Introducing the Toshiba Satellite P755D

While the launch of Trinity isn't too far away, it's important to remember there are still plenty of Llano notebooks available today with a lot to offer on their own. AMD's APU may be weak on the processor performance side, but the GPU side achieves something Intel historically couldn't touch: decent gaming performance at a budget price.

The problem now is that with Ivy Bridge also due soon, Sandy Bridge-based notebooks are going at fire sale prices while any of NVIDIA's 500 series graphics that haven't been rebranded also need to be purged, resulting in a substantial number of notebooks with gaming potential hanging out in Llano's neighborhood. Toshiba's Satellite P755D features AMD's fastest 35-watt Llano processor and a Blu-ray drive at a reasonably low price, but is it still going to be competitive?

As product lines age, parts get refreshed and good deals begin to appear near the end of a generation of hardware in preparation for the premiums that the next generation often commands. The same can be said for the Satellite P755D; the review unit we have on hand is essentially where the AMD-equipped versions of Toshiba's P750 series peak, condensed down to one model to make room for the new blood due over the next few months.

As I mentioned before, AMD's A8-3520M is the fastest APU in their mobile lineup before jumping up to the 45W TDP chips. This is a fully equipped Llano chip featuring all four cores running at a nominal 1.6GHz and able to turbo up to 2.5GHz depending on the workload and thermals. The GPU half sports the full 400 shaders, 20 texture units, and 8 ROPs, and shares a 128-bit dual-channel DDR3-1333-specced memory bus with the CPU half.

Toshiba's other big selling point with the P755D is offering a Blu-ray reader at a price the competition generally just doesn't. While this may not be of use to many users, I can tell you that I've known at least a few people who have deliberately sought out Blu-ray drives for their notebooks. Toshiba knows about those customers, and I get the feeling that the P755D is geared towards serving them specifically.

The rest of the notebook is pretty par for the course for an entry-level system, but thankfully USB 3.0 is at least becoming increasingly pervasive. It's joined by three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA, and an ethernet jack, but the battery is the kind of middling-capacity hardware you'd expect from a notebook in this end of the market. You'll also have to cope with Toshiba's slow 5,400-RPM 640GB mechanical hard drive, which gets the job done but is definitely going to be the bottom rung on the performance ladder.

Where things get a bit sketchy is that $699 price tag. Fire sale Sandy Bridge notebooks have resulted in systems from Lenovo (never thought I'd see the day the vendor of ThinkPads would aggressively chase the bottom dollar) and Acer with i5 processors and dedicated NVIDIA graphics coming in $30 to $80 below the Satellite on NewEgg. The flipside is that none of those notebooks feature a Blu-ray drive, and while that accessory is going to be of questionable value to a lot of users there's a subset that will be willing to take the performance hit to get that flexibility.

Fusion X2, We Won't Miss You

Toshiba's Fusion and Fusion X2 finishes are long in the tooth, and unfortunately the Satellite P755D continues the trend with the Fusion X2. Texturing glossy plastic mitigates a lot of the issues with using the material in the first place, but the shell as a whole still looks very bulbous and busy, and Toshiba continues to use a glossy black plastic in (IMO) the worst place a designer can put it: the screen bezel.

Where Toshiba continues to do a decent job is with the keyboard, though. With the success of the Portege line, Toshiba started transitioning the rest of their notebooks to chiclet keyboards that are substantially improved over the flat glossy keycaps of their predecessors. While I'm still not overjoyed with the use of glossy plastic in the construction of these keycaps (or Toshiba's insistence that these are premium when the matte keyboards they use in less expensive notebooks are actually superior to the touch), the layout of the keyboard continues to be one of the more traditional (and one of the smarter) ones on the market. For some users the keyboard won't matter, but for others it will be a make or break experience, and as a more finicky user I can say the one Toshiba employs is definitely comfortable enough for regular use.

The P755D also enjoys a touchpad with dedicated buttons. The buttons themselves are large, but they do feel like there's a little bit too much resistance. It's a minor quibble in the scheme of things, and the surface of the touchpad itself is plenty comfortable to use. The touchpad can also be easily toggled on and off by pressing a button just above it.

As for the rest of the overall build quality, it's easy to say that Fusion X2's time has passed. Despite having a weight comparable to the Acer TimelineU "ultrabook" we recently reviewed, the P755D feels a lot bigger and bulkier. It continues to be a situation where, when recommending a budget notebook, I feel like I have to continually say "as long as you don't mind how it looks, Toshiba makes good budget machines."

