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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annyhaiyan - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
The problems we encountered on the early samples of the A665D have been fixed in the retail A660D—sony vgp-bpl9 battery and presumably the A665D as well—so unless you really want to spend $150 for the upgrade to a 7200RPM drive there's no reason to choose the more expensive model.Cal123 - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
No informed person would buy a HP/Compaq with a Nvidia chipset considering the overheating reputations of those companies.Hrel - Thursday, September 9, 2010 - link
How'd you force the 1600x900 resolution? It used to be easy to do in Catalyst Control Center, under XP, but now I have 7 and the option just doesn't seem to be there; to set your own resolutions I mean. I get the feeling I'm missing something really obvious, someone help.Also, I do not understand your fixation with 16:10 screens. They make black bars, I HATE black bars. 16:9 gets rid of them on most video content unless it's a movie like Star Wars that insists on using an absurd aspect ratio like 2.32:1. Granted most movies today do that, but why have black bars on tv shows and youtube content as well as old movies and modern movies like Sherlock Holmes if you don't have to? The answer is don't. AHHHH, I just HATE black bars on the screen SO MUCH. Really, aspect ratio just needs to get standardized at something widescreen and that's what EVERYTHING should be produced at.
OCD makes life frustrating sometimes.