinness, which is likely due to its small size rather than any special design features.

The laptop is quite compact: its dimensions are 314x224 mm, and the maximum body thickness is 16.4 mm (with the rear leg increasing it to 20.5 mm). The weight of the device is quite large for such a laptop — 1.43 kg, which is mainly due to the significant battery capacity.

The plastic frame around the screen is 6.4 mm wide on the sides and 9.4 mm wide at the top (where the webcam with indicator and microphones is located). At the bottom the frame is 15 mm before the bend of the edge of the lid.

On the bottom, in addition to the legs (two small in front, one at the back almost the entire width), closer to the rear edge there is a ventilation grill through which air is taken in to cool the components, so you should not place the laptop on a soft surface.

At the rear end of the case there are larger slots through which the ventilation system exhausts heated air (they are hidden from view by a bend covering the hinges). It turns out that the bottom part of the screen is heated, but when running “heavy” tests it turned out that it is not particularly noticeable.

The lid with the screen opens to an angle of up to 180 degrees (the lower edge does not touch the table) and is precisely fixed in any position, starting from 20-25 degrees. Magnets located at the front edge of the case help keep it closed.

The force of the hinges is noticeable, but you can open the lid with one hand and you don’t have to hold the bottom part. For convenience, a small recess is made in the middle of the front edge of the case to make it easier to pick it up with your finger; in other places this is more difficult to do.

On the left side there is a Kensington lock hole, a two-color LED indicator (white + orange), a USB Type-C connector for connecting a power adapter (and only for this — data transfer is not supported!), a full-size HDMI port, USB 3.1 Type-A and another USB Type-C, this time fully functional.

On the right there is a tiny hole for the Reset button (to press it you will need a thin tool like a straightened paper clip), a slot for a microSD card reader, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a combined jack for an audio headset minijack.

That is, the set of interface ports is rich by the standards of compact laptops, although not the most modern in terms of range, but interfaces like Thunderbolt 4 are unlikely to be relevant in a device like this in the near future.

The keyboard is a membrane type with an island arrangement of buttons, its configuration is different than in the 15.6-inch Megabook T1: there is no number pad, which is quite acceptable for a 14-inch model, the only disappointment is the lack of Page Up, Page Down, Home, End. Otherwise, everything is similar, including the “half” height of the up and down arrow buttons (but this is not at all pleasing).

The margins on the sides are moderate: 21 mm. The size of most buttons is normal: 16.1 x 16.1 mm. Functional ones are smaller: 16.1×9.5 mm. The width of Enter and left Shift is 35 mm, right — 44 mm. The distance between the edges of buttons in one row and between rows is 2.7 mm.

Typing is quite comfortable, the typing sounds are quiet. The full key travel is about 1.4 mm.

There is a backlight — white, with four levels, barely noticeable at minimum, and sufficient brightness at maximum. The backlight is controlled by a keyboard shortcut, but it automatically turns off when the keyboard is not used for 15 seconds — not the most convenient “feature”, but you can’t influence it. Both the printed characters and the edges of the keys are highlighted (but to a lesser extent).

CapsLock and some other keys have built-in indicators with tiny white LEDs to indicate when their modes are enabled.

The Power button is located outside the keyboard in the far right corner of the case and is slightly recessed, all this is designed to reduce the likelihood of operation from accidental touches. On the surface it is clearly visible due to its different texture and shiny framing chamfer.

This button has a built-in fingerprint scanner.

The webcam is capable of providing resolution up to 1080p at 30 fps, and a mechanical shutter is also provided. The picture quality still leaves much to be desired, but the very fact that a relatively budget laptop has a camera with such a resolution, and even with a shutter, is indicative, and it remains a mystery why much more expensive devices today often have 720p cameras.

The touchpad is quite large (125x78 mm), its surface is slightly recessed. There are no dedicated keys, but its left and right near edges can easily work as corresponding mouse buttons. There is a combination of buttons to quickly turn it off.

