Toshiba Satellite L755D review

Apart from the glitz of the ruby red finish, the Satellite L755D looks like your archetypal budget laptop. Look more closely, however, and a sticker on the Toshiba’s wristrest reveals a genuine novelty: it’s the first retail laptop we’ve seen using AMD’s Llano architecture.

It’s heartening to see one of AMD’s newest quad-core parts appearing on such a keenly priced portable, and there’s certainly nothing obvious lacking, either. Once you’ve finished pawing at the pretty patterns of the crimson finish, you’ll find a generous 6GB of RAM and a 320GB hard disk thrown in for good measure.

On paper, AMD’s A6-3400M CPU is bursting with promise. While its four cores of its CPU operate at rather pedestrian 1.4GHz, AMD’s Turbo Core technology is capable of bumping an individual core up to 2.3GHz, providing a big boost for single-threaded applications. The processor’s equally ready for gaming action, packing in an integrated Radeon HD 6520G GPU alongside the four CPU cores.

Disappointingly, in our application benchmarks the A6-3400M struggled against even Intel’s entry-level CPUs. Despite its copious system memory, the Satellite L755D racked up a mere 0.46 in our benchmarks. That’s fine for lightweight desktop applications, but a typical Intel Core i3 laptop scores around 0.53 in our Real World Benchmark suite.

Switch to gaming, however, and AMD’s graphical might trounces Intel’s integrated GPUs. Our Low quality Crysis benchmark proved no challenge at all, the lush jungle environments sliding past at a smooth average frame rate of 50fps. Task one of Intel’s Core i3 processors with the same test and you’d be lucky to see an average of 30fps. More demanding tests saw the performance delta yawn wider: with Crysis running at Medium quality and 1,600 x 900 resolution, the Toshiba managed an average of 25fps, against the Intel chip’s 12fps.