Toshiba Satellite L645D: Mobile AMD at 3GHz
by Dustin Sklavos on March 9, 2011 3:20 AM ESTAMD's Fastest Mobile Dual-Core
Okay, so that's not technically accurate: as of this writing there's a 45-watt Phenom II X620 BE running at 3.1GHz, but I challenge our readership to find a notebook employing that chip. That leaves us with the L645D enjoying the mobile equivalent of an Athlon II X2 250, a $60 desktop chip that still offers enough horsepower to do general computing fairly comfortably. Remember that AMD is the reigning budget champion on the desktop. So that said, can a 3GHz AMD chip close the gap with Intel's hardware?
The two main take-aways here are that at 3GHz, AMD can at least hang with the i3-370M for the most part, and that AMD's mobile tri-core and quad-core chips were probably ill-advised. The extra headroom afforded by only having two cores allows the N660's 3GHz core clock to meet or beat the P920 with its four 1.6GHz cores and the N830 with its three 2.1GHz cores in even heavily threaded workloads. Ultimately the N660 is going to seem a little slow by comparison, but it's still offering a healthy amount of performance for most tasks and I wouldn't be completely aggravated doing more processor-intensive work (like video editing) on it.
Unfortunately, though the extra 800MHz on the processor gives the L645D a leg up on Sony's EE34, the HD 4200/4250 starts to show its age again. Intel's HD graphics in the Dell Latitude post numbers on par with it in most disciplines (beating it soundly in 3DMark Vantage), but when we get to actual game testing we'll find that to be less the case.
This is where it would be good to point out that Toshiba loses one of the main points of leverage AMD's integrated graphics have over Intel's solutions: driver quality. As Jarred has mentioned in the past (and it does bear repeating), Toshiba has inexplicably opted out of AMD's mobile driver program, leaving you at their mercy. Sony doesn't get off any lighter: they opted out, too. There's really no good reason for this (especially since downloading the actual driver on another machine and then installing it on these notebooks still works), and it actively sabotages one of the strongest aspects of AMD's graphics hardware.
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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.