Toshiba Satellite L645D: Mobile AMD at 3GHz
by Dustin Sklavos on March 9, 2011 3:20 AM ESTAt Least 720p Makes Sense Here
More and more on 15.6" notebooks, the 720p resolution feels almost idiotically low. The LCD industry must be thankful Windows XP isn't in heavy rotation anymore: between the look of Luna and the gigantic taskbar on a 15.6", 720p screen, every notebook would feel like it was shipped from Fisher Price's laptop division. At least on the L645D's 14" screen, 720p makes more sense. Keep in mind that this notebook retails for $619 when you look at our test results, though. You get what you pay for; asking for DreamColor at that price is dreaming at best—foolhardy at worst.
The L645D's display isn't great but it's not completely awful either, offering decent brightness and color gamut. What is troubling is a trend I'm noticing on more and more of these budget systems: the screen lattice and poor dithering on these cheap 720p TN panels seems to be getting more and more apparent, and it's a problem not easily captured in photos. It was most egregious on Gateway's ID49C (still our champion worst notebook screen), but has been present on both this notebook and the Sony EE34.
Viewing angles aren't great either, with massive washout at low angles and some trouble finding the "sweet spot." That problem has historically been extremely common in 14" notebooks, though, to the point where you might as well ask for a GeForce GTX 485M for how often you find a large sweet spot in this form factor.
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Taft12 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Starcraft II has higher requirements than the rest of this list, but it is the most popular PC game on the market by a mile. Please include it (low settings of course)JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
This is the list of *old* games I'm testing. Anything on the current list will also be tested. You can already see those results in the HP dm1z review:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4187/hp-dm1z-taking-...
Dustin Sklavos - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
We already have low settings SC2 numbers for every low-powered notebook we test, SC2 is in our suite.LeftSide - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
COD4 or COD5. My Dell studio 14 with nvidia 9400m can play cod4 at 1366x768 with low settings. World at War is too much too handle.JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Hmmm... I've got so many FPS titles in there already. I suppose I can try COD4, which is a slightly newer take on Quake 4 engine IIRC.UNHchabo - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I have two suggestions:1) Killing Floor or Red Orchestra. As far as I know, you don't have any UT2.5 games on your list, and some lower-end graphics chips can still struggle on it.
2) At least one racing game: maybe Need For Speed: Undercover, or Trackmania Nations.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I figure if Unreal Tournament 3 can run okay, anything on the UT2.5 engine should be okay as well.The racing genre is pretty unrepresented, true. I suppose one of the NFS games will do; I'm trying to remember what the last one I purchase is. NFS: Carbon I think. I remember playing Underground 1 or 2 and then Carbon, and felt like the series had lost me. What about NFS: World? Is that too demanding, or have they made it work well with slower systems?
Also, I forgot that League of Legends is supposed to be in the above list as well. I suck at it, but I can at least play against the computer. :-)
cdeeter - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
How about one of the older Need for Speed games like Most Wanted or Underground? That way you would have a racing game in the mix.HHCosmin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
this is so stupid what this companies do. i think they deserve a little suing. they give you crap autonomy because they are too lazy to care about integration. for some time i thought that amd cpus were not that great as power usage goes. well... not anymore. sony proved that you can get good runtime with even a small battery with an amd platform. toshiba, asus, dell etc care crap about optimizing the platform (and think this is the case for intel to some degree). these machines are for mobile use so runtime is more important than raw power! do you hear me dear integrators?! they also make life harder for users by feeding crapware and opting out of programs that would assure good quality for drivers and would not cost them anything.... the platform is as good as the software is so use you brainz so good, uptodate drivers we need. do not really see much use for optical drives especially in small laptops and mostly in general. why is gbit lan missing? why all this obsession for gloss? i have some hard time what kind of person makes such decisions? do they know anything about IT in general? if they do it really does not show. i believe these companies really deserve some protests. my protest is simple... right now i believe has some dumb people around that make dumb selections of hardware.HHCosmin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
fully agree with Dustin. why have a expensive blueray drive in a budget machine? why not bigger battery? why not gbit lan? why not bluetooth? there are some decisions that make this look like some people at toshiba are very confused. this laptop could have been a lot better and cheaper but some toshiba dorks screw around. this really pisses me off.