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Written by Sasa Pantelic
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Wednesday, 13 June 2007 |
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Page 4 of 9
Although many associate Toshiba's name with business notebook models, it seems that they have unexpectedly good gamer-oriented models on the market. Toshiba Satellite P100-324 is undoubtedly the definitive star of this test.
| | Toshiba A100 | Toshiba P100 | | Processor | Intel C2D T7400 @ 2,16 GHz | Intel C2D T7400 @ 2,16 GHz | | Chipset | Intel i945PM | Intel i945PM | | Memory | 1 GB DDR2 | 2 GB DDR2 | | HDD (GB) | 120 | 200 | | Storage | DVD +/- RW DL | DVD +/- RW DL | | Graphics | nVidia GeForce Go 7600 | nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS | | Display | 15,4 (1280x800) | 17” (1680x1050) | | OS | Windows XP Home | Windows XP MCE | | Price (€) | 1550 | 2060 |
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It's not just about the fantastic performance (which blew the competition away), but also the production quality.
All praise goes to the great 17” wide high-resolution monitor with its superb display quality. Alongside quality, what also separates this model from the masses is its colour – not a typical black/silver combination, but a colour which is honestly hard to describe with words, but which still isn't ugly and is a very welcome and refreshing change.
The biggest pro of this notebook is the smashing nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS graphics card. As you can see in the charts, the results which are of greatest interest to gamers show an absolute domination of the Satellite P100. A great deal of it goes to the Core2Duo CPU clocked at 2.16 GHz and a whopping 2GB of RAM. Speakers are signed by Harman Kardon, a name that speaks for itself.
We expected their power to be slightly greater maybe, but their quality is uncompromising, something that we can partly attribute to the SRS TruSurround technology as well. The touch pad is great, and also worth mentioning would be a large capacity HDD. A variety of connectors make sure that you don't lack in anything. All in all, a fantastic computer for all those who can afford it.
Toshiba Satellite A100-912 cannot pride itself on top-notch performance and P100's quality, but nevertheless has things to offer. Just like the LG S1, it has a fingerprint reader. Not just because of that, this couple has a lot of similarities. Even at first glance, it is easy to deduce that they belong to the same category, mostly due to the (very good) production quality. As far as performance is concerned, the A100 is undoubtedly better, but LG has a better display. A100's colours are more vivid, but the viewable angles are not as good as we hoped for them to be. The keyboard is, on the other hand, more than satisfactory. Leaving out the numerical part enabled the other keys to get their full size. Located on the front is also a potentiometer for regulating the sound volume, which is always useful.
If you look at the specifications in the charts, and then the test results, you will notice that the Satellite A100 has weaker results in gaming tests compared to similarly configured MSI notebooks. The secret is in the unexpectedly low graphics memory clocks. Whereas MSI has the graphics memory clocked at 1000 MHz, GeForce Go 7600's memory on the Satellite A100 is clocked at only 700 MHz! The battery test on this notebook was not performed. That fact has nothing to do with the battery or the rest of the configuration, which was flawless in all other tests. Simply, based on our previous experience, we estimated that the battery autonomy results would be similar to those of the other tested notebooks.
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