Toshiba A505D-S6987: A Look at Turion II Ultra M600 Performance

Toshiba A505D-S6987 Gaming

We ran all of our gaming tests at 800x600—our traditional resolution for low-power GPUs—and at the native resolution of the notebook, 1366x768. You can't expect the world from the Mobility Radeon HD 4200, but at least you can game on it. That's more than you can say for Intel's old 4-series IGP, and even the current HD Graphics have teething issues in the drivers that AMD more or less conquered a long time ago. Okay, lots of graphs coming….

800x600 gaming is doable on most titles, though it won't impress relative to other laptops with discrete graphics. The A505D takes the lead over the M300-based 5542 and the i3-330M, with the exception of the Mass Effect 2 result where the outdated drivers penalize it. And that's something you may encounter on more than one occasion going forward, unless Toshiba decides to opt back in to AMD's mobile driver program. They really should, and while it's not critical for something like the A505D, other laptops with discrete graphics are a different story.

We'll save you the trouble: only Empire: Total War and STALKER are really playable at native resolution, just like the Acer 5542. The faster M600 CPU doesn't make more than a small difference in gaming performance. Most of the other games outside of Mass Effect 2 ran fine at the lowest settings and 800x600, but we can't really recommend performance-hungry monsters like Far Cry 2 or Crysis: Warhead. As a side note, the recently released time-destroyer Magic: the Gathering—Duels of the Planeswalkers runs decently enough on the HD 4200. If you're a Magic nerd, and this author can neither confirm nor deny his own status, the HD 4200 is going to suit you just fine.

But speaking of beasts like Crysis: Warhead, game play was... troubled. Troubled in the sense that when we loaded up the game, the ground just plain didn't render. It wasn't there. That makes our results for Crysis: Warhead questionable. If you can get the ground to render instead of having Psycho floating in space, odds are performance just isn't going to cut it for the game. Of course that would most likely mean updating the drivers, and since Toshiba elected not to be a part of AMD's mobile driver program you would have to hack the drivers using Mobility Modder. Mercy of mercies, though, the Radeon HD 4200 at least ensures the unit's fan never has to spin up aggravatingly loudly, and is liable to allow at least some gaming on the battery without severely draining power.