Toshiba Satellite L755D – Review

The Toshiba Satellite L755D is one of the first notebooks to use AMD’s new Llano architecture, and it’s impressive to see a quad-core processor on a budget notebook, but more importantly one that doesn’t shirk on any particular count.

The Toshiba Satellite ships with a generous 6GB of RAM with a capacious 320GB hard drive for storage.

Star of the show is AMD’s A6-3400M CPU, four cores chugging along at 1.4GHz, with AMD’s Turbo Core technology ready to boost any individual core to  2.3GHz for single-threaded apps (which is the vast majority, even now), plenty enough for average-sized jobs, while the other three cores take care of the OS and any background apps like Media Player.

A quadcore processor with dedicated graphics would be too much to ask of a budget laptop, but the Radeon HD 6520G GPU integrated solution makes a good sustitute.

In benchmarks the CPU performed well on lightweight desktop apps, though fell slightly short of Intel i3 scores. However, the AMD’s graphics processing power easily outperformed Intel’s integrated solutions. For instance, at low-quality resolutions Crysis came in at a comfortable 50fps, whereas the Intel i3-integrated pairing couldn’t make the 30fps cut. Even on medium settings at 1600 x 900 resolution the Satellite L755D manages a just-unplayable 25fps vs Intel’s laughable 12fps.

Yet the glossy 15.6″ display 1366 x 768 resolution display is par for the course for budget notebooks, and image quality is consequently average.  Images look a little washed-out and the colors are not particularly vibrant.

Build quality is typically good, and the Satellite L755D feels sturdy. Notwithstanding its all-plastic casing, the lid feels robust and there is very little keyboard flex whilst typing. The combination of crimson and black disguises the budget price tag , and the ergonomic design is attractive, with a numeric keypad squeezed in beside the main keyboard. The large square keys offer good travel and resistance for an overall typing experience which is accurate and brisk.

The touchpad lacks multitouch scrolling, but fine-grained cursor control and large buttons ensure the touchpad above average.

In light usage tests the Toshiba Satellite L755D delivered a respectable 5 hrs 33 mins, roughly equivalent to battery life for Intel i3 notebooks in its price range.

Lackluster performance on heavy desktop tasks should exclude the Toshiba Satellite L755D from the category of business machines, but for all-round performance and moderate gaming ability the Toshiba Satellite L755D represents very good value for money.