A poor screen and touchpad prove the undoing of an otherwise attractive laptop
Toshiba has pulled out all the stops for its latest entertainment laptop, the Satellite P855. It has Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor and Nvidia’s new 600 Series GPU onboard, and with both housed in a slick new chassis, this 15.6in laptop is set to deliver a serious performance kick for £1,000.
Visually, Toshiba has made a real effort to give the Satellite P855 a bit of pizzazz. Its silvery-grey chassis is part metal, part plastic, and is covered with a textured weave pattern. Apart from the black of the square, Scrabble tile keys and the occasional accent of black and chrome, every inch of the Toshiba is covered in silver, with the patterned finish stretching right around the metallic lid and wristrest and seeping across the laptop’s plastic base.
It isn’t a laptop that stuns like Apple’s MacBooks or HP’s Envy range, but it balances a smart, unfussy chassis with plenty of sensible practicalities. For one, it isn’t too heavy: at 2.55kg, it’s fine for the occasional trip. Build quality is reassuringly stout: despite a little flex here and there, the chassis and solid lid feel well up to lasting the course.
Connectivity is also ample, with four USB 3 ports, HDMI, D-SUB, Gigabit Ethernet, and an SD card reader. In fact, our only moan is that Toshiba has cut corners by including a bog-standard single-band 802.11n wireless adapter. For a £1,000 laptop, that’s stingy.
What’s more impressive is that Toshiba has squeezed in one of Intel’s quad-core Ivy Bridge processors: the Core i7-3610QM. This is the same processor found in the Alienware M17x R4, and it sports a quad-core, eight thread architecture, clocked at 2.3GHz. Toshiba hasn’t gone to town with fancy extras, with a standard 5,400rpm 1TB hard disk and 8GB of RAM, yet the Satellite P855 tore through our benchmarks to an overall result of 0.96, a mere 4% slower than our reference desktop PC.
Driving the display is a pair of graphics chips: the new Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU for less taxing jobs, and an Nvidia GeForce GT 630M for gaming. The latter isn’t particularly exciting, but it makes all the difference to games, giving a score of 34fps in the Medium quality Crysis test. Drop the resolution to the Toshiba’s native 1,366 x 768 resolution, and the Nvidia chipset is capable of delivering 25fps at High quality.
Such immense power comes at the expense of stamina. With a modest 4,200mAh battery clipped to its rear, the Satellite P855 struggled to impress in our battery tests. Under light use the Toshiba managed 5hrs 33mins. With the quad-core CPU at full tilt, this figure dwindled to 48 minutes.
Even at maximum brightness, though, the display is terribly disappointing. The backlight is perfectly capable, giving a brightness of 298cd/m2, but the colour accuracy and overall image quality is poor. Measuring the Toshiba’s panel with our X-Rite colorimeter revealed a heinously low contrast ratio of 165:1, and a gamma reading of 1.5.
It’s a huge stumbling block, and we also found fault with the Toshiba’s touchpad and its irritating integrated buttons. Leaving a thumb poised on the left- or right-hand button area occasionally interrupts the cursor movement, and clicking the button sometimes bounced the cursor out of position. Fortunately, the keyboard is better.
With such a capable processor, good gaming performance and a Blu-ray reader included as standard, the Satellite P855 appears to be a tantalising prospect. In reality, it’s desperately unbalanced, with the touchpad and poor quality display destroying its appeal. The top of the range model, which adds a Full HD glasses free 3D display and a faster Nvidia GPU for £200 more, looks promising, but this mid range model doesn’t cut it.
Basic Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Part Code | PSPKBE-042008EN |
| Review Date | 22 May 2012 |
| Rating |  |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-3610QM |
| Processor clock speed | 2.3GHz |
| Memory | 8MB |
| Memory slots | 2 |
| Memory slots free | 0 |
| Maximum memory | 16GB |
| Size | 28x385x253mm |
| Weight | 2.7kg |
| Sound | Realtek HD Audio |
| Pointing device | touchpad |
Display | |
|---|---|
| Viewable size | 15.6 in |
| Native resolution | 1,366x768 |
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia GeForce GT 630M |
| Graphics/video ports | VGA, HDMI |
| Graphics Memory | 2,048MB |
Storage | |
|---|---|
| Total storage capacity | 1,000GB |
| Optical drive type | BD-ROM + DVD+/-RW +/-DL, DVD+/-RW +/-DL |
Ports and Expansion | |
|---|---|
| USB ports | 4 |
| Bluetooth |  |
| Wired network ports | 1x 10/100/1000 |
| Wireless networking support | 802.11b/g/n |
| PC Card slots | none |
| Supported memory cards | SDXC, MMC |
| Other ports | minijack audio output, minijack microphone input, 4x USB3 |
Miscellaneous | |
|---|---|
| Carrying case |  |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
| Operating system restore option | restore partition |
| Software included | Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Edition |
| Optional extras | none |
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