回顾东芝Satellite L855D-10K笔记本

At a first glance the Toshiba Satellite L855D-10K inspires us with its unusual color - Toshiba calls it "Iceblue" - and with the brushed aluminum at the cover. However, with the first contact it becomes evident that the stability is not very convincing: Even under slight pressure the cover is clearly pushed in. If the cover is open it can be easily twisted, which can also be seen in brightness changes of the display. Furthermore, the display frame made of glossy plastic arches forward considerably; the result is a gap between the aluminum and plastic.

All in all, the notebook cover leaves the impression of poor build quality, the lower part of the case seems to be more stable. The palm rest can also be pushed in under pressure but not as easily as the display cover. We can also see a noticeable indentation of the keyboard during normal typing.

Except for the stability the brushed aluminum convinces with a good look and the cool haptics. The touchpad frame is also a visual highlight. Only the glossy plastic parts around the keyboard and the display are annoying, which cause the notebook to attract fingerprints, contrary to Toshiba's statement. 

Toshiba wants 799 Euros (~$1047) for the Satellite L855D, so a certain minimum in terms of ports should be present. In short: The device is within the standard of competitors but you should not expect any highlights. Two USB 3.0 ports are mandatory by now, as well as the HDMI output. The L855 series devices that are equipped with a Blu-ray drive also support 3D output via HDMI port; the notebook could be used as a 3D Blu-ray player for the TV. However, our notebook only has a DVD burner on the left side.

The port layout could also be better: Almost all the ports are at the right front, a place that is usually occupied by a right-hander's mouse and in addition the ports are very close together. This could lead to some conflicts between USB sticks and HDMI cables.

Warranty

Toshiba offers a 2-year standard warranty; the device has to be sent to the service center. However, if you register your warranty case through the Toshiba hotline, you can use a Pick-up and Return Service that conveniently picks up the notebook at your home and then brings it back to you. There are many additional services on the Toshiba website, starting with simple warranty extensions up to data rescue, which recovers data from damaged hard drives. Even an All inclusive-warranty is available and includes a free hotline, theft insurance and more. Considering the price of the notebook such an additional protection might end up being useful.

In general the turbo-feature of the quad-core processor is very turbulent: Even during idle the clock constantly fluctuates between 1.4 GHz and 2.3 GHz, Intel's Turbo-Boost technology is more relaxed in this regard. Performance wise the processor can hardly convince us: Despite its four cores the AMD A8-4500M only reaches values similar to cheap Pentium or Celeron processors in Cinebench. During battery use the processor clock is reduced in every energy profile: 1.9 GHz is possible under load. Also, the processor cores can only execute one task at the same time, Intel Core-i processors can execute two threads simultaneously thanks to Hyperthreading technology.

Similar priced competitors sometimes even have an Intel Core i7 quad-core processor (Acer Aspire V3-571G, Dell Inspiron 15R SE), which is at least twice as fast in the synthetic benchmarks. If you only use less demanding applications like text processing or want to watch movies the AMD processor works just fine. However, the identical base price for considerably lower CPU performance is not justified in our opinion.

We played three games on the notebook, all of them ran smoothly in the native display resolution but FIFA 13 and Diablo III are not very demanding anyway. As mentioned before there were some issues with unpleasant micro stutters.

Mass Effect 3 is a bit more demanding but also ran smoothly even on an external Full HD display - a positive surprise. Our Graphics Overview also shows that more demanding games can quickly bring the notebook to its performance limit: Hitman: Absolution especially suffered from the weak CPU. An extensive games check of the APU can be found in the Toshiba Satellite L875D-10E review.

System Noise

Basically the fan of our review unit is very quiet and even completely turns off sometimes. However, the fan spins up unnecessarily from time to time, even with the activated energy-saving mode and reduced clocks of the components - this behavior might annoy some users. This is unfortunate, usually the fan is quiet even under load with 34.5 dB (average). The hard drive is also pretty quiet, the DVD drive is audible with 35.2 dB during movie playback but this is still reasonable.

The Satellite L855D-10K is clearly ahead of the higher performing competition: In the more practical WLAN scenario it runs over 4 hours, the Acer Aspire V3-571G and Dell Inspiron 15R SE only manage around 3 hours. All three systems have a 48 Wh battery.

The behavior of the Crossfire combination with both graphics cards is very interesting during battery use. Under load the GPU clock is significantly reduced to 380 MHz, independent from the selected energy profile. To save energy the dedicated graphics can also be deactivated; this usually happens during idle or with less demanding tasks.