Getac S410 G5 Review | PCMag

Pop quiz, hotshot: When you drop your laptop, do you drop it from a height of three feet or six feet? Either will be bad news for the average notebook, but wanting a system that survives such falls determines whether you need what’s called a semi-rugged or fully rugged laptop, respectively. The 14-inch Getac S410 G5 (starts at $1,849; $4,599 as tested) is the latest edition of a longtime semi-rugged champion. It’s not quite as indestructible as its fully rugged cousins, but it’s an excellent companion for field workers, first responders, and others who use PCs in the great outdoors, earning it our Editors’ Choice award in the category.

Configurations: Variety Is the Spice of Work 

We reviewed the Getac S410 G4 in October 2021. The fifth generation moves its Intel processor choices up two generations—from 11th to 13th—and improves connectivity (ditching the USB 2.0 port and adding a 5G option, for instance). But its place in the rugged laptop arena hasn’t changed: This is a system suitable for a factory floor, a police car dashboard, or an emergency worker’s go bag that shrugs off abuse but is lighter and more affordable than fully rugged leviathans, like the Panasonic Toughbook 40.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Specifically, the ABS- and magnesium-armored S410 measures 1.5 by 13.8 by 11.5 inches and weighs 5.25 pounds—portly compared with most business laptops, but more than two pounds lighter than the 14-inch Toughbook 40 and about the same as the fully rugged, 13.3-inch Getac B360 G2 (5.11 pounds).

Besides surviving three-foot drops and MIL-STD 810H torture tests, it carries an IP53 ingress protection rating, meaning it’s built to keep out virtually all dust and dirt and immune to rain or water spray (though not splashes, pressurized jets, or immersion). The notebook has a built-in carrying handle, and its lid latches down.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Almost all Getac laptops are custom-configured from a slew of expansion and connectivity options at order, so pricing is hard to pin down. The company gave us a quote of $1,849 for a base model with a Core i5-1340P processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a low-res, high-brightness (sunlight-readable) 1,366-by-768-pixel screen.

Our $4,599 test unit stepped up to a Core i5-1350P (four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 16 threads) with Intel’s vPro management tech, 32GB of memory, and two SSDs—one 512GB PCIe and one 256GB SATA—as well as a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel IPS display, dual batteries, both a fingerprint reader and a face-recognition webcam, GPS, a SmartCard reader, and Windows 11 Pro. 

Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth are standard; 4G or 5G mobile broadband is optional, as is a touch screen and Core i7-1370P or Core i7-1360P (vPro or not) CPU. The multimedia bay that holds the second storage drive can also hold a third battery, a DVD or Blu-ray drive, or a bar code reader.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Sliding latches on the bottom release the modular components, starting with the bay and battery on the laptop’s left side. Along the right are the AC adapter connector and the first set of ports protected by snap-open covers: a Thunderbolt 4/USB-C port, a microSD card slot, an audio jack, a SIM slot, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, and a hole to stash the stylus for touch-screen models. HDMI, Ethernet, and two more USB-A ports are around back, next to one of four available additional arrays: a serial port, either a DisplayPort or VGA connector, and either a second Ethernet or third USB-A port.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Using the Getac S410 G5: Hit It With Your Best Shot 

I dropped the S410, both closed and open, half a dozen times from about three feet onto both a carpeted floor and grassy lawn. Except for the screen flopping from upright to flat, nothing untoward happened. Ditto for putting it in the kitchen sink and simulating a cloudburst with the sprayer; the keyboard and the rest of the machine were fully functional after its dousing. 

The webcam provides not only Windows Hello face recognition but 5-megapixel (up to 2,592-by-1,944) resolution and a sliding privacy shutter. It captures well-lit and colorful images and videos, though with a trace of noise or static.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Getac’s full HD screen is stupendously bright, with white backgrounds that are positively Antarctic instead of dingy or grayish. Viewing angles are wide, though with some reflections at extreme angles, and contrast is high. Details are clear, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. Colors, alas, are mediocre, bland and washed out instead of vivid or well-saturated, but rugged laptops are rarely used for graphic design or movie viewing. 

They’re rarely used for Spotify or MP3 playing, either, so it’s no surprise the S410’s sound is only fair, quiet even at top volume and flat with no hint of highs or bass. It’s not the worst laptop audio I’ve heard—instrumentals come through if you keep your ear close, and you can dimly make out overlapping tracks—but it’s far from the best.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Since the system is destined for the front seats of ambulances and police cruisers on the night shift, I was disappointed that the keyboard’s backlight is quite dim, even unnoticeable in an office in daylight. Its square keys also have an uncomfortably stiff, wooden typing feel that makes even using your bare hands feel like typing with gloves. Speaking of which, the touchpad earns points for being perfectly usable indoors—some rugged laptops use glove-friendly resistive pads that require unnaturally heavy pressure from bare fingers. The touchpad is tappable but not clickable; you’ll find two decently sized mouse buttons below it. 

Getac’s G-Manager software combines system and battery info with options such as swapping the Fn and Ctrl keys at bottom left, enabling the PowerShare USB-A port, and assigning functions to the two shortcut buttons above the keyboard. On touch-screen models it also optimizes the panel for glove, stylus, or rainy use.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Testing the Getac S410 G5: Perfectly Capable of a Long Day’s Work 

Except for battery life and (outdoor) screen brightness, benchmark results aren’t the most important thing about rugged laptops, but we found two other 14-inch semi-rugged systems for our comparison charts: the Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged and the Panasonic Toughbook 55 Mk2. Filling out the field are two fully rugged notebooks, the 14-inch Panasonic Toughbook 40 and 13.3-inch Getac B360 G2.

Productivity Tests 

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. 

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.5 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The two Getacs, the newest systems in the quintet, led the way in these tests, with the S410 posting a particularly potent score in Photoshop (though not really a prime app for first responders). All five laptops cleared the 4,000-point hurdle in PCMark 10 that indicates fine productivity for routine office tasks; none is a threat to CAD or CGI users’ mobile workstations, of course. Expect this laptop to generally run the apps you need on the field, barring any particularly high-power edge cases. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Toughbook 40 managed the highest frame rates in GFXBench with the S410 close behind, but none of these PCs—nor, frankly, any laptop with integrated graphics instead of a discrete GPU—is capable of playing the latest games. Police and EMTs will have to settle for solitaire, mah-jongg, and YouTube or Netflix for after-hours entertainment. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test each laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

Additionally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Getac S410 G5 performed terribly in our color-coverage test—if you were planning on doing some graphic design or pre-press work under fire, you’ll have to reconsider—but it dazzled in the other two events, managing nearly 30 hours of unplugged runtime in our battery test and coming close to its advertised 1,000 nits of screen brightness. Only the Dell’s color reproduction qualified as not bad, and only the Toughbook 40 came close to matching the S410 in our battery rundown.

Verdict: Ideal for Bare Fingers, Gloved Fingers, Even Butterfingers 

Getac’s S410 G5 is heavy and expensive as configured—for more than $4K, you’d think our test unit would at least include a Core i7 instead of a Core i5—but that comes with the territory. However, if you need a laptop that has your back in bad conditions, the Getac S410 G5 is an excellent choice that easily replaces the previous award holder as our semi-rugged Editors’ Choice award honoree.