If you
were to go hands-on with the $700 (as of March 30, 2011) Toshiba Satellite
L675D-S7106 before you looked at its test scores, you'd never guess that it was
one of the slower desktop replacement laptops we've tried. Subjectively, its performance is
agile in standard desktop applications, and its large, 17.3-inch,
1600-by-900-pixel display gives you plenty of screen real estate. The machine
even has a Blu-ray drive on board, so you can watch high-def moves. For the
price, it's a lot of laptop.
The L670
series is available with a ridiculous number of CPU options--everything from an
Intel Pentium or AMD Turion II to an Intel Core i3 to the AMD Phenom II P860 Triple-Core on the
L675D-S7106. Joining the Phenom on our test configuration were an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
graphics processor, 4GB of memory, a 5400-rpm 500GB hard drive, and the
aforementioned Blu-ray player/DVD burner. Just looking at the branding, you
might think that it had a discrete graphics card, but you'd be wrong: The HD
4250 is a two-generations-old Radeon graphics offering built into the chipset,
sharing RAM with the main system.
The
L675D-S7106's WorldBench score of 78 is rather low for a
desktop replacement laptop, but subjectively the unit feels very nimble. It
also plays 1080p video smoothly, though gaming frame rates don't cut the
mustard; it generated only 29.3 frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3 at 800
by 600 with medium detail (the least demanding resolution we test at). Daily
desktop tasks such as Web browsing and word processing zip along nicely, but
demanding work such as editing or encoding video will be slow for a system of
this class.
