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Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 Review


Introduction:

OK, as you probably know, the big deal here is the new Toshiba is A) The first true gaming laptop from Toshiba and B) The first laptop to be fitted with Nvidia's new Geforce 7900GS.

System Specifications:

The P105-S921 is driven by an Intel Centrino Duo (Dual Core) 1.8G CPU. , x512MB 667MHz ram, a 160GB 4200RPM Fujitsu (strange in that Toshiba makes drives of its own as well...)

The monitor is a 17" glossy , and the videocard is the 7900GS. Some new Toshiba features, such as a dual mode touchpad which you can use to launch programs as well as drive the mouse, and a fingerprint ID scanner to login to the machine with, also exist. The ID scanner is pretty cool, letting you scan in up to 20 different fingerprints, allowing mulitple fingerprint users. For more info on specs go visit Toshiba's website on the specs, as I don't see the purpose of me regurgitating specs here.


Chassis Design and Build Quality:

The design quality is acceptable, and while there are a few minor complains I have, they are mostly small annoyances. For one, the ridiculous hotkey buttons built into the laptop, and two, the LED lights which illuminate the Harmon Kardon speaker clusters... They are a little distracting, and might get me some looks at wrok... and I think about the 2 minutes of power they rob from my battery life. But that's just me. The good news is that, for 17" game capable laptop, this is a light machine, weighing in at about 7 lbs. It's also relatively thin, too. This is about as portable as 17" gets.

Screen... There is an average amount of flex to the screen, and the point between the screen hinges (where the TOSHIBA logo resides) is particularly cheesy... Pushing on the Toshiba logo will cause the screen and the frame to bend a bit. That area should have been more reinforced than it is.


Keyboard... is OK. It feels a little different to me than other laptops I have used, but works well, just makes clicky-clacky sounds. Another guy I work with said he liked it, so go figure. He owns a mac laptop anyways. YMMV. There is a bit of flex in it, but nothing too bad. It is also not fully sized... the LETTERS are sized right but some keys, like quotes and other specials chars, are 2/3rd sized instead. Personally don't dig this and whish they would have just put in a full sized keyboard - it looks like they had room to do it if they were inclined to. It does have a numpad though, which is full sized.

Sound... is amazing. As Fujitsu have mastered LCD screen and Dell has mastered 1 day coupon deals, Toshiba has taken audio to a new level with these speakers. I'm not afraid to say that I have what you'd call a golden ear, after countless bands and years of playing and composing... and the fidelity of what comes out of this laptop with regards to sound is far and away, the best I have ever heard on stock speakers.

Performance:

In order to gauge system performance, I loaded 3dMark05. Stock drivers, no tweaks, and this is what you get:

3DMark2005: 6202

While that isn't as high as the 7800 GTX's I have a feeling that if one wanted to overclock this card, they could easily... The laptop does not get very hot at all, even under gaming conditions. There is a fan that will turn on ocassionally, with venting to the rear left side of the laptop. And then there is the 90nm construction of the 7900.. which makes it more overclockable than say, a 110nm 7800.

HDD:
RANDACC: 19.9ms
AVG READ: 25.9 MB/S


Battery Life:

Battery life seems very good, around 2.5 hours initially.

Conclusion:

This laptop meets my expectations. My other (cheaper) option was the MSI-1039 but I finally decided the screen and the videocard advantages of this model compelled me to take the plunge. As a technology consultant, and a gamer (sometimes) and someone who was looking to replace their desktop... it achieves what is required. For someone trying to meet all three goals (Work, Play, Home) this is good stuff, and at $1,850.00 (all inclusive total!), not too badly priced either. For people who want a business laptop, there are cheaper, lighter solutions. For gaming only, a hot running, power sucking 7800GTX in a thick brick of a laptop is the way to go. And for those who want truest of DTR's, you would want a slightly larger keyboard. Thus, a compromise of all three would result in something called the Toshiba Satellite P105-S921.


Pros:

Very portable (for 17") and thin.
Very strong GPU Performance
Runs very cool
Harman/Kardon speaker system (WOW!)
Light relative to features
Fingerprint ID system
Price-Performance ratio very good (1850.00 OTD via Amazon.com)
Looks sleek.

Cons:

LCD screen resolution (YMMV, personally I like this resolution)
Good, but not great, color warmth from screen.
Flexy Screen
Average Build Quality (Fujitsu is better, HP is better. This reminds me of Dell.)
NO "clean" XP CD. (Toshiba will NOT send you an XP CD WITHOUT AOL crap, Yahoo Crap, and alllll kinds of other Crap, preloaded for your disenjoyment.) They even train the technicians to believe that no such XP CD's exist at Toshiba without these programs! lol.

thanks for the review, if my dell e1505 problem doesn't work out i'll probably be saving my money for the toshiba.

