Toshiba Satellite L645D: Mobile AMD at 3GHz
by Dustin Sklavos on March 9, 2011 3:20 AM ESTStill Not Enough to Game
At this point you should be expecting these results: the HD 4200/4250 just isn't powerful enough to run modern games at 768p. That said, reviewing the L645D gives us an opportunity to at least gauge how much CPU power can affect gaming performance with the HD 4200/4250 as well as pad out our results for two recent bench inductees: Mafia II and Metro 2033.
At 768p the GPU is too heavily taxed for any improvement in CPU performance to pick up slack; the only game that shows any improvement is the notoriously CPU-limited StarCraft II; everything else performs basically on par. Notice how NVIDIA's dismal GeForce 310M, the subject of endless ire among AnandTech staff, still offers a substantial improvement. I've said it before and I'll say it again (many times no doubt): Llano can't get here soon enough.
These are all recent titles, of course, and if you go back several years you can certainly find older games that will run fine on HD 4250. Jarred is working on a roundup of sorts to pit AMD's Brazos, HD 4225, and HD 4250 against Intel's GMA 4500MHD, HD Graphics, and HD Graphics 3000 with a suite of older/less demanding games. Generally speaking, you'll need low to medium detail with titles from around 2006, or if you want high details you'll need to go back to circa 2003. Stay tuned for that article....
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kmmatney - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Agreed. I have 4-year old 1930 x 1200 Dell, and had a look at a possible replacement. I couldn't find anything at Dell with more than 1080 pixels, and even that was hard to find and cost a lot. I have to give Apple credit for still using 1920 x 1200 resolution in their laptops. 1366 x 766 is total crap - especially with the extra vertical bloat in Windows 7.KiwiTT - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
and on the 768 height, once you add the toolbars etc. You may only have half the screen left.Don't manufacturers do real user usability testing? If they did, they'd soon come to light that 768 is abysmally small.
bhima - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Your colorful language throughout the article made it a blast to read. Kudos Dustin!Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Thanks, much appreciated. :)helboy - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
"It seems like manufacturers almost deliberately cripple AMD-based notebooks."Had been my doubt also for the past one year or so!! Almost all the notebooks that carry the "not enough battery life" label after reviews,the battery provided will be of inferior capacity.AND the reviewers mostly ignore this fact when highlighting poor backup.I wonder whether winning the anti-trust case is helping AMD much in the marketing war.
cdeeter - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
+1 Yeah what's the deal with giving AMD systems smaller batteries? They are using the same chassis so use the same battery!silverblue - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
I can just imagine Intel realising they can't use one method to push AMD out of the market and then deciding to use another, albeit more subtle method. :P After all, battery life is king for a lot of people, so you need to prove those claims of long running times...And anyway, on an unrelated note, isn't it about time AMD got a stupid jingle for people to associate their products with? Everyone knows the Intel jingle.
jackylman - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
I picked up my new baby at a liquidation sale for the same price. It has the same CPU/GPU combo, but a 15.6" screen, webcam, gigabit LAN. On the downside, the hard disk is smaller (500GB) and no Blu-ray, but I'd rather have a bigger screen and a webcam.fumigator - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Despite all the criticism, I like this laptop. Thanks for the great review.Only thing I would like to say is that I miss somehow the lack of nvidia chipsets on laptops.
I've owned an MSI VR630 that came with a geforce 9100 IGP and Turion X2 RM70 and I miss it all day. It was simply superb.
Later on the ATI 3200s and 4200s IGP started to pop up like maries and somewhat the 9100 started to look old. But even those MSI that came with Nforce 8200 and intel Core solutions were far better than any HD4500 based notebook. Lets say, MSI CR400, CR500, CR600 all came with Nforce 8200 and Intel something (Celeron dual core / Pentium dual core / Core 2 Duo etc, depending on submodel) Now they are all discontinued and nobody did serious reviews on them.
Moreover, i own an AM2+ motherboard with the Nforce chipset 8200 IGP as well, and I can't complain.
swaaye - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
My mom wanted a notebook with a Bluray drive because she travels a lot for work and lives in a hotel for days at a time. So it's her mobile media center. I found a $600 Sony with a 2.0 GHz Core 2, 4GB and GMA 4500 something like 18 months ago.This Toshiba seems like the latest edition of that kind of thing. For what these are used for the performance might not even be tangibly different.