Toshiba Satellite P50 - Lean Multimedia Machine

 Leanest 15.6-inch Notebook with Discrete Graphics

Recently, Toshiba unveiled a few new notebooks that consumers can expect to get in the second half of the year. Among the notebooks shown, the 15.6-inch Toshiba Satellite P50 stood out as one of the first multimedia notebooks in the market with a fourth generation Intel Core i7 -4700MQ, 2.6GHz processor.

Toshiba also touted it as one of the world’s thinnest 15.6-inch multimedia notebooks with discrete graphics (NVIDIA GeForce GT 745M). Despite having a built-in optical drive, the Toshiba Satellite P50 measures only 25.8mm thick. Now for those of you wondering what's the norm like, it used to be 30mm thick or more more (such as the HP Pavilion dv6 series that often characterize multimedia notebooks). From that perspective, the Satellite P50 is a little more than 15% slimmer than what you would expect and that's a good thing. We reckon the notebook might have had even slimmer dimensions if it had ditched the optical drive, but that's debatable for the folks who this notebook targets.

On top of being a thin and portable multimedia notebook, Toshiba also made an effort to price the Satellite P50 competitively. At $1699, it’s definitely priced reasonably so that students or casual users can afford the latest computing platform with a big screen and a full keyboard without much concern.

Design and Build Quality

Surprisingly, the Toshiba Satellite P50 also features liberal use of brushed aluminum on its exterior and on the surfaces that users interact with the most -- lid, keyboard and palm rest. This makes the Satellite P50 look fairly attractive and more expensive than it really is.

The selective use of aluminum on the machine also makes the P50 feel rigid and robust, even though the rest of the machine (the interior and bottom) is plastic. Fortunately, the plastic is fairly rigid and it isn't the sort that will flex or make the product feel cheap. Overall, we're content with the build. It's not something that's built for rough handling and knocks (expect dents and scratches), but at its price point, we don't expect it to be. That’s not to say you should handle it gently, but it will definitely be able to handle daily rigors of use.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Thanks to the keyboard well and palm rest area made from a single piece of fairly thick aluminum, there’s hardly any flex from using the keyboard. Unfortunately the key travel for the individual chiclet-style keys on the Satellite P50 are quite shallow, like the keyboards you’d find on other Satellite branded machines.

The decision for a shallow key travel was likely to keep the machine as thin as possible, but it could also be related to maintaining uniformity on the kind of components used across their notebook models. While we’d prefer increased key travel and more audible feedback (the authoritative clickity-clack that makes typing so enjoyable), the good news is that the keys themselves have a reasonable amount of resistance, and this in-turn provides decent feedback for typists. This means users who prefer a quiet keyboard and are not particular about their notebook's key travel distance would have no problems adapting to it.

And because the Satellite P50 is not a small Ultrabook and is 15.6-inch multimedia notebook, Toshiba added a number pad instead leaving large swathes of empty space on the sides of the keyboard. This would be useful for users who need to deal with numbers regularly, or even gamers.

Multimedia

As for the multimedia capabilities of the Satellite P50, for starters, it has a full HD display (1920 x 1080 pixels resolution) that feels right at home on a 15.6-inch notebook. However take note that due to the type of display used, you would be able to make out very thin black lines between the pixels. Here's an illustration with a close-up photo shot:-

Fortunately we didn’t feel that it compromised the machine’s image quality. In fact, it's hardly noticeable unless you’re sitting nearer than the recommended viewing distance of at least 1 meter from the display. Viewing angles on the display was also found to be decent. We noticed that the screen showed fairly accurate colors even at awkward angles of view. This will bode well if you're viewing videos with a few friends at a table, or with your other half in bed. However, it's not a touch screen display and that means you can't enjoy the touch-friendly Windows 8 OS as it was intended to be.

What really impressed us however, were the Harman Kardon speakers on the Toshiba Satellite P50. Audio from the speakers was much louder than anticipated and we found that it retained its clarity even at those loud volumes. Unfortunately, there was no sub-woofer integrated as part of the unit's audio system, which might have made the the P50 an even better value proposition. It's probably both a good and a bad thing because putting in an extra component means added cost and perhaps increased thickness. Furthermore, if not well tuned, the sub-woofer would not have made a positive impression.