Screen

The laptop uses a 14-inch IPS matrix with a resolution of 1920×1200

The outer surface of the matrix is ​​black, hard and semi-matte (specular). There are no special anti-reflective coatings or filters, and there is no air gap. When powered from mains or battery and with manual brightness control, its maximum value was 370 cd/m² (in the center of the screen on a white background). The maximum brightness is quite high, so you can somehow work/play on the laptop outside on a clear day if you sit in the shade.

To evaluate screen readability outdoors, we use the following criteria obtained from testing screens in real conditions:

These criteria are very conditional and may be revised as data accumulates. Note that there may be some improvement in readability if the matrix has some kind of transreflective properties (part of the light is reflected from the substrate, and the picture is visible in the light even with the backlight turned off). Also, glossy matrices, even in direct sunlight, can sometimes be rotated so that something quite dark and uniform is reflected in them (on a clear day, for example, the sky), which will improve readability, while matte matrices need to be blocked from the light to improve readability. Sveta. In rooms with bright artificial light (about 500 lux), you can work more or less comfortably even with a maximum screen brightness of 50 cd/m² or lower, that is, in these conditions the maximum brightness is not an important value.

Let's return to the screen of the laptop under test. If the brightness setting is 0%, the brightness is reduced to 8 cd/m². Thus, in complete darkness, the screen brightness can be reduced to a comfortable level.

There is automatic brightness adjustment based on the light sensor (it is located to the right of the camera). In automatic mode, as external lighting conditions change, the screen brightness both increases and decreases. The operation of this function depends on the position of the brightness adjustment slider: with it the user can try to set the desired brightness level in the current conditions. If you don’t change anything, then in complete darkness the brightness drops to 60 cd/m² (lower is possible), in an office illuminated by artificial light (about 550 lux) the screen brightness is set to 320-370 cd/m² (also a bit too much), in very in a bright environment it rises to 370 cd/m² (to the maximum, which is what is needed). We weren't entirely happy with the result, so we lowered the brightness a little in an office environment. After this, for the three conditions indicated above, we obtained 8, 170-230 and 230 cd/m², that is, in high-light conditions, the screen brightness turned out to be reduced, which is unacceptable. It turns out that the auto-brightness function works in principle, but not quite adequately, and there is no way to adjust the nature of the brightness change to the user’s requirements.

At any brightness level, there is no significant backlight modulation, so there is no screen flickering (no PWM). As proof, we present graphs of brightness (vertical axis) versus time (horizontal axis) for different brightness settings:

This laptop uses an IPS matrix. Microphotographs show a typical IPS subpixel structure (black dots are dust on the camera matrix):

Focusing on the screen surface revealed randomly located surface microdefects responsible for the matte properties:

The grain of these defects is several times smaller than the size of subpixels (the scale of these two photographs is approximately the same), therefore focusing on microdefects and the “jumping” of focus across subpixels when changing the viewing angle are weakly expressed, because of this there is no “crystalline” effect, but some variation brightness and hue on a pixel scale are still observed.

We measured brightness at 25 points on the screen, located in increments of 1/6 of the screen width and height (screen borders not included). Contrast was calculated as the ratio of the brightness of the fields at the measured points:

In terms of white field uniformity, the Tecno Megabook T14TA screen shows good results, but the black field contrast leaves much to be desired. It is visually clear that the black areas, especially the edge ones, may be slightly highlighted. However, this uneven illumination of the black field is noticeable only in very dark scenes and in almost complete darkness, which is not a significant drawback.

It should be noted that the rigidity of the cover is not too high; it can be slightly deformed with a small applied force, which changes the nature of the black field illumination.

Screen viewing angles are good, without significant color distortion, even at significant viewing angles from perpendicular to the screen. However, when deviated diagonally, the black field can become significantly lighter and acquire a reddish tint.

As for the screen response time, when transitioning black-white-black it is 29 ms (13 ms on + 16 ms off), and the transition between half-tones of gray takes an average of 50 ms. This indicates that the screen matrix is quite slow and cannot be overclocked.

The total output latency from switching video buffer pages to the start of displaying the image on the screen at a refresh rate of 60 Hz is 10 ms. This is a very small delay that is not noticeable when using a PC and even in fast-paced games will not lead to a decrease in performance.

