Toshiba Satellite P750-115 review

With its black plastic chassis and monotone colour scheme, Toshiba’s Satellite P750-115 doesn’t look particularly exciting. However, beneath the plain exterior lies an incredibly competent multimedia machine, powered by one of Intel’s fastest mobile processors.

The Core i7-2630QM runs at 2GHz, which might seem like a sedate clock speed, but it can jump up to 2.9GHz using Turbo boost – and that’s on all four cores. Combined with 8GB of RAM, it breezed through our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 78, proving it can cope with almost any task. Despite having so much power, Intel’s latest processors are also frugal with power so the P750 lasted a respectable four and a half hours in our light-use battery test.

Although Intel’s dedicated graphics chip has enough power to play Blu-ray films, thankfully Toshiba has also installed an Nvidia GeForce GT 540M with 2GB of dedicated video memory. This managed a smooth 41.7fps in our Dirt 3 benchmark, showing that even modern games will be playable at reasonable detail settings.

It’s unfortunate that Toshiba hasn’t paired the Blu-ray drive with a screen that can do Full HD films justice, as the 1,366×768 screen is only big enough to show all the detail in 720p video. Even so, the backlight was even, colours looked natural and images were very sharp, but the overall image quality is let down by very poor viewing angles. There’s a reasonable amount of screen tilt, but not enough to correct the loss of contrast at anything other than squarely facing the screen.

Audio quality is slightly better than the sub-par screen, but not beyond our expectations for a laptop. The speakers might be Harmon/Kardon branded, but the lack of bass came as no surprise. Volume was reasonable and the mid-range was clear, if slightly tinny.