14 DAY TRIAL // With all the new technological standards that have gained traction since the year started, any and all PC makers have been striving to offer them as part of their latest and greatest products. Nevertheless, there are still those consumer segments that cannot afford ultra-high end machines, but would still like a decent level of performance. To this end, Toshiba has put together a large laptop with significant horsepower that forgoes certain next-generation technologies in order to enable a, more or less, affordable gaming capability.
The new mobile PC is known as the Toshiba Satellite P505 and is an 18.4-inch notebook that was first showcased at this year's international Consumer Electronics Show. It is based on an Intel Core i7-720QM central processing unit, with a clock frequency of 1.6GHz. This CPU is accompanied by 4GB of DDR3 memory, as well as an NVIDIA GeForce 310M discrete GPU, with 512MB of memory.
The video card is definitely no weakling, but its disadvantage is that it lacks DirectX 11 support, unlike the ATI mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series. The other aspects that may be seen as a drawback are the lack of USB 3.0 connectivity and the fact that the large LCD has a native resolution of 1,680 x 945 and, thus, does not support a Full-HD image quality. Nevertheless, there are, at least, VGA and HDMI outputs, for when consumers are interested in streaming video to their HDTV or Full-HD monitor.
Other specifications of the Satellite P505 include a DVD Super Multi drive, four USB 2.0 ports, a built-in memory card reader, an ExpressCard slot, 500GB hard disk drive (HDD) and a 12-inch Li-ion battery. The system is already available, pre-loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium, through Microsoft's Webstore. As for pricing, it bears a tag of $1,149, but it can come for as low as $689 by means of a coupon.