According to the data on the control panel with video adapter settings, the screen supports Adaptive Sync technology in the range from 47 to 60 Hz:

Next, we measured the brightness of 256 shades of gray (from 0, 0, 0 to 255, 255, 255). The graph below shows the increase (not absolute value!) in brightness between adjacent halftones:

The increase in brightness on the gray scale is mostly uniform, and each subsequent shade is brighter than the previous one, with the exception of a couple of cases in the highlights. However, this does not spoil the overall picture. In the darkest area, all shades are visually distinguished:

The approximation of the resulting gamma curve gave a value of 2.16, which is slightly lower than the standard value of 2.2. In this case, the real gamma curve deviates little from the approximating power function:

The color gamut is quite close to sRGB:

Therefore, visually, the colors of images oriented to output in the sRGB space on this screen have a natural saturation. Below is the spectrum for the white field (white line), superimposed on the spectra of the red, green and blue fields (lines of the corresponding colors):

Indeed, this screen uses LEDs with blue emission, green and red phosphors, which in general allows for good separation of color components. However, due to special light filters, a cross-mix of components occurs, which limits the color space coverage to the sRGB standard.

The grayscale setting on this screen is a trade-off due to the significant deviation in color temperature from the standard 6500K, as well as the slightly higher ΔE (color deviation) value from the blackbody considered average for a consumer device. However, it is worth noting that color temperature and ΔE practically do not change from hue to hue, which has a positive effect on the visual assessment of color balance.

Values in the darkest regions of the gray scale can be ignored because color balance is less important there and because there is greater uncertainty in color measurements at low brightness levels.

Let's summarize. The screen of this laptop has a fairly high maximum brightness (370 cd/m²), so that the device can be used outdoors on a bright day, shielded from direct sunlight. In complete darkness, the brightness can be reduced to a comfortable level (up to 8 cd/m²). It is permissible to use a mode with automatic brightness adjustment, which works more or less adequately. The advantages of the screen include low output latency (10 ms) and natural colors (sRGB coverage). The disadvantages are the low stability of black to the deviation of the gaze from perpendicular to the screen plane. Overall the screen quality is quite high.

Sound

The speaker grilles, located on the bottom of the laptop, create directional sound that is directed downwards, suggesting that sound is reflected from the surface on which the device is placed.

When used for listening to music, watching movies and playing games, the sound is generally rated as acceptable given the limitations of laptops. Often the low-frequency component of the sound is missing, and the high frequencies may be slightly suppressed. However, the speaker volume is usually sufficient for individual use.

Battery operation

The declared battery capacity is 75 Wh, and similar values are indicated on it, which are confirmed by utilities.

The Tecno Megabook T1 model had a battery with a smaller capacity (70 Wh), but that device showed excellent autonomy. The screen brightness in testing is set to 100 cd/m² (in this case, this corresponds to approximately 26%), so laptops with relatively dim screens do not benefit. The keyboard backlight cannot be used; it turns off automatically.

The autonomy when working with text is simply remarkable; it surpasses even the very, very good result of the Tecno T1 by a third. With video the situation is worse, but only when compared with the result for text, because the charge is enough for half a day of continuous viewing.

We have come across laptops of similar class, both with similar battery capacity and with lower one; we used both for comparison.

Yes, when used for text processing, the autonomy of the Tecno Megabook T14TA laptop in question is record-breaking compared to other participants in the comparison, including the Honor model with a battery of the same capacity. However, when watching the video, the record for autonomy belongs to last year's Tecno T1 model, surpassing other rivals, including the T14TA. The autonomy of the Tecno S1 model when working with text seems to be quite low, and when watching videos its level is average.

Note that for mains power and charging the device, you can use the USB Type-C port with the included adapter or a suitable charger that supports 20-volt Power Delivery mode and a current of at least 3 A. Consumption when running resource-intensive applications with a fully charged battery and Screen brightness at 35-40 percent remains at about three amps or slightly higher.

