Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 Review (pics, specs)

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Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 Specs

• 17" Widescreen 1440 x 900 TrueBright
• Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz
• 2x 512MB PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM
• Fujitsu 160GB 4200RPM SATA Hard Drive
• Intel A/B/G WiFi Intel Pro/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
• Conexant HD Audio Synaptics Touchpad
• nVidia Go 7900GS Graphics Card
• harmon/kardon Speakers
• LG DVDRAM SuperMulti Drive

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Design

Never settling on a single design like Dell, Toshiba goes for another makeover. Following the round Vaio'esque look along with HP, the P105 goes for sleek, fluid styling. The front is thin and thickens towards the rear for the bulk of the components such has hard drive, CPU, GPU, and respective heatsink/fans. This gives it the illusion that it's thinner than it actually is. The top cover features a flat gunmetal like grey, opposite of the glossy frou frou look of the Qosmio series. I must say this is the best looking laptop I've ever had.

Performance

The processor included is a Core Duo T2400 running at 1.83GHz based on the Yonah core. The Core Duo Centrino has all the fixins of it's predecessor "Sonoma", such as PCI Express, Serial ATA, and dual channel DDR2, but adds dual core into the mix. This gives theoretically double the processing power, in the same package and power requirements. But in real life it translates to about 30-40% boost in multithreaded apps, and amazingly, about the same amount of power used. TheRAM used are a pair of Hynix sticks with Hyundai PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM. This runs at a brute force frequency of 333MHz DDR with latency timings of 5-5-5. This is paired up with a FSB running at QuadDataRate 166MHz (666MHz). The memory bandwidth can provide up to 10.7GBps while the FSB can only provide 5.3GBps of bandwidth to access it. The main advantage of DDR2 for laptops is the 30% less power consumption than DDR1.

This translates to great increases for encoding, video editing, 3D rendering, compression, and multitasking. For those hoping for improvements in general internet, office, and gaming apps will find little. However if you do all three at once, dual core should help streamline the process a great deal. The general trend in multi-cores is growing rapidly as even video game consoles have gone multi-core. We will only be seeing more and more applications being multithread optimized.

The biggest bottleneck for this laptop is the hard drive. While weighing in at a huge 160GB, it is only offered at 4200RPM with peak transfer rates at 35MBps and averaging out at 28MBps. The performance is pretty decent for a drive with these specifications. A faster hard drive will generally help in situations where large amounts of data needs to be accessed.

The DVD Writer featured is an LG DVDRAM drive. As Toshiba is one of the creators of DVDRAM, they like to include it in their notebooks. DVDRAM has not gained much popularity over the years and has mostly stayed in corporate environments. No special packet writing software is needed for DVDRAM on WinXP or Mac OSX so it can essentially be used as a floppy. More and more desktop DVDRW drives are supporting DVDRAM reading, making it a more viable standard with the premature releases of BluRay and HD-DVD. Features write speeds of 8X DVD+/-R, 4X DVD+/-RW, 2.4X DVD+DL, 24X CDR, 16X CDRW, and 3X DVDRAM.

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Audio

The speakers are from harmon/kardon located at the front of the laptop with a dedicated bump on the bottom. Unfortunately Toshiba decided to omit a built in "subwoofer" in the P100 series making it subpar when compared to offerings of Dell or their Qosmio series. You can get about 80% max volume before hearing lots of distortion. They are louder than 15" laptops, but overall a bit disappointing when compared to its predecessors. They still are able to be loud enough to enjoy movies and music in a quiet environment. Below the speakers is a line that glows blue all the time. To my knowledge there is no way to turn this off. While attractive at first glance, most will find it annoying very quickly. Currently I put a strip of electrical tape to cover it up.

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Input

The keyboard is about as full featured as you can get on a laptop. Backspace is nice and large with all the standard keys where they normally are. A full numpad is also included for those who like to use that for Excel or whatever. The arrow keys have been squished into the shift key so those used to big right shift might need to adapt. Being so large hoever, introduces a lot of flex. I found it very hard to type with this keyboard. I found it skipping keys once in a while which is very annoying.

