The Toshiba Satellite P30 is a 17-inch behemoth with a price tag to match. It has an exquisite 1440 x 900 screen, easily beating all comers, and is well suited to movies and gaming – if gamers can overcome the glare found on the new generation of high gloss LCD screens. It was one of the brightest tested and was the best for showing the lightest and darkest colour shades.
Complementing such an beautiful display is a set of Harman Kardon speakers. Considering this, we were extremely disappointed to find an external volume dial but no multimedia buttons, remote control or digital line out.
The phenomenal work application benchmarks are thanks to a desktop 3.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor under the bonnet – equal fastest in the roundup. You pay for this grunt, not just in cash, but with grunting of your own thanks to the unit’s backbreaking weight, but none of the P4’s tested weighed in under 4kg – and some weighed far more.
The unit sports PC card and PC Card Express slots, as well as a neat 4-in-1 memory card.
Strangely the 801.11a/b/g wireless card isn’t accompanied by gigabit Ethernet, which would have rounded out its connectivity options.
Gamers will be disappointed with the benchmarks, but Toshiba have only blessed this unit with an ATI Mobility RADEON X600.
Had they have thrown in an X800, or perhaps even a X700, this notebook would have romped it in to win the roundup – but then the same could be said for the far cheaper HP which has more features. Ultimately, while this loses out on value for money, the Toshiba is easily one of the beautiful units on test.
This article appeared in the August, 2005 issue of PC Authority.
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