The kit comes with a standard adapter, which is marked with the fancy letters “GaN”, indicating the use of semiconductor components based on gallium nitride. This made it possible to make the adapter lighter and more compact compared to adapters from other similar laptops with the same power, although its size still does not allow it to be carried in a pocket: the case measures 50.5 x 34 x 34 mm, and with a plug its length increases to 89 mm.

This power supply supports PD modes up to 20V@3.25A, or up to 65 W. Of course, it can also be used to power other devices that support Power Delivery technology.

As already mentioned, the kit includes a cable with USB Type-C connectors 1.75 meters long.

Now let’s compare it with adapters of similar power without the letters “GaN” — for example, from a set of Honor laptops:

Unfortunately, we didn’t have such an adapter on hand, only a photo of it, but for assessment you can use the size of the plug as a guide: Tecno’s power supply is noticeably smaller, although Honor’s is not a giant. And in terms of weight (the values are slightly rounded and taking into account the cables, they are the same length) the difference is this: 170 grams for the Tecno adapter and 200 grams for Honor. How important such a reduction in the size and weight of the power supply is for the owner of a laptop, even a compact one, cannot be said for sure; it is a very individual question.

The sticker on the top panel of the T14TA laptop characterizes the memory as follows:

The statement “40% smaller” most likely refers to the volume of the case, and we can quite agree with it. And “40% faster” probably means charging speed, and this is pure advertising: the duration of energy replenishment depends on the current, but not on the semiconductor technology, and the maximum currents for Tecno and Honor chargers are the same, they are determined by the Power Delivery specification and in both cases they are 3.25 A for 20-volt mode.

We start charging from the standard power supply after automatic shutdown at a level of 1%, the OS was loaded on the laptop; The table shows the readings of the corresponding Windows equipment:

According to these readings, the process is not very fast even for a battery of this capacity: 80% were obtained in two and a half hours, 90% in almost three hours, and a full charge took about four and a half hours. As often happens, the last five percent took a lot of time, more than an hour, but after the value of 100% appeared, the current consumed from the adapter became consistently minimal, that is, the indication in Windows corresponds to the actual state of the battery, but this is not always the case.

The test with charging from a standard adapter was carried out with the laptop turned off, and the current was measured with an external device. Results in the table:

Thus, a full charge even when the laptop is turned off takes quite a long time — about three hours, but this is noticeably less than with the OS loaded. And if you charge the battery at the same time as working in resource-intensive applications, then it will take even more time.

Judging by the current, little energy is added in the last 30-40 minutes, so in most cases you can get by with two and a half hours.

The built-in BMS (Battery Management System) does not allow recharging when the remaining energy is above 90%, and if you want to charge the battery to the maximum, you must first discharge it to at least 88-89 percent. There are no settings to limit the upper charge level.

At the initial stage, the adapter heats up significantly and also beeps — the high-frequency sound is not very loud, against the background of ordinary office noise you are unlikely to pay attention to it, but in a quiet room it is clearly noticeable. As the supplied current decreases, the case temperature decreases, and the squeak disappears from approximately 2.2-2.4 amperes and below. In games and other “heavy” applications, sometimes other sounds are heard, reminiscent of a faint crackling sound, that is, the standard power supply unit is compact, but you cannot call it “silent”, and it can get quite warm.

The indicator lights up white when the laptop is turned on and blinks slowly in power saving mode; When charging, the color will be orange, and when the remaining energy is low, the color will be flashing.

Load operation and heating

First, a little about the design features.

To remove the bottom cover, you need to remove nine easily visible screws.

The motherboard is small — it takes up about a third of the area, another small board is separated from it by a cooler, it contains USB and audio connectors, a card reader and Parade PS8719E USB repeater chips. Both boards are connected by a cable.

The rest of the interior space is taken up by a three-cell lithium-ion battery. There are speakers on the sides of the battery.

RAM and wireless communication module are soldered.

The only M.2 slot is occupied by a standard NVMe SSD with a size of 2280, that is, the upgrade options are extremely limited: the RAM cannot be increased, and the drive can only be replaced. But both of these are quite common for compact laptops.