Performance

The Toshiba Satellite P50 has an Intel fourth generation Core i7-4700QM (2.4GHz) quad-core processor, as well as a new NVIDIA GeForce GT 745M GPU. The GPU on the P50 is a basic mid-tier class so as to keep the price of the machine affordable, but yet provide it with enough power for some gaming needs.

For comparison, we brought out the MSI GE40 gaming-class 14-inch Ultrabook, another Haswell platform bassed machine which runs a more powerful NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M GPU. The Lenovo Ideapad Y500 is also a gaming machine, but it’s running a third generation Intel Core processor, and a last generation NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. However, the Y500 is also capable of using two GPU’s at the same time using an SLI configuration which boosts its performance almost two-fold. While these notebooks aren't the best options for direct comparisons (the Toshiba Satellite P50 is a multimedia machine, not exactly gaming oriented), until we've gathered more appropriate new notebooks for test, these should suffice for the moment.

PC Mark 7

The Toshiba Satellite P50 didn’t manage to outperform the MSI GE40 mainly due to its lack of an SSD. Without an SSD, even the system's slightly faster and more powerful processor was unable to help make up for it when competing against the MSI GE40. However, it did manage to outperform the Y500 in both configurations (with and without SLI) by a decent margin in some of the compute-intensive workloads. This is directly attributed to the Toshiba machine's newer hardware, namely its new fourth generation processing platform.

PC Mark 8

PC Mark 8 is a new benchmark that has multiple practical scenarios that stresses different aspects of a noteook. The Home benchmark tests for casual usage like web browsing, document editing, gaming, photo editing and video chatting. The Work workload (mostly document editing and web browsing) requires less computations, and so places less stress on the processor. The Creative workload puts stress on both the processor and the GPU via web browsing, photo and video editing, group video chat, gaming and media transcoding tasks. 

Like in PC Mark 7, the Toshiba P50 loses out to the MSI GE40’s super raid configuration in the storage-centric benchmark. However it manages to close the gap in the other remaining benchmarks that are more task intensive. The charts shows that while it may not have the advantage of an SSD, it’s still able to perform other tasks reasonably well.

Gaming - 3D Mark 11, 3D Mark 2013 & Far Cry 2

Next up, we've three benchmarks all oriented towards gaming. We start off with the 3DMark 11 synthetic benchmark to test the gaming capabilities of the notebooks using the "performance" profile to find out how Toshiba's GeForce GT 745M GPU  kept up with MSI's GeForce GTX 760M and the Lenovo’s GeForce GT 650M (and its SLI configuration). The results showed the the Toshiba P50's GPU was only marginally better than that of the last generation GPU on the Lenovo machine - up until we toggled the Y500's SLI mode. that gave it almost double the graphics horsepower.

The results are more or less the same with the latest 3D Mark 2013 synthetic benchmark too. However, because of an incompatibility between the Y500’s SLI mode and 3DMark 2013, the Lenovo machine was unable to produce better results with an additional GPU on board.Further to that, we noticed the Y500 with a single last generation GPU was actually faster than then the Toshiba's newer GPU. Meanwhile, the MSI GE40's GeForce GTX 760M managed a 40% lead over the Toshiba's GeForce GT 745M.

As for actual gaming, we used the benchmark tool from Far Cry 2 to gauge real-world performances of the notebooks. Here, the results are again somewhat the same as those reported in the synthetic benchmarks as the MSI machine kept a 40% lead over the Toshiba machine. However, the Lenovo Ideapad Y500’s SLI capabilities kicked in this time round and it managed to produce far better results with its additional GPU, even much more than the gains sneen in 3DMark 11.

The bottom line that you need to take away from these benchmark results, is that while the Toshiba Satellite P50 doesn’t have a top-of-the-line card, it has a decent enough GPU that is able to handle gaming needs for those who're not too demanding. For example, you get enough firepower to enjoy your games, but you need to keep your in-game quality settings to a medium level in order to obtain smooth game play.

Battery Life and Power Consumption

For true gaming class notebooks, battery life span would be more of an an afterthought than a requirement, especially for desktop replacement class notebooks. However, for all other kinds of notebooks, battery life performance is a key factor for determining freedom from the wall socket.

In the case of the Toshiba Satellite P