Toshiba Satellite M645: The Steady March of Progress
by Dustin Sklavos on April 29, 2011 12:50 AM ESTGaming Performance Should Be Better
As a refresher, the NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M with 1GB of DDR3 beating at the heart of the Toshiba M645 is specced to run at 600/1200MHz on the core/shaders, but instead Toshiba runs 21% slower at just 475MHz on the core and 950MHz on the shaders. This not only puts it well below spec, it puts it below even the GeForce GT 420M. It may seem like I'm harping on this way too much, but it oftentimes means the difference between playability and stuttering. Take a look at our "low" preset scores.
In most situations the M645 doesn't fare too bad, but at these settings there is a tendency towards being CPU-limited that allows the i5-2410M in the M645 to stretch its legs. Still, the clocks claim their first victim in Mafia II, dipping that game below the 30fps mark. We also see the L501x with a GT 420M claiming leads in Left 4 Dead 2, Mafia II, Metro 2033, and STALKER. When we bump settings up to our "medium" preset, watch the tumble the underclocked GT 525M takes.
Once we get to Medium detail, the underclocked GT 525M loses ground in a hurry. Situations in more heavily GPU-limited games only get worse; any game where the M645 can't leverage its faster processor in takes a serious hit. The older L501x now leads in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, plus the other four games where it had a lead at Low settings.
Another point of reference is the GT 540M in the L502x; it should be at best about 12% faster than the GT 525M (except when the quad-core CPU in the Dell can help out, e.g. BFBC2), but the leads range from around 20% (DiRT 2 and StarCraft II) up to 55% (Metro 2033), and a maximum lead of 67% in BFBC2. The M645 still manages playable framerates in most of our test suite at medium settings, but the green bar should have been a lot closer to the black bar in the above charts.
Again we note that Left 4 Dead 2 at our medium preset requires you to set "Paged Memory Pool Available" to "Low" on Optimus systems—this appears to be a problem with the Intel HD 3000 drivers, as we had the same issue on the SNB IGP notebooks. It appears to degrade performance about 10-20%, though we can't test with the setting on "High". At over 50FPS, it's not a major concern, but the game does seem to have more HDD thrashing with this setting at Low.
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yyrkoon - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 - link
Sadly, as you found out. eSATA from one device/system to the next is very inconsistent.Personally, I was in the market for something eSATA. But after reading through all the woes on user reviews (newegg) about the current state of eSATA hardware. I was "forced" to realize that USB3 is the only real option. It is a shame though, as eSATA has a few pretty nice options to offer. Connecting to a RAID array through a port multiplier would be one.
USB3 is not however a bad option. 5Gbit/s should be more than enough to keep up with any plater based HDD. Worse case scenario I've read that you double your speed when compared to USB2. Some claim 100MB/s when using one HDD( which I personally find dubious ). I would be happy with a consistent 50-60MB/s though.
Anyway, this might not do you any good now, for your current problem. But keep in mind that in the future, Assuming the state of current eSATA hardware stays the same. You could have used that expresscard on your laptop to put in an expresscard ->USB3 card and bought a USB3 enclosure for under $60 USD. Here, I am assuming your system did come with an expresscard slot ( which many Toshibas do ). Also, for all intents and purposes where performance is concerned, expresscard slots are in effect a mini PCIe slot. 1.5Gbit/s throughput potential.
gte343z - Monday, May 2, 2011 - link
Has anyone reviewed the lenovo e420s, It would seem to be a good competitor to the m645 in terms of price / features, although they haven't released the version with hd6630m graphics yet in the U.S.I'm looking for something in the 13/14" <4.5lbs range and am not that impressed. The mac air / mbp 13 have nice screens but slow processor / no discrete graphics accordingly, not to mention the high price. Still competition is lacking given the subpar screens from other vendors.
Also how usable is the 1366x768 screen size? I'm used to my hp 8530w 15.4" 1920x1200 screen and am concerned this will be a deal breaker.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
NeilBhisma - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
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