After playing games for an hour I was struck by the lack of heat. So I ran Gear of War for 10 hours, still no heat issues. Toshiba has put some thought into the X305’s cooling system. There are two fans that suck cool air in from beneath the notebook blowing it over the CPU, GPU and venting out the rear. Temps on the exhaust can reach 65oC but the palm rests remain nice and cool. In other words the heat is kept away from where you would notice it. Fan noise is not noticeable unless you flip the X305 and listen to them.

Keeping it in the family, this X305 uses Toshiba’s MK3252 GSX 320 GB hard drive. It has a spindle speed of 5400 rpm, 8 MB buffer and SATA-II 3.0Gb/s interface. Temperatures during normal use hovered around 40oC. HD Tune performance was in-line with the ubiquitous Western Digital drives. Here is a screenshot:

Toshiba designed the X305 with a front loading tray-style DVD drive. Optical recording is robust and the LG GSA-T50N covers all but the most exotic formats (CD-R 24x, CD-RW 4x, DVD-R 8x, DVD-R DL 4x, DVD-RW 4x, DVD+R 8x, DVD+R DL 4x DVD+RW 4x, DVD-RAM 5x). An 8x dual-layer multi-DVD burner is exactly what you would expect at this price point although Blu-Ray is starting to pop-up.

Toshiba has made some large strides from last year’s X205. The X305 looks much better – they have committed to the concept of the gaming notebook and have produced something bold. Chances are people will either love or hate the design but Toshiba has plenty of staid conservative notebooks to choose from; they need something like this.

In terms of performance the X305 does very well. The CPU and GPU are well balanced and it seems to be within 10% of last year’s value gaming champ, the Gateway P-6831FX. The Toshiba wins in synthetic benchmarks but falls a bit short in actual games. The cooling and audio systems are significantly better though. Less heat equals peace of mind to many people (myself included).

Toshiba’s offering also has the upside of being upgradable – but that is not officially supported nor will it be easy. CPU swaps are straightforward, simply buy a new P8400/8600/9500-series Intel CPU and take the case apart to install (easier said than done). Tracking down the 9800m GTX SLI MXM 3.0 module is going to tough and you may have to count on some eBay mercenaries unless Toshiba allows you to order the part direct from them. A quick scan of eBay shows the 8800m GTX SLI card selling for about $1,000.00.

Knowing I’ll own this laptop for a long time to come, my expectations were relatively high. Since I’ll mostly use it in my living room, I wanted something that is still somewhat mobile although it doesn’t have to be ultra-portable. I’m not a gamer either and my main uses are office functions and Internet surfing. For this reason, I focused in on 14″ laptops for their ample screen size and relatively low weight. I initially looked at some desktop replacements like the Dell Inspiron 6000, but they were just too big and heavy for me.

Where and How Purchased

For a long time I considered the HP DV1000 and the Dell Latitude D610. The DV1000 impressed me with it’s features, however after evaluating them numerous times in stores I noticed that the bottom always seems to be white-hot just sitting on the store shelf. This generated visions of it burning a hole right through my shorts, which was the main reason I kept looking. The Dell I found difficult to evaluate since I can’t just walk into a store and work with it or pick it up. I suppose if you know someone that has one it might be easier, but I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a laptop sight unseen.

Then Toshiba released the Satellite M55. Since the major big-box retailers started stocking it soon after it’s release, I had the opportunity to evaluate it on several occasions. While it had most of the features of the HP DV1000, the big thing I noticed is that it didn’t seem to run nearly as hot as the DV1000. In the end I decided to purchase my M55 from the local CompUSA primarily because of their 21-day return policy with no restocking fee. This really impressed me because lately it seems that everyone has a restocking fee. Personally I think this only makes sense since brick and mortar stores have to compete with the direct online sales where often-times a buyer can get up to 30 days to return their purchase for refund.Toshiba Laptop Battery & Adapter Online Shopping Mall - new-laptopbattery.com
http://www.new-laptopbattery.com/toshiba.html

Note: As of the submission date of this review, a CompUSA manager has informed me that CompUSA has recently changed their return policy to only allow in-store credit on laptop returns.
The construction of this laptop is all plastic, however that can be expected from most laptops in this price range. There is a little bit of flex on the back of the screen if I push on it, but I would characterize it as an average amount. When picking the M55 up it is incredibly light and although I didn’t weigh it I can believe Toshiba’s claim of around 5.3 pounds. The size is nicely portable checking in at 13.5″W x 9.53″L x 1.53″D. All this makes for a very attractive combination of portability, nice screen size and a ton of features.

When Toshiba released the M55, it announced that the laptop would be available in 3 colors (copper, gray and blue); mine has a peacock-blue screen-back that I found to be a nice departure from the institutional black and gray laptops. The rest of the laptop is the same silver and black design as all other recent Toshiba Satellite models. One of the more unique things I noticed about this model is that it seems Toshiba has shortened the palm-rest size slightly from what other manufactures are offering on similar models. At first this seemed like a good way to decrease the overall size of the laptop, but in practice it wasn’t comfortable when typing.

The overall build quality on this laptop is quite poor in my opinion. As noted above, there is some flex in the screen-back and the palm-rest area has some flex to it as well. Perhaps the worst part about the construction is the keyboard. There is a large amount of flex to the keyboard that makes it very annoying to type.

The "TruBright” screen on the M55 is just beautiful to use in my opinion. It is a glare-type screen so I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it, but it was easier to see in high light situations where my old laptop screen would simply have washed out. Using the M55 outside on a sunny July morning I was still able to read the screen although it was decidedly harder to see.
On the technical side, the screen has a maximum resolution of 1280×768. This is fairly typical of the 14″ widescreen laptops I’ve seen however I would like to see the ability to step up to at least one higher resolution. Under normal usage I wasn’t able to notice any dead pixels, but using Dead Pixel Buddy software I was able to find 4 dead pixels. Not exactly perfect, but since I can’t find them during normal usage I consider this acceptable.
This laptop uses the integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics card with up to 128 MB of shared video RAM. In general use for me this seemed to provide very acceptable performance, however if you are planning on playing games, you may want to pay particular attention that at this time the M55 is only offered with integrated graphics.

At first glance the speakers on this laptop really stand out. A pair of harmon/kardon speakers sit directly below the screen providing a very interesting and rather slick look to the screen area. However these speakers aren’t there just to look pretty and they don’t disappoint. While not having a lot of bass to the sound, I found the sound quality good with ample volume. These are much better than the average tinny-sounding laptop speakers, but if you are an audiophile or looking for a lot of base you will still want external speakers.

The Toshiba Satellite M55-325 comes with an Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) processor. Add to that 512 MB of RAM and a 100 GB hard drive spinning at 5400 RPM and you would expect that this laptop should put up reasonably fast numbers for a thin and light laptop. Unfortunately at least from my perception this laptop was far from fast and I was slightly disappointed with the performance. However to be as objective as possible, I’ve included several benchmarks so everyone can evaluate the performance themselves.

• Dell Inspiron M5010R Battery
• Dell Inspiron M5030 Battery
• Dell Inspiron 17R Battery
• Dell Inspiron N7010 Battery
• Dell Inspiron 1721 Battery
• Dell Vostro 1500 Battery
• Dell Vostro 1700 Battery
• Dell Latitude D531 Battery
• Dell Precision M65 Battery
• Dell Precision M4300 Battery
• Dell Vostro 1310 Battery
• Dell Vostro 1320 Battery

Posted by: akkusmarkt at 01:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1546 words, total size 11 kb.