An excellent comprehensive Windows 8 laptop
with no advertising tricks, only high performance and impressive specification.
The release of Windows 8 might have
inspired a whole generation of laptop – tablet hybrids, but Toshiba’s Satellite
L855-148 demonstrates the traditional laptop style still has so much to offer.
Toshiba
Satellite L855-148
It is large, with the size of 380x242x33mm
and weight of 2.3kg, but even though it may not be the most portable laptop,
the L855-148 is a so powerful computer. Its Intel Core i7-3610QM processor runs
at 2.4GHz, but Intel's Turbo Boost technology can increase the clock speed to
3.6GHz when the temperature allows it to. Combined with 8GB RAM, this laptop is
incredibly fast, and it completed our multi-media tests with an impressive
score of 90. For your reference, the Ivy Bridge Core i5-3570K for desktops
achieved 100 points, so it made the L855-148 one of the fastest laptops we've
ever seen. However, there is one major disadvantage to this power: the laptop
drains a lot of power. In a light use battery test, the L855-148 only lasted 4
hours and 9 minutes after being fully charged, much less than 5 hours that we
would expect from it.
However, the L855-148 does not only have an
excellent application performance, as it also has powerful dedicated graphics
card. The AMD Radeon HD 7670M is not the fastest mobile chipset today, but it's
pretty strong for one laptop at less than $1,024. This chipset gives an average
but impressive speed of 38.2fps in the Dirt Showdown test at High Quality
settings and a resolution of 1,280x720, so the laptop can play modern games at
high detail settings with smoothly playable frame rates.
We also liked the laptop’s input devices.
The keyboard has equally spaced keys and provides quite significant bounce.
They also provide enough tactile feedback, which lets you know when you've
successfully hit the key you want and leads to achieving faster typing speed.
The keypad is an advantage when you have to work with numbers in a spreadsheet.
The
keyboard has equally spaced keys and provides quite significant bounce.
The touchpad lies on the left side, and we
noticed that it did not hinder us when we were typing. We especially liked the
slightly rough surface of the touchpad and its multi-gesture support, as this
makes the use of Windows 8 become a more interesting experience than trying to
navigate its new interface with a mouse or a standard touchpad. Swiping the
touchpad from right to left opens up the Charms bar as it does on a normal
Windows 8 touchscreen, and the gesture support makes the pinch-to-zoom gesture
in applications become very simple without a separate touchscreen.
We do not like the L855-148’s glossy
screen, either. It suffered from the reflection issue of the things above
although it provides a significant tilt to help solve this problem. The shiny
black surface of the keyboard will also leave traces of fingerprints, but
luckily, the rest of the laptop’s aluminum surface seems to be excellent and
doesn’t suffer from similar problems mentioned above. Normal connectivity
options are flanked round the base of the laptop, including HDMI and VGA
outputs for external monitor, one USB 3 port, two USB 2 ports and a SDXC card
reader to copy images from the camera. It also has Gigabit Ethernet, which is
useful for the ultra-fast file transfer over the network.
Including
HDMI and VGA outputs for external monitor, one USB 3 port, two USB 2 ports and
a SDXC card reader to copy images from the camera
The Full HD screen will be such an
interesting embellishment, but unfortunately the L855-148’s screen has an
ordinary resolution of 1,366x768. Its shiny surface may cause problems with the
reflection, but the advantage of such screens is that they often bring more
vivid colors. The L855-148’s screen is bright, and it does not make you
sacrifice anything for the contrast - we saw quite a lot of detail in bright
and dark areas of the tested pictures. The laptop continues to get better, and
this is one striking example.
Toshiba’s L855-148 is an excellent
computer, which shows how you can buy a laptop if you choose the keyboard,
touchpad and traditional screen instead of the touchscreen or a convertible
tablet. It may not have the longest battery life, but the L855-148 proves to be
strong enough to handle anything we threw in, making it one of the best laptops
at this price so far. It won our Best Buy award.
Toshiba’s
L855-148 is an excellent computer
|
Info
§ Price:
$1,000
§ Website:
www.gultronicsdirect.com
§ Ranking:
5/5
Specifications
§ CPU:
Intel Core i7-3610QM 2.4GHz
§ RAM:
8GB
§ Storage:
750GB hard disc
§ Graphics:
AMD Radeon HD 7670M
§ Optical
drive: DVD+/-RW+/-DL
§ Screen:
15.6-inch widescreen LCD (1,366x768)
§ Operating
system: Windows 8
§ Dimension:
32.5x380x242mm, 2.3kg
§ Power
consumption: 1W standby, 15W idle, 60W on
§ Warranty:
one-year RTB
|
