Toshiba Satellite A660D-ST2G01: AMD's Quad-Core Phenom II P920 Joins the Mobile Party
by Jarred Walton on August 31, 2010 12:45 AM ESTNot Fast Enough for High Quality
Bump up the graphics quality to "High" and suddenly the 5650 chokes. That's not surprising, as you really need the HD 5830 and above (or NVIDIA GTS 350M and above) to pull reasonable frame rates at high details in most games. We've standardized at 1600x900 for our base "High" setting, but we've also included results from the A660D at the native 1366x768 resolution.
At our "High" settings, several of the games we tested drop well below playable frame rates. DiRT 2 is borderline at 30FPS and native resolution. L4D2 and Mass Effect 2 turn in acceptable performance, though competitive L4D2 players will probably want to stick with slightly lower settings to keep minimum frame rates up. For the rest, BFBC2, STALKER, and StarCraft II all become very choppy, whether you run at the native resolution or use an external LCD with a higher resolution.
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bennyg - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
This quad core simply has no logical benefit to it. Who buys a quad core for price and battery life (given Intel's penchant for monopolistic behaviour, if this was a market segment worth worrying about we'd have a dedicated mobile i7 quad die not harvested desktop Lynnfields)Even in benches where it's sposed to benefit from highly multithreaded workloads - e.g. cinebench multi - it's beaten by a i3. Why would AMD even bother releasing something this poor is beyond me.
AMD notebooks like this don't sell because they don't make sense.
The Crying Man - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Wow... $950 for this? Amazon's selling the dv6-3050us with the Phenom II N930 for $890 and even cheaper on Newegg - better processor, driver support from AMD, and the GPU has normal clocks. Toshiba must put a premium for an ExpressCard slot or their cheap looking designs... What kinds of stupid thoughts go through the minds of that company's decision makers?I think it's time AMD started making their own special edition laptops with configurations OEMs aren't willing to put together. Why can't we get a MR HD5870 + Phenom II X920 BE?
Roland00 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
That specific model has even been cheaper before. One week on newegg it was 779, and if you did a 50 MIR it was 729 AR. Another week Frys.com had a similar promotion where it was 799 and if you did a 50 MIR it was 749 AR.The Crying Man - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Yep, bought mine way back in July on Amazon when it was $775.blackshard - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Hello. Just a suggestion: check the battery wear level on this notebook (hwmonitor does it well). I just bought an Toshiba L650-10H with an AMD P520 (2.3 Ghz part) and HD5650. The video chip was clocked to 450 Mhz, as far as I remember. Anyway the 48Wh battery came with a silly 20% wear level, leaving around 39Wh for a brand new laptop. I don't know if it is a faulty battery or a "feature" coming straight from the factory, but it is enough for me to drop away toshiba notebooks.Also the display was the worst thing I've ever seen: the Windows 7 loading logo is exposing a really huge dithering problem with colors fading to black.
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
HWMonitor reports the wear level as 2%, which probably came from me going through 10-12 recharge cycles during testing. Now, I wish I could say as much for another laptop I just got, where the wear level is reporting at 30%. :-\larson0699 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I'm on an A665 at work, P920, 4GB, 500GB, 16", $799. We've had this for a while now. But whenever I'm in early or need to get online during break, this is the machine I use. Absolutely brilliant on Toshiba's part. It's a shame we don't also sell Sony...hgd - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
<quote>On the other hand, AMD specs the P920 for 25W compared to 35W on the 720QM,
</quote>
Doesn't 720QM have 45W TDP?
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Correct. Fixed.Cal123 - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Acer has a P520 with 5650 in a 15.6" for only $599, I'd really like to see a review of that. It looks good to me, if Acer put it together well. I don't think Acer screws up the graphics like Toshiba does.Aspire 5551G-4591
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results....