Toshiba Satellite P50t-10U review

The Toshiba Satellite P50t-10U is an attractive laptop with a quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor that can Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom, and a huge 16GB of memory. The Core i7-4700MQ is a powerful processor that can handle even the most demanding application. However, we were a little disappointed that the P50t-10U scored just 78 overall in our multimedia benchmarks.

78 overall is still a good score for a mobile processor, but we’ve seen this model perform much better in laptops such as the award-winning MSI GE60 and Scan 3XS Graphite LG155 laptops, both of which had scores above 90 overall.

More surprising was the P50t-10U’s outstanding battery life. Many very powerful laptops rarely last beyond four hours on their battery, but the P50t-10U lasted an impressive 6 hours and 48 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. This is one of the best battery lives we’ve seen from a quad-core laptop, but more intensive tasks than our test will drain the battery much faster.

The P50t-10U is also capable gaming laptop thanks to its dedicated 2GB Nvidia GeForce 740M graphics processor. The P50t-10U produced a respectable average frame rate of 43.9fps in our Dirt Showdown test at a 1,280×720 resolution with High quality graphics.

In our Dirt Showdown benchmark test the P50t-10U produced a comfortably smooth frame rate of 59.5fps in Dirt Showdown at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with Low quality graphics and anti-aliasing disabled. The P50t-10U isn’t designed to be a gaming laptop, but these results show that you can certainly enjoy some fairly recent 3D games as long as you’re willing to compromise on quality settings.

The P50t-10U’s 15.6in touchscreen made a good first impression. The display was a little dimmer than we’d like it to be, but the P50t-10U’s 10-point touchscreen was quick and responsive, and we could accurately open and close internet tabs.

Unfortunately, the screen’s overall image quality left a lot to be desired, as our colour calibrator showed the screen was displaying 72.8 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is around average compared to other laptop screens we’ve tested, but we’d have expected to see deeper, richer colours on a laptop at this price. We also recorded a black level reading of 0.55cd/m2, which is reasonably deep but still a little grey overall compared to its black glossy bezel.

The screen’s biggest problem was its poor viewing angles. At a normal working angle, the lower part of the screen was much lighter than the top, and this had a huge impact on colour uniformity across the screen. We had to tilt it back beyond our normal working angle to improve the image quality, but even this wasn’t perfect. It also made it virtually impossible to see a good level of detail in our high contrast test photos. We measured a low contrast ratio of 358:1 certainly didn’t help matters, but we still struggled to pick out fine shadow detail, even when we found a good viewing angle.