Toshiba Satellite P855-307 review

Intel’s latest processor range, previously known as Ivy Bridge, has been a long time coming. Delays and embargoes meant we were waiting for the first chips to arrive for months, but now that we’ve finally got our hands on an Ivy Bridge laptop, we can finally see how the mobile variants compare to their desktop counterparts. Toshiba’s Satellite P855-307 is the first Ivy Bridge laptop we’ve seen, and from first impressions the CPU upgrade has made a huge difference to performance.

The laptop’s quad-core i7-3610QM runs at 2.3GHz, but can Turbo Boost to a maximum of 3.3GHz. It also has hyper-threading, effectively doubling the core count to eight within Windows. This, combined with a massive 8GB of RAM, helped the Satellite P855 achieve a phenomenal 94 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. This is essentially on par with last year’s desktop PCs, meaning you’ll have absolutely no trouble running any application.

Ivy Bridge processors have Intel’s integrated HD 4000 graphics, which are a welcome step up from the HD 3000 GPU found in Sandy Bridge chips, but Toshiba has still opted to add dedicated graphics to the Satellite P855. The GeForce GT 630M is at the lower end of Nvidia’s newest mobile graphics range, but it’s still perfectly capable of playing high definition video, as well as games thanks to 2GB of dedicated video memory. Our Dirt3 test produced a silky smooth 43fps, even with antialiasing enabled, so you should have no trouble playing the most up-to-date titles.

Naturally, there’s a downside to all this power – even with Nvidia’s Optimus technology disabling the dedicated graphics card when on battery power, the Satellite P855 could only manage a little over four and a half hours away from the mains. This is barely any different to laptops equipped with the equivalent Sandy Bridge processor, so you’ll still need to keep the power brick to hand when working on the move.

As Toshiba is predominantly aiming the Satellite P855 at multimedia users, it’s unsurprising to find a Blu-ray optical drive, but the massive 1TB hard disk is certainly a welcome addition. There’s also a multi-format card reader and four USB3 ports – a first for any laptop we’ve reviewed.

The Satellite P855 is a good-looking laptop. Built from a combination of plastic and metal alloys, it’s much easier on the eye than previous Toshiba machines, especially in the fetching silver of our review sample. It’s delightfully minimal, with very few superfluous media keys or LEDS – just two buttons for power and energy saving, a Chiclet-style keyboard and oversized touchpad.

We still aren’t big fans of Toshiba’s keyboard, which has keys with little travel or tactile feedback. There’s noticeable flex in the keyboard tray, even when you press down with minimal force. A separate numeric keypad is useful for data entry, but the half-height function and arrow keys can be troublesome.

The touchpad is comfortably large enough for you to span the desktop in a single motion, although we would have preferred physical buttons to the all-in-one touchpad. To click, you have to push the whole pad inwards, which can nudge your cursor around the screen. We did appreciate the option to disable it by double-tapping in the corner, however.

Perhaps our main issue with the £1000 Satellite P855 is its mediocre screen. With a fairly average 1,366×768 resolution, the 15.6in panel isn’t as sharp or defined as other laptops we’ve seen, with poor vertical viewing angles and a glossy screen finish that made light reflections a problem. There’s a reasonable amount of screen tilt, and colours do at least look bright and vibrant, but we would have liked to have seen a few more pixels for this price.

Overall, this is a great first outing for Intel’s latest processor, reaching performance milestones that weren’t possible last year. The Satellite P855 has ample performance, in both 2D applications and 3D games, plenty of storage space and great connectivity, although it does fall down in some areas. The keyboard is pretty average and we would have liked a higher resolution screen, but if you can’t wait for the competition to announce their new laptops, this is one of the most powerful around right now.