Toshiba Satellite L50D-C-13G review

Performance and Benchmarks

The L50 is powered by AMD’s Carrizo-based A10-8700P APU. This combines a quad-core processor running at 1.8GHz with Radeon R6 graphics. There’s a respectable 8GB of memory and a 1TB hard disk. The laptop still comes with Windows 8.1 installed, but as usual there’s a free upgrade to Windows 10 available.

Performance in our benchmarks was rather lacklustre, managing just 21 overall in our desktop performance benchmark, with its multitasking score of 7, in particular, pulling the average down considerably. Its scores of 41 and 30 in image and video editing were at least reasonable for the cost of the laptop.

The integrated graphics were actually very respectable, and on par with a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 920M GPU. We managed a reasonable 27.7fps in Dirt Showdown at 1,280×720 resolution, which, considering the display’s low resolution, didn’t look that bad. Modern titles remain out of reach, but if you keep your expectations in check you play more basic titles at lower graphics settings. Certainly Minecraft ran without any hitches.

The main standout achievement was the L50’s battery life. It managed a very impressive 5 hours 41 minutes in our light-use battery test. Just shy of what you can consider ‘all day battery’, but very good nevertheless.

Ports and connections

There are two USB3 ports and a single slower USB available. The HDMI port can output at up to 3,840×2,160 resolutions. Network connectivity comes from an Ethernet or 802.11n Wi-Fi. There’s also Bluetooth 4.0. On top of this, there’s an optical drive and an SD card reader included. The speakers are tuned by Skullcandy and actually don’t sound too bad, if unsurprisingly a little thin.

Conclusion

The Satellite L50D-C-13G is very much a budget laptop, where you largely get what you pay for. Even at this price the display was surprisingly bad, however. Performance wasn’t much better, making it a difficult to recommend. Ideally, if you can afford to stretch to a higher budget you’re much better off with the Acer Aspire V3-574G.