The cooling system contains a single radiator with a fan, which is connected to the processor heat sink by two heat pipes. As already mentioned, air is sucked in through slots in the bottom and expelled back to the bottom of the screen.

To assess how the operating parameters of system components (temperature, frequency, etc.) change under different load scenarios, we present a table (the maximum/steady-state values ​​are given through a fraction). The fan automatically changes speed as needed, but its rotation speed is not displayed in the utilities we use.

When a load is applied (powerMax program), the CPU first operates in Turbo Boost mode, in which the frequency of the CPU cores reaches 3.4 GHz, its consumption increases to 40 W, and the peak temperature reaches 82 ° C, the fan begins to spin up, quickly reaching maximum speed (you have to judge by the sound). After half a minute there is a rapid decline: frequencies to 2.9 GHz, consumption to 28 W, the fan reduces speed to medium, and the temperature quickly decreases and stabilizes at 75-76 degrees. It doesn't get to the point of throttling.

After removing the load, the processor quickly cools down, the fan slows down and stops after just over two minutes.

At maximum load on the processor and video card simultaneously, the initial peak looks more like a trident: short-term rises in half a minute manage to give way to declines three times. The maximum CPU frequency is lower — up to 3.1 GHz (observed three times, but only a few seconds in total), and consumption and maximum temperature are approximately the same: up to 40 W and up to 80 °C. After the end of Turbo Boost, the situation remains unstable: the frequency fluctuates between 1.9 and 2.3 GHz, the temperature is from 68 to 77 degrees, and only the consumption is constant — about 28 watts. There is also no throttling.

The video core frequency constantly changes between 850 MHz and 1.1 GHz, consumption is from 7 to 16 W, the temperature stabilizes at 68-72 degrees.

The fan first spins up to maximum speed, then slows down.

When loaded only on the GPU, this core operates at a frequency of 1.35 GHz (which is quite consistent with the specification), but not constantly, but with regular short dips up to 1.0 GHz. Its temperature gradually rises to 63-64 degrees, consumption constantly changes from 13 to 15 watts with a total consumption of 20 watts. The fan operates at medium speed.

Thus, the cooling system copes with its duties quite well, preventing either overheating or throttling.

Below are thermal images taken after long-term operation of the laptop under maximum CPU load:

Above

Power unit

From below

When working with resource-intensive applications for a long time, the part of the top panel behind the keyboard and to the left of it (that is, where the cooler is located) becomes noticeably warm; the left half of the function keys becomes warm. But the heat level is far from uncomfortably hot. Holding a laptop on your lap is unpleasant, since the left knee feels significant heating from the bottom of the laptop (heating above the right is also felt). The power supply gets very hot, so when working with high performance for a long time, it is better to make sure that it is not covered with anything.

Noise level

We measure the noise level in a special soundproof and semi-muffled chamber. In this case, the microphone of the sound level meter is positioned relative to the laptop so as to simulate the typical position of the user’s head: the screen is tilted back 45 degrees (or maximum if the screen does not tilt 45 degrees), the axis of the microphone coincides with the normal emanating from the center of the screen, the front end of the microphone is located at a distance of 50 cm from the screen plane, the microphone is aimed at the screen. The load is created using the powerMax program, the screen brightness is set to maximum, the room temperature is maintained at 24 degrees, but the laptop is not specially ventilated, so in the immediate vicinity the air temperature may be higher. To estimate real consumption, we also present (for some modes) consumption from the network. Battery is pre-charged to 100%:

If the laptop is not loaded at all, then its cooling system under the above conditions can operate in passive mode for a long time. The nature of the noise, even under high load, is even and does not cause irritation. The spectrogram obtained for the maximum fan speed is quite smooth, and there are no pronounced peaks in the frequency range where sounds can cause particular irritation:

To subjectively assess the noise level, we use the following scale:

Below 20 dBA the computer is conditionally silent, from 20 to 25 dBA the laptop can be called very quiet, from 25 to 30 dBA the noise from the cooling system will not stand out much against the background of the typical sounds surrounding the user in an office with several employees and working computers, from 30 to 35 dBA noise is clearly audible, from 35 to 40 dBA the noise exceeds a comfortable level for long-term work, from 40 to 45 dBA the laptop is very noisy and for work it is necessary, for example, masking with background music, from 45 to 50 dBA the noise level is very uncomfortable, and From 50 dBA and above the noise is so loud that headphones must be used. The scale, of course, is very arbitrary and does not take into account the individual characteristics of the user and the nature of the sound.

