Pros & Cons
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- Strong build quality
- Sunlight-readable screen
- Dual batteries
- Sharp webcam
- Available dedicated graphics
- Intuitive included apps
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- Expensive
- Middling CPU performance
Getac S510 Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 512 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Rugged |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 1.5 by 14.8 by 10.9 inches |
| Graphics Processor | Intel Graphics |
| Native Display Resolution | 1920 by 1080 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro |
| Panel Technology | IPS |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 7 155U |
| Processor Speed | 2.1 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 60 |
| Screen Size | 15.6 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 15:21 |
| Variable Refresh Support | None |
| Weight | 5.18 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 5.2 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 6E |
Semi-rugged laptops are built for durability and endurance, plain and simple. That's why you'll see so many of them in challenging, rough-and-tumble environments like police cruisers, ambulances, industrial worksites, and the remote outdoors. The Getac S510 (starting at $2,171; tested configuration priced at approximately $3,522) is not only one of the biggest semi-rugged laptops, it's one of the best.
The S510 exemplifies reliability and performance, with an impressive array of features. The 15.6-inch display has a sunlight-readable screen, and the list goes on from there: dual hot-swappable batteries, GPS, a carry handle, and an integrated barcode scanner. The S510 takes the crown from the Durabook S15 as our new Editors' Choice for semi-rugged laptops with larger screens.
Design: One Big and Tough Customer
All of the S510's design is focused on survival, not sleekness. Its bulky, armored chassis—weighing about 5.2 pounds and measuring 1.5 by 14.8 by 10.9 inches (HWD)—dwarfs slim consumer laptops. (Given the weight, the flexible carry handle is a much-appreciated touch.) And the more you look, the more rugged the machine gets.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Just to start with the basics: The S510 features a sliding latch that keeps the lid securely closed, and its display hinges are stiffened to prevent wobbling yet open easily with one hand. From there, the specs get even more tenacious. The S510 has MIL-STD-810H certification—in other words, it meets certain military toughness standards, which ensure reliable performance in temperatures from minus 20 degrees to 145 degrees F. The laptop can also withstand drops of up to three feet, while its IP53 certification covers resistance to dust and exposure to rain or narrow streams of water. Fully rugged laptops like the Panasonic Toughbook 40 offer even greater protection, including a six-foot drop rating, a completely dustproof design, and enhanced water resistance, but with significantly extra bulk and expense.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The screen, meanwhile, has a brightness rating of 1,000 nits (candelas per square meter) and can be viewed in direct sunlight. While our demo model lacks a touch screen, Getac offers the option for a capacitive touch screen that accommodates input from bare fingers, gloved fingers, or a capacitive stylus.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Meanwhile, Getac shields the ports with dust covers for maximum protection, and they are clearly marked to identify what’s behind them. On the right edge, you’ll find a SmartCard reader, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a nano SIM slot for optional 4G or 5G connectivity. Another compartment houses dual Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports and a USB 3.2 Type-A port, while the AC power jack is at the back corner.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)More ports await around back. Under the protective cover on the left (viewing the laptop from the front), you'll find an HDMI 2.0 monitor output, a USB-A port, and an Ethernet jack, while the middle cover shelters an optional second nano SIM slot. Open up the cover on the right, and you'll see a serial port alongside two customizable port spaces. Our test unit includes a VGA monitor output and a second Ethernet jack, though you can opt for a USB-A port and a DisplayPort monitor output instead.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Swing around to the left side of the laptop, and our S510 shows off a barcode reader; it can be replaced with a second storage bay or a DVD optical drive. On the underside of the laptop, the dual batteries are designed for hot-swapping, while the M.2-format storage drive can also be swapped without tools. For connecting with the wider world, the laptop packs an Intel AX211 wireless card that supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Getac covers the S510 with a three-year warranty and includes Windows 11 Pro. A variety of accessories are available, including vehicle mounting solutions, protective screen films, and in-the-field battery chargers with two or eight bays.
Using the Getac S510: Field-Tough, Yet (Mostly) Easy to Use
While semi-rugged laptops often prioritize toughness and gloved usability at the expense of comfort, the Getac S510 is surprisingly accommodating for light office tasks. The keyboard shines with its substantial key travel and gratifying tactile feedback. (In fact, it helped me achieve a personal best of 131 words per minute with near-perfect accuracy in the MonkeyType online typing test. Didn't expect that on a rugged laptop's keyboard!) That said, typing for more than a few minutes revealed a drawback: The laptop’s thick chassis and the longer-than-usual reach to the keyboard made the front edge press uncomfortably against my forearms.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)I found the touchpad to be excellent, offering a smooth surface and two well-placed physical buttons that operate quietly. The buttons are separated, too, which prevents accidental simultaneous presses when wearing gloves.