The touchpad is a bit small, but still very usable. It features different shortcuts and quick commands that can be accessed via software. It features a special tap mode where the backlight would turn on and the touchpad functions as a volume adjuster. I found this an easy way to disable it when using a mouse.

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The fingerprint scanner is an interesting addition. For those who hate passwords, it might be the godsend they are looking for. The software takes about 3 seconds to recognize the swipe, so those with fast typing skills may find it faster to just type their password. The software allows up to 16 different fingers to be scanned, so in addition to all ten fingers, you can authorize toes, friends, and family.

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Like current HP/Compaq laptops, a PCMCIA size infrared remote is integrated. The infrared port is next to the volume control knob. The remote features the standard media center functions and has a pretty nice range of about 25 feet.

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I/O Features

Toshiba includes just about every connector you could want including both the ExpressCard slot and classic PCMCIA Type II slot missing from the recent Dell Inspirons. The standard data jacks include 4 USB 2.0, 4 pin Firewire IEEE1394, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0, and an RJ-45 Modem. A/V connections include headphone, microphone, S/PDIF, VGA, S-Video, and Hi-Def DVI-I port. Rounding it out with amulti-card reader with support for SD, Sony Memory Stick/Pro, and xD though no support for CompactFlash or Micro/MiniSD.

Screen

The P105 features an LG Philips TrueBright high gloss 17" widescreen LCD with a 16:10 aspect ratio. The display is very nice beating out the Dell 17" Inspiron 9400 laptop screens in color richness and saturation. There is not shimmering or backlight bleeding many complain about with Dell. Blacks are nice and dark with an overall cool looking picture. The LCD provides a very good high contrast picture on par with HP/Compaq 17" widescreens. The resolution is SXGA+ running at 1440x900. It's a bit low compared to the 1920x1200offered in Dells (UXGA), I was hoping for at least 1680. However, most will find this resolution more than adequate. Another advantage is you are not required to run games at monster resolutions to achieve native resolution. It is still a higher resolution than most budget 19" LCD monitors running at 1280x1024.

Battery, Power, and Cooling

The battery life is very good for a laptop of this caliber. On maximum power saving scheme I'm able to squeeze in 2 hours and 30 minutes of general websurfing from the 6000MaH battery before it shuts off. The GPU powers down its core to 100MHz to save as much power as possible. Power draw maxes out at 90 watts.

The cooling system is bulky and a bit noisy, but does it's job well. At the lowest RPM, it is more noisy than Dell's but keeps the CPU and GPU about 5-10 degrees cooler. The GPU and CPU never passed 70C even with overclocking. One annoying trait is the fan would kick into a higher RPM every minute for a second, giving up a burst of noise. This happens even with minimal system usage. Toshiba seems to be ironing out this issue as newer BIOS' tweak the fan speeds. A word of caution when playing 3D games, the bottom left of the laptop can get quite hot, reaching a blistering 60 degrees C when under load. The left wrist rest can reach a warm 33 degrees C after 15 minutes of normal usage, which can be a bit uncomfortable for some when typing.

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Video

The Video card in here is a real beauty. This is the first laptop with the Geforce 7900GS Go. The 7900GS specs in with 20 pixel shaders and 7 vertex running at 375MHz. Memory is 256MB of GDDR3 on a full 256bit bus at 1GHz. This puts it right into third position under the 7900GTX Go and the 7800GTX Go. Its performance is about on par with a desktop 7800GT. This laptop is faster than any AGP computer system you can make!

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are done with Forceware 91.28

		Avg	AA/AF	Score	Res
Final Fantasy XI V3			0/0	5970	"high"
3DMakr 06			0/0	3421	1024
3DMark 05			0/0	6877	1024
3DMark 03			0/0	13704	1024
FEAR		52	0/0		1440
Ghost Recon (GRAW)		24	0/0		1440
NFS: Most Wanted		41	4/16		1440
Aquamark		75	0/4	75253	1024
Farcry Volcano		130	0/0		1280
Farcry Training		93	0/0		1280
Farcry Training		75	4/16		1280
Quake 4		89	0/0		1440
Quake 4		45	4/8		1440
Doom 3		98	0/0		1440
Doom 3		67	4/8		1440
Battlefiled 2		57	0/0		1440
Lost Coast		46	4/16		1440
HL2		89	0/0		1440
HL2		79	4/16		1440
Splinter Cell 3 HDR		41	0/0		1440
Oblivion		30	0/0		1440
COD2		39	0/0		1440
Black&White 2		32	4/0		1440

The 7900GS can handle the latest FPS games like a champ. The 1440x900 resolution allows you to enable antialiasing and anisotropic filtering to all your favorites. In many games it is twice as fast as a 6800Ultra/7800 Go GPUs.

