Toshiba T235D: AMD's 2010 Ultrathin "Nile" Platform
by Jarred Walton on August 23, 2010 11:00 PM ESTToshiba T235D: the Best AMD Laptop We've Tested
After going through all the benchmarks, features, etc. we come to the final tally, and for once we have an AMD laptop that we can recommend without hesitation. You're not going to have a great gaming experience on the T235D, but for everything else it works well and the price is right. It's easy to find laptops that are significantly faster, but such laptops cost more and generally fall short in the mobility areas of battery life and size. If you want a good thin and light laptop, Toshiba's T235D deserves a close look, and it delivers a good multimedia experience as well.
Not everyone will like the styling, true, but I can say that the look has grown on me during the time I've spent with the laptop. I'd still prefer a matte finish on all the silver plastic, but the glossy silver is a nice break from all the glossy black I've grown accustomed to seeing. The T235D is a thin and light laptop in every sense of the term, checking in at under 1" thick and weighing under four pounds. With battery life of 5-6.5 hours, very few users are going to need to carry their power adapter around for a single day's use. Also of interest is the 2-prong plug on the power brick, so you don't need to find an outlet with a grounding pin—fitting for a 45W adapter.
When it comes to competition, there are lots of options in the $600 range, but few deliver the same set of features and performance as the T235D. We did a quick search on Newegg, limiting pricing to $500 to $700, with sizes between 11.6" and 14.1" and a weight of less than 4.9 pounds. Perhaps the most interesting alternative is the Acer Aspire AS1551-5448, which sports similar specs to the T235D but with an 11.6" chassis. We hope to get one of those for review in the near future, although it looks like the keyboard carries over from the other 11.6" Acer laptops we've looked at in the past—in other words, not our favorite keyboard. HP's Pavilion DM3 is another alternative that uses the Nile platform. Naturally, there's plenty of competition from older CULV designs, so if you prefer battery life over multimedia capabilities (an area where the GMA 4500MHD is a definite liability) those laptops are still an option. Finally, if you like the look of the T235D but still want an Intel option, the T235-S1350 uses an Intel Pentium U5400 (a 1.2GHz 32nm Arrandale without Hyper-Threading support) for about the same price.
Widening our search a bit, we can find Acer's TimelineX 1830T with a price tag of $600, using the i3-330UM and equipped with 3GB RAM, or it's closer to $700 with an i5-430UM and 4GB RAM. You can also find the T235D-S1340 with 3GB RAM for $520. Even at $600, the T235D-S1345 is a competitive offering, but if you jump on the Office Depot $500 sale price (good until 8/28/2010, though you can likely find a similar sale down the road), this is an awesome bargain.
If you're willing to give up a bit of CPU performance relative to Intel's Arrandale ULV i3/i5 offerings, and a bit of battery life as well, AMD's Nile platform delivers a superior graphics solution and a good feature set at a great price. After playing with the T235D, there's no way I'd want to go back to the current Atom N450 netbooks; I'll give up four hours of battery life for a much better performance and multimedia experience in a hearbeat. We'll have to see what N550 brings to the table, but unless and until Intel gets a better IGP in Atom it's going to need some help. In the meantime, while we wait to see what AMD's Bobcat and Intel's Sandy Bridge bring to the party (more on that soon!), the Nile platform is a nice blend of performance and features and should please many ultraportable enthusiasts.
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mczak - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - link
per-clock performance of HD3200 and HD4200 is pretty much the same. The difference here (aside possibly from clock - not sure what clock the hd3200 used in the other notebooks were running at) is the platform. Most notably the HT speed, which was limited to HT-800 for Congo platform instead of HT1600 (for the K625). This basically halves the memory bandwidth available to the GPU and as you can guess this has a pretty disastrous effect on performance. Other differences are possible as well (e.g. different sideport memory), I believe some congo designs also ran their (ddr2) memory at a very low clock which could further lower scores though unless it was single channel it shouldn't make much of a difference since the HT-800 limits available gpu memory bandwidth still more. Well it could be a combination of slow memory and slow HT but whatever the case it's a bandwidth problem not architectural differences which make the HD3200 and HD4200 perform differently (unless you had an app which would use DX10.1 features).Hyperion1400 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
"Of course, battery capacities are a bit tricky—I know I have some 2500mAh 1.2V AA Energizer rechargeable batteries that suck compared to some equivalently rated 2500mAh Eneloop rechargeables"IxV gets you rated output(max power output assuming 0 ohm resistance). The only way to know the capacity of a battery is to rely on the manufacturer's word or to test the battery yourself.
Computer Bottleneck - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I think it is really interesting that older 45nm Intel's like SU7300 score better in battery tests than 32nm Arrandale i7-640um (found in Alienware M11 R2).Does this have anything to do with differences in peripherals (hard-drive, LCD, etc)? I noticed the Alienware has a 7200 rpm drive whereas the Acer Timeline 1810 has a 520 rpm drive. Or is the battery life difference related more to other factors? (I was expecting 32nm to definitely pull away from 45nm all things being equal).
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I don't think most of the components make much of a difference. M11x isn't the most power-friendly implementation of Arrandale ULV, though, so we'll see how the ASUS UL80Jt stacks up next week. In general, though, the IGP in Arrandale is far more potent than the old GMA 4500MHD, and perhaps that's part of the difference.Intel specs the Arrandale ULV chips at 18W, which includes graphics. The CULV stuff was 10W, but I don't have a clear number on the chipset+IGP. It would appear that the chipset tops out at around 3W-5W for the IGP based on my testing here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2932/intel-core-2-cu...
Idle power draw on CULV may also be better, for whatever reason. Maybe 32nm has higher leakage, or it's just the number of transistors. I keep thinking the next 32nm parts from Intel will probably show much better power numbers, as this is really their first 32nm part. We'll see later this year with Sandy Bridge I guess.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
All the testing with any Arrandale (ULV or not) has shown battery life not really improved from the later C2D processors, correct? Maybe there will be an improved stepping at some point.Computer Bottleneck - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - link
Good point about Arrandale ULV possibly having higher leakage at idle. Maybe this is because i7-640um needs to be built on higher power wafers in order to hit the 2+ Ghz turbo speeds?Kishkumen - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
As usual, the display just kills it all for me. A fine review, I just wish these laptop manufactures would throw us a freakin bone when it comes to some better displays. They're not doing themselves any favors with my pocket book anyway.Taft12 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
If you're referring to 1366x768, I fully agree!!Dell doesn't allow you to customize the screen nearly as much as they used to. Come on already, I am not paying over $600 for a laptop with that screen resolution!
The Crying Man - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Nice review. Is there any in the works with the N930 paired with an HD 5650? I have the dv6, but I'm just curious where it falls compared to all the other review laptops.JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I've got a P920 with 5650 review coming, but I do wish the CPU were faster. It's the Toshiba A665D... except the A665D is now discontinued and so my replacement system is the A660D. It's the same notebook but with a 7200RPM HDD AFAICT. Should have that up in the next week or so.