Toshiba Satellite P105-S921

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

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. The RAM 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.