Toshiba finally gives us a true gaming laptop. After having huge 17" multimedia monsters like the Qosmio, they now offer one of the top gaming performance to boot. Perfect for Lan parties, or just showing off to your friends how much faster your laptop is to their PCs!

Pros

• Powerful!
• Beautiful evenly lit and crispscreen
• Built in IR remote
• Built in fingerprint scanner
• USB ports on every side
• Multiple volume controls Integrated numpad

Cons

• No subwoofer
• Slow 4200RPM hard drive
• Low battery life
• Bottom gets very hot

Toshiba P105 vs Dell E1705

Back view of Toshiba P105 on top of Dell Inspiron e1705

Front view of Toshiba P105 on top of Dell Inspiron e1705

 

Great review and comparison right to the important points .

Better style & screen VS. price , audio , heat & fan noise .

The blue light bars are so Fast and Furious , they really should let turn them off .

 

hey, nice review! very detailed, hey, btw i don't think that the QOSMIO has a subwoofer, it just have a large bass reflex H/K speaker with a "bass-enhancing" port on the bottom of the speaker. so, putting a subwoofer is not relevant.

 

Nice review, I assume most of this basically applies to the P105-S9321 too (which I think is identical other than a 2.0GHz Core Duo and a 200GB HD)?

It seems like stores are having trouble keeping these in stock though. The CompUSA's around me are all out of stock, as are the Best Buys.

I wonder if the current Core Duo model is also going to disappear soon, to be replaced by the Core 2 Duo? I mean, it seems like the P105-S921 was only out for a short period of time before it was replaced.

 

Good review! I had considered buying this laptop, before finally deciding to get my HP dv8000t.

What kind of software came with the laptop? Was there a lot of bloatware?

 

Nice review! Looks very, very nice.

A minor correction, the Dell E1705 also offers the Geforce 7900GS

 

Great review man, NBR doesn't have much Toshiba reviews

I like the Toshiba's style better than the Dell. The Silver and white "bumper" in Dell makes it look hideous, IMO.

 

Looks very nice! Great review!

Now what I find interesting is a 160GB Fujitsu drive? Why not a Toshiba?

 

agreed. Anything is better than that

 

Excellent review, love the pics!

 

I'm planning to go to law scool next year, and Toshiba, along with Dell and of course IBM/Lenovo thinkpad, seems to be the laptops of choice.

 

I agree the toshiba probably looks better, but since the dell cost me over $700 less, i've convinced myself its okay to have something that others might say looks hideous, since the computer usually just sits on a desk somewhere...and i've yet to have folks laught at me or get up in horror while sitting in starbucks...

 

How were the partitions? Did your notebook come with an install disk for Windows?

 

HexiumVII,

nice review... good thing to know that toshiba decided to join the gaming laptop crowd... seems like a very capable laptop...

there's only one thing about your review, the quake 4 and doom 3 avg frame rate doesn't seem right. As far as i know, both games capped the max framerate at 60, the only time u see above 60 framerate is during static loading screen and those shouldn't be counted. this is the property of the doom3 engine i believe, please ignore this part if i am totally wrong...

also, can you give some examples of the 7900gs doing 2x the performance of 6800ultra or 7800 go? Just curious to see which games can get better performance on the 7900gs...

thank you for the great review,

sg

 

Great review! This computer looks extremly beautiful with a lot of power inside. Enjoy it!!!!!

 

Hey guys, i've decided to rip apart my P105 to see whats inside, see what i can upgrade ect. Overall the built quality is not as high as the Dell 1705s. Also video graphics and LCD panel are proprietary and won't work with the Dells if anyone wanted to know. The entire motherboard and every connector (about 7 of them)must be ripped out in order to access the CPU and GPU.