Let's compare with other similar laptops, maximum values ​​are taken into account:

That is, the Tecno Megabook T14TA laptop is not the quietest, but not the noisiest.

Performance

The processor has an integrated video core, which is used by the laptop — there is no discrete video card.

The motherboard contains LPDDR4-4266 memory chips manufactured by Samsung. Utilities report a four-channel mode, but in terms of bandwidth this is equivalent to dual-channel in older types of memory like DDR4.

Foresee XP1000F512G drive installed (512 GB, M.2 2280, NVMe, PCIe 3.0 x4):

It showed good performance in CrystalDiskMark tests.

We suggest comparing with the test results of two more PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs — Foresee GSYAPGC-512G (512 GB, Infinix Inbook X2 XL21 laptop) and KingSpec NX-512 (512 GB, Irbis SmartBook 15NBP3508):

Foresee GSYAPGC-512G

KingSpec NX-512

For clarity, we present the results in the form of diagrams:

The laptop is equipped with a microSD card reader, to determine the speed indicators of which we will use a SanDisk Ultra media (class I) with a capacity of 64 GB; First, the results in the CrystalDiskMark test utility; for comparison, here are the results of the card reader of the Digma Pro Sprint M laptop:

Card reader Tecno Megabook T14TA

Digma Pro Sprint M card reader

The second test is the speed of real file operations performed by OS tools: copying 100 image files with a total volume of 2.5 GB, first from the media to a folder on the desktop, then from the folder to the media.

Copying from microSD to computer

Copying from computer to microSD

In the first case, the procedure took 289 seconds, which corresponds to an average speed of 8.7 MB/s, in the second — 115 seconds (21.7 MB/s). The card reader in Digma Pro Sprint M with the same set of files showed 22.3 and 18.7 MB/s, respectively, that is, it worked significantly faster in one direction and a little slower in the other.

Game testing

The Tecno Megabook T14TA laptop, equipped only with an integrated video core, cannot be called a gaming laptop

To confirm this opinion, we still tested it in World of Tanks with three quality settings and three resolutions. The table shows the average (minimum in parentheses) frame rates averaged over two measurements.

With the nominal resolution of 1920×1200 for this device, even in undemanding “tanks”, it is possible to exceed the lower threshold of comfortable values ​​of 60 fps on average and 30 fps minimum only with average quality, and for maximum quality you will have to reduce the resolution to a value that cannot be named acceptable. We did not try to additionally load the processor with software calculation of ray tracing.

We tried three more games (racing simulator, shooter and strategy), which ran on both the Tecno Megabook T1 (remember: Intel Core i5-1035G1, 16 GB LPDDR4-3733) and on other recently tested laptops without discrete graphics: Honor MagicBook 14 2023 with a more recent Intel Core i5-13500H and 16 GB LPDDR5-4800 processor, as well as 11th generation Digma Pro Sprint M (Intel Core i5-1135G7, 16 GB LPDDR4-3200) and Infinix Inbook X2 Plus (Intel Core i7-1195G7, 16 GB LPDDR4x-4266). Here are the results at medium quality and with a resolution of 1920x1080 — in the case of the Tecno Megabook T14TA we used the same settings to compare the results:

The previous model Tecno Megabook T1 is doing poorly in games even by the standards of compact laptops without a discrete video adapter, but the new T14TA is doing much better.

However, the general conclusion is predictable: none of the participants in the comparison is suitable for the role of a gaming laptop, although with a strong desire, but without very critical compromises in terms of quality, four out of five (including the Tecno Megabook T14TA) will allow you to play at least «tanks».