Application and Futuremark Performance

Despite being AMD's fastest 35W mobile chip, the A8-3520M in the Toshiba Satellite P755D is nonetheless a good generation behind Sandy Bridge in CPU performance. Worse, Toshiba is going to be crippled in these comparisons by its slow 5,400-RPM mechanical hard drive, but please try to remember that this is also a sub-$700 notebook. It's not supposed to blow anything away; it's just supposed to get the job done.

PCMark has a tendency to skew decently towards the storage subsystem, and that probably accounts for why AMD's reference Llano platform with its slightly slower CPU continues to outperform the Satellite P755D. At the same time, this is the kind of difference in scores that unfortunately will manifest itself in day to day use; the slow hard drive in the P755D will result in a computing experience that's going to feel slower and less fluid.

Bounce over to our CPU-isolated tests and the clock boost on the P755D manifests itself in a modest but measurable performance boost over the reference A8-3500M. Llano's poor single-threaded performance continues to dog it, though, and it's only when it's presented with multi-threaded situations that it can even nip at the heels of a 17W Sandy Bridge CPU. Trinity can't come soon enough, and hopefully it can at least reduce the performance gap on the CPU side.

Where Llano has always been able to stretch its legs has been on the GPU half, and that's true again here. The A8-3520M's clock speed bump over the A8-3500M doesn't account for much if anything, but Llano continues to blow away Sandy Bridge's HD 3000 and even AMD's own entry-level mobile graphics. Once again, however, Trinity is needed to really make a compelling argument for AMD given the current pricing of Sandy Bridge CPU + NVIDIA GPU offerings—even Toshiba's own L755-S5173 (basically an Intel variant of the P755D with slightly different aesthetics and no Blu-ray drive) sells for the same price, and based on the components that notebook should deliver at least 15% more GPU performance with substantially better CPU performance.

Gaming Performance

While the CPU half of Llano has always been a substantial bottleneck, the GPU half is able to do wonders to make up for the CPU's shortcomings. Unfortunately something I've experienced anecdotally that doesn't manifest itself on our benchmark charts is just how great the difference is between the Radeon in an AMD APU and Intel's Sandy Bridge IGP. Intel's HD 3000 doesn't ever look completely awful on charts, but in practice I've found it to have a tremendous amount of peaks and valleys that make it less ideal for even casual gaming than Intel would have you believe. Worse, I've gotten the distinct impression that geometry continues to be a very serious weakness for Intel.

The net takeaway here is that, performance numbers notwithstanding, Llano's graphics hardware actually provides a significantly more fluid and responsive experience the Intel's HD 3000 overall.

Now this is interesting. What you're essentially seeing is the IGP version of the Radeon HD 6650M beat it in certain benchmarks. This massive difference can likely be attributed to two things: the older (and essentailly non-updateable) Radeon drivers on the Sony Vaio Z2, and the Z2's HD 6650M being bottlenecked by the Thunderbolt interface to PCIe x4 speeds. (That laptop has to transfer the frames back to the integrated display over Thunderbolt, which appears to hurt performance.) The ultimate result is that even though the Z2 should trounce the Satellite P755D's A8-3520M on paper, in practice things aren't so clear. The VAIO SE on the other hand puts in a better showing in pretty much every game with the HD 6630M—just as you'd expect.

For academic purposes (and to prep our charts for Trinity), I've also run our Mainstream class benchmark suite.

Unfortunately it doesn't really matter what you want to point the finger at, be it low memory bandwidth or just a weak GPU overall, the A8-3520M just isn't capable of pushing 900p gaming at playable framerates. Our best case scenario is Portal 2 on Valve's aging Source engine, and even that game is just on the cusp of playability. Llano remains fine for entry level gaming, but any more stress than that is ill advised.

You may or may not have noticed we don't have any testing results for Batman: Arkham City. The reason for that is a simple one: the legitimate license key that I've been using has basically been locked out. I ran out of activations, went through their arcane key revoking process, and the best part? When I try to revoke a key on a system I'm done testing, SecuROM actually tells me I've revoked the key too many times! So congratulations to Warner Brothers Games, you have successfully prevented a legitimate user from playing your game or letting it get any kind of positive exposure.

We're currently working with NVIDIA on getting keys blessed with an arbitrarily large number of activations so that we can continue to do our jobs, so if that comes to pass, results will be added for the P755D. It does bear mentioning that the driver developers on NVIDIA's mobile team are actually having the exact same problems with Arkham City's DRM that we are (thus the impetus for them to press WB for keys without such draconian limitations), so if the people who are supposed to be optimizing their hardware and software for your game can't even actually run it, clearly your DRM scheme is a smashing success.

And by "smashing success," I of course mean "complete and utter failure." Here's a novel idea: Steam already has DRM in place so that legitimate Steam users can only play a game on one PC at a time—log in elsewhere and you get logged out. And really, who cares how many times people install a game? If someone is looking to pirate your game, giving them an arguably better experience for doing so only adds to the desire to avoid legitimate channels. This stinks of the same profit taking that's bringing about such useless innovations as Blu-ray's Cinavia protection.