Shortcut buttons are essential features on semi-rugged laptops where using key combinations might not be ideal with gloved hands. Getac’s G-Manager app allows intuitive configuration of the P1 and P2 shortcut buttons above the keyboard, which can engage blackout or sunlight-readable screen brightness, enable the barcode reader, set airplane mode, switch power profiles, initiate Ctrl+Alt+Delete, or launch an app. This laptop also supports screen edge menus when configured with a touch screen. Additionally, Getac offers its Driving Safely utility to protect your workforce from using this laptop in unsafe situations.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The display is also impressive, delivering dazzling brightness at its maximum sunlight-readable setting. I learned this the hard way when I set the screen to full brightness in a dark room; I ended up quickly looking away and fumbling for the brightness-adjustment key. For pitch-black settings, the display includes a blackout mode, which I measured at an impressively low 1.5 nits. The anti-glare coating, meanwhile, is indispensable for outdoor visibility. While the colors appear natural and not washed out, the screen’s color coverage is limited, as I'll discuss in the next section.
I also give Getac points for the S510’s excellent webcam, which sports a privacy shutter and is available with infrared capability for facial recognition. Another notable visual flourish: classic LED indicators for things like power and wireless. As for audio, the speakers are a disappointment, sounding flat with no bass, and aren’t particularly loud.
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Under the hood, the Intel Core Ultra processor proved responsive for anything I threw at it. I found that the single cooling fan became notably audible when the system was being stressed, but it wouldn’t be a big deal on a factory floor or inside a vehicle with, say, an engine running.
The processor can be paired with up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of self-encrypting storage. This is also one of the few semi-rugged laptops that offers a dedicated GPU, specifically an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, which can accelerate video decoding and localized AI tasks.
Benchmark Performance: Fast Enough for What It Is
Our Getac S510 demo unit features an Intel Core Ultra 7 155U processor (10 cores, 4.8GHz turbo), Intel Graphics, 32GB of memory, and a 512GB self-encrypted SSD. A base model starts around $2,171, and our test unit reaches $3,522 with the barcode reader. We won't be doing detailed pricing comparisons here, since semi-rugged laptops are typically purchased through special agreements for government and industry.
The S510 faces the semi-rugged Dell Pro Rugged 14 and the fully rugged Panasonic Toughbook 40 in our comparison round. To fill in the charts, we also included two key premium, but non-ruggedized, business laptops: the HP EliteBook 1040 G11, and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the freeware video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations that it performs in Adobe Photoshop 25.
The S510 ranked last in almost all of the benchmarks among this test group, especially in Cinebench's Multi-Core test and in Handbrake—something you'd expect, since its CPU is less powerful than others in the pack. However, it delivered a score of 5,621 in PCMark’s main test; that's far above the 4,000-point threshold we consider sufficient for an everyday-use system. Overall, this semi-rugged laptop is well-equipped to handle any standard task that you'd expect to subject a rugged laptop to. Just don't expect to use it for heavy content-manipulation or conversion work.
Gaming and Graphics Tests
We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance using Vulkan or Metal APIs at 1440p resolution.
The S520 came in a decided last place in these tests, as well. Again, it's hardly surprising: Just as with the CPU, the S510 has the weakest integrated graphics solution in this group (vanilla integrated Intel Graphics, as opposed to one of Intel's up-ticked Arc solutions). As noted, you can order the S510 with dedicated graphics, should you need GPU acceleration. But that's largely not the point of a system like this, for most users looking to pay a premium for ruggedness. GPU-accelerated content work and gaming is just not what a Getac laptop is all about.
Battery Life 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.
To gauge display performance, 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 S510 turned in an impressive 15 hours and 21 minutes of life from a single battery, and adding a second battery could potentially double the runtime. Although the S510 falls far short of the Panasonic Toughbook's commanding 41-plus-hour performance in our chart, know that the Panasonic was tested with its provided second battery. The Getac would likely tip into the 30-hour range under the same conditions.
The S510’s screen performs as expected, reaching a peak brightness of 964 nits for clear visibility in sunlight, as is typical of rugged systems and within the range of the Dell and Panasonic models here. However, its color coverage is ho-hum, with only 63% coverage of the sRGB gamut, in line with the Toughbook's screen. This shortcoming is understandable, as these laptops are not designed with creative tasks or entertainment as their primary (or even tertiary) focus.