Great review Troyus. Now all we need are some nice hi rez pics.

Nice review!

Strange...you have a laptop with a GPU which isn't even listed on nVidia's website.

And a few questions:
1) How is the speed of the HDD? The benchmarks look rather low, even compared to my lappy...much slower.
2) What is the dual-mode touchpad like? And isn't the touchpad a bit small?
3) Do they actually send a Win XP CD at all?

Also, have you run 3DMark06, just so that we could try and compare it to the Go 7800/GTX in the Dell Core Duo/Solo forum.

Thank you!!!

"Available models: GeForce Go 7900 GS, GeForce Go 7800 GTX and GeForce Go 7800"

http://www.nvidia.com/page/go_7800gtx.html

It wasn't there yesterday
Still...not like it says much about. No specs, nothing...

Link to my post regarding 7900GS specs.

Great review but i have some questions ....
You are comparing this lappy to other companies like dell, fujitsu - did u own any of those laptops, because the screen and built quality on toshibas is TOP NATCH .... I own P25 s676, qosmio G20 and those are the best built laptopts EVER as well as screen quality It just feel wierd that sudenddly toshiba puts bad LCD and bad built quality ... Definatelly better than my xps2 .... .... so just wanna make sure it is just your preferance or is it relly bad
Ohhhh and HP definatelly has not better built quality from toshiba ... no way ....

Acxtually, Yes. I owned a Dell Latitude for a year, and a Fujitsu Lifebook for a month. This isn't the Qosmio line, which I believe is their high end. I believe the Satellite to be mid-range. I also own a very old Toshiba laptop a 3110CT, and I think the build quality of the older Toshiba is superior to this new one. But, this machine is much better in every other way.

1) The speed seems good to me, no problems, I would not make the HDD RPM a buying decision-ator.

2) I'm not too thrilled on the dual mode touchpad, it is a small pad already, and the dual mode button takes up space too... if you accidentally touch it the pad lights up and now it launches applications. To be honest, when it comes to a laptop, I'm a nipple man. But since the nipple has gone the way of to Dodo, I now use a usb mouse instead. I don't like touchpads at all, totally inaccurate pointing device.

3) Toshiba sends along a recovery CD which has XP+tons of crap on it. They don't ship or even support clean XP copies and the uselesses on the phone even had the gall to tell me that if I install XP on the system (without bloatware) it voids the warranty.

3DMark06 (Stock system, no optimized drivers): 3766

In short I think all these companies are lame in their own unique ways, Dell, Sager, Toshiba, etc. The list goes on... it's luck of the draw and that's that really. Get what fits your needs don't stick with a certain brand.

One plus side to Toshiba, I didn't take a phone trip to India. Not that I have it in for Indians, great culture andf history spanning thousands of years... but if I can't understand you over the phone, and you can't understand me over the phone, then why are we having a phone call. This was a big reason why I passed up Dell.

Anything else let me know... if you REALLY want pics I could do it but man I am lazy about that stuff... I will say it looks better in person then on the website!

One other question. How do you compare the weight of this laptop to some of the other laptops you've used? I know you said 7.1 lbs but sometimes it's helpful to get an idea of your opinions compared to other laptops. Do you find that you can fit this in a backpack or a bag?

Appreciate your great review! Really helped me with whether I should get this laptop. If you can provide us with some pics, it would make this review even better!!

It's pretty close to a 15.4" laptop in most respects, just longer... the only problem is that it has a 17" screen... so it has that 'footprint', but it's not any wider than that. I haven't tried to fit it in a backpack or bag, I have a laptop totebag thing which used to hold my 12" Toshiba (hahahha) but it still (barely) fits this one. The advantage over other 17" laptops is that this one is generally thinner, and lighter - but it still covers the same footprint. For something backpack friendly I would probably go for the MSI-1039 or other 15.4" laptop. You don't get much more real estate with 17", and the 15" screens have less flex. I just thought it would be good for working in multiple windows, and maybe to watch some movies.

I just want to make it clear that this isn't the answer to everybody's laptop problem, but it probably is to some. Think of it as a Dell XPS for grown-ups.

Glad you liked the review! I'll put some pictures up pretty soon here, as soon as I can find my digital camera... which is somewhere... in this house... under something...

Ahh.. one other bummer... the memory card slot doesn't support compact flash, but not many of them seem to... :/

Pretty much everything is going the way of the SD card now. Seems the new motto is "smaller is better".

Toshiba uses foreign call centers as well as Dell.

Yeah it DID sound like someone from the bible belt... which is pretty much another country to me.