Getac X600

May 01, 2024

Aside from its formidable price and weight, the Getac X600 ($10,916 as tested) is a fully rugged laptop that forces you to make few sacrifices. Its 15.6-inch display is roomier than those of most laptops for first responders and field workers, and bright enough (rated at 1,000 nits) to be viewed in direct sunlight. When the skies aren't clear and sunny, the X600 shrugs off extreme environments and rough treatment with MIL-STD 810H durability and IP66 ingress protection. It's also the rare rugged notebook that offers an optional GPU boost instead of integrated graphics—an Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 (Getac calls the system a mobile workstation), which forms a dynamic duo with a powerful (if two-generations-old) Intel Core i9 H-series processor. And with two hot-swappable batteries, the X600 will last all day when you're far from a power source. The Getac X600 is undeniably triple or quadruple overkill for most workers, but it fills a unique niche for those who need a large, high-powered laptop that they can use under the harshest conditions.

There's no mistaking the Getac X600 for anything other than a fully rugged laptop; it's big and bulky with large rubber bumpers in each corner. There's so much heft to it that it has a built-in handle on its front edge. With thick bezels protecting the edges of the display, the X600 takes up a lot of room. It measures 2.1 by 16.2 by 12.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 9.7 pounds, making it a better travel companion sitting next to you in a Humvee than in a laptop bag slung over from your shoulder (especially since its massive power brick and cord bring the total travel weight to 11.4 pounds).

Because of the added weight of outdoor armor, most rugged laptops feature 14-inch or smaller displays to keep them reasonably portable. Panasonic's Toughbook line, for example, tops out at 14 inches with the 7.4-pound Toughbook 40. The 14-inch Getac S410 G4, which is only semi-rugged, is 5.25 pounds. Indeed, the only other 15.6-inch rough-and-tumble laptop we've reviewed is the semi-rugged Durabook S15AB, which is much trimmer than the X600 at 5.7 pounds.

But while semi-rugged laptops are built to survive falls of up to three feet, the Getac X600 is certified to withstand a four-foot drop. With its IP66 rating, it offers total protection from dust and even high-pressure jets of water (think monsoon rains). The system has also passed a slew of MIL-STD 810H and MIL-STD 461G tests, shrugging off adverse environmental conditions from humidity and extreme temperatures to vibration and low air pressure at high altitudes, as well as electromagnetic compatibility for military communications. Even resistance to salt fog is an option.

To keep the elements outside, the Getac keeps its ports secured behind protective covers on the sides and rear edge. The covers snap closed and are held in place by a sliding lock.

The port selection is a far cry from the stripped-down connectivity of most modern consumer laptops—for one thing, you'll find legacy serial and VGA ports on the back panel. The rear array also includes HDMI and DisplayPort monitor connections alongside a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports. Rounding out the rear ports are dual Ethernet jacks and the power connector. Below the USB ports is a SIM card slot for optional 4G LTE mobile broadband.

On the left edge, you'll see a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support and another USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port. You can access the laptop's solid-state drive from the left side, and there's a spot to add an optional SD card reader. Another cubbyhole is built to stash a stylus if you opt for a touch screen (our test unit had a non-touch panel).

A fourth USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port is found on the right edge next to a headphone jack. Should you outfit the X600 with a second or third SSD, they'll be accessible on the right side.

The X600 features dual hot-swappable batteries, each reachable from either side of the laptop. That's an easier access point than having them accessible from the bottom panel.

The pull-out carrying handle on the front edge could come in handy if you wear work gloves during parts of your workday. I'd caution you to exercise care when not wearing gloves; I took a small chunk out of my thumb by accidentally banging it against the corner of the handle when the latter was extended.

The X600 features a 15.6-inch display with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution. Its best attribute is its viewable-under-noonday-sun 1,000-nit brightness (which we measured as close to that impressive figure, as you'll see below). The screen's scores in our color coverage test were lackluster, but field workers and military personnel aren't usually busy with image editing or movie viewing. In my own anecdotal tests, the Getac's display remained readable under a bright August sky.

Powering the display is the formidable combo of an eight-core Intel Core i9-11950H processor and Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 graphics. The 11th Generation Core i9 chip is still highly capable, coming as it does from Intel's 45-watt H series (versus the ultraportable, battery-sipping 15-watt U series and in-between 28-watt P series). The 6GB Quadro RTX 3000 GPU adds a substantial $3,728 to the system price. (The X600 is a slightly less painful $7,317 without it.)

Above the display is a 1080p webcam that delivers a crisp picture that's less grainy than that of lowball 720p cameras. When not on a video call, you can slide a physical shutter over the webcam to protect your privacy. The camera lacks an IR face recognition sensor, and the keyboard has no fingerprint reader, so our X600 doesn't let you skip login passwords with Windows Hello. These items, however, can be added as upgrades when ordering from Getac.

Below the display is a backlit keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad. It suffices for data entry, but I quickly gave up trying to type this review on the X600—the keys are soft and a bit wobbly, with too much side-to-side movement. I did appreciate, however, having four full-sized cursor arrow keys, as well as the soft, three-level red backlighting that lets you see the keycaps in dim light without drawing too much attention to yourself. The touchpad is small and doesn't offer a click response; you can tap on the touchpad to perform a mouse click, but I found myself using the two buttons below it.

The Getac X600 is unique among fully rugged laptops because of its large display and beefy CPU/GPU duo; most competing models feature not only smaller screens but more battery-friendly CPUs alongside integrated graphics. For our performance benchmark tests, we compared the X600 not only to other fully and semi-rugged laptops but to the HP Envy 16, a non-rugged consumer laptop geared toward content creators that has a similar (if more up-to-date) silicon profile.

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.

Our other three 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 5.4 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 X600 outpaced the other rugged models in our application and media tests (though all five laptops cleared the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent performance for productivity apps like Word and Excel) but trailed the Envy 16 and its mighty 13th Gen Core i9. It has more than enough muscle to multitask under Windows 11 Pro without any hiccups and to tackle some light media editing or content creation, though the display's color quality is a greater hindrance to fancy graphics work than the system's performance.

We test mainstream laptops with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also in the test mix is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance. Two GFXBench tests are rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.

Not surprisingly, we saw similar results in our graphics benchmarks as we did in the productivity tests. While none of these machines except the HP is suited for playing the latest games (and far from the point of the X600), the Getac was clearly ahead of the rugged models with integrated graphics.

We test laptops' 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.

We also 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 X600 display did better in our color reproduction tests than the Panasonic Toughbook 40, but worse than the other two rugged machines, the Durabook R11 and Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged. Again, however, nobody chooses a fully rugged laptop for graphic prepress work. Battery life is much more important, and its dual 74.5-watt-hour batteries gave the Getac a highly respectable runtime, though nothing approaching the Panasonic which can literally run around the clock. Remember, however, that the X600's batteries are hot-swappable, so if you invest in some spares you can run and run without needing to power down.

The Getac X600 is a specialized product in a specialized category—a fully rugged laptop with a potent, high-wattage CPU and discrete GPU backing a big 15.6-inch display. This uniquely focused package comes at a sky-high price and requires you to lug around basically a ton, but if you're doing demanding work in extreme cold or heat or rain or dust or riding in a jeep or stumbling over rocks, the X600 is ready for any scenario. Whether you're a first responder or an engineer doing oil and gas exploration in the wild, it'll run—and run fast—for as long as you have batteries on hand.