Battery Life

One of the places where AMD scored big with Llano (especially compared to their previous generation) has been battery life and power efficiency. Llano presently remains your best option for gaming on the battery, but somewhere along the line it seems like Toshiba may have dropped the ball with the Satellite P755D. Take a look.

Our battery running time results seem to corroborate the results from other sites, but that doesn't actually explain why the P755D's battery life is so terrible. Llano is definitely capable of running very efficiently (our time with AMD's reference platform proved that), so I can't help but get the impression that we're running into another situation where AMD's status as an also-ran in the notebook market is resulting in less care being taken in optimizing systems that run their hardware.

Jarred's remarked on this before but it bears repeating: part of the problem with AMD processors in notebooks is that notebook manufacturers almost never took them seriously. This isn't bad hardware, but Toshiba's engineers seem to have taken only the most minimal of care with the Satellite P755D's APU. It's a decision that ultimately sells everyone on the chain short: Toshiba, AMD, and the end user. We don't think it's impossible for a vendor to produce a very compelling AMD-based notebook, but they have to be willing to try, and it's a shame nobody's really stepping up to do so.

Heat and Noise

The P755D does do right by AMD in one way: it demonstrates just what a good citizen AMD's A8-3520M can actually be in a system where heat and noise are concerned. The fans never have to spin up terribly high in the P755D, even under load, and you can see why.

HWMonitor's wattage reading is undoubtedly off the mark, but check out the thermals. While we're used to seeing other systems we test cook the hardware, the A8-3520M is running downright frosty. Seeing mobile hardware, or heck, even desktop hardware, run below 60C under stress is a very rare thing. At these temperatures it's no wonder the fan doesn't have to work particularly hard.

Yes, Another 1366x768 Screen

We've belabored this a thousand times, you've belabored it a thousand more; it's not worth getting into here. At least with the Toshiba Satellite P755D we can argue that the notebook is a budget machine, so asking for a fancy screen in it suggests end users may be barking up the wrong tree. Of course, adding a Blu-ray drive to a notebook with a 768p display seems like a mixed set of priorities; the same money spent getting a BRD in the P665D would buy a substantially better panel (e.g. AU Optronics B156HW01 v4 goes for around $95 online, where the LP156WH4-TLA1 costs $60). That said, the 768p screen in the P755D isn't actually the worst one we've seen (though it's close in several areas!), but the resolution remains too low for a notebook this size.

The panel in the Satellite P755D errs on the side of color gamut and accuracy instead of high brightness and contrast. I'm not necessarily certain the tradeoff is a worthwhile one, as the gains just don't seem great enough and contrast is quite poor even by TN panel standards. Heck, even matte LCDs that compromise on contrast in order to avoid glare frequently offer better contrast.

Conclusion: It Depends on Who Needs It

The Toshiba Satellite P755D is, first and foremost, a notebook for the budget consumer market. It's not necessarily meant to be a particularly exciting piece of hardware; it's meant to fill a niche, offer value to specific end users, and basically to just be an inexpensive computer that can handle most tasks and watch a movie once in a while. Taken on those terms, the P755D is successful.

It's pretty clear that Toshiba made a series of tradeoffs to get the Blu-ray drive into a notebook at as low a price point as possible, and a visit to NewEgg will see that they were mostly successful in that respect. The only notebook NewEgg offers that isn't a refurbished model and is less expensive than the P755D is a strikingly similar Gateway unit, but you sacrifice hard drive capacity, USB 3.0 connectivity, Bluetooth, and carrying weight in the process. If you're in the market for a notebook with Blu-ray, that's something you'll have to weigh on your own.

Of course, if Blu-ray doesn't matter to you, the P755D doesn't belong on your short list. You can find better performing notebooks from other vendors or even Toshiba themselves at a similar price. Screen quality is going to continue to be an issue (same as it ever was) no matter where you look, but Acer and even Lenovo are currently willing to sell you a faster processor coupled with Optimus-enabled NVIDIA graphics for around the same price, resulting in a notebook that's going to beat the P755D at every metric except gaming on the battery.

Ultimately, though, I think we can all agree that the next generation of hardware can't come soon enough. A little birdie told me Toshiba's Fusion X2 is on its way out and due to be replaced by a much nicer fit and finish, alleviating one of my biggest grievances with Toshiba's notebooks. Llano is a fine chip, but it needs just a little more pep, and if AMD's predictions for where Trinity's performance is going to line up come to pass (and it appears they will), then Llano is going to look like the rough draft for the chip we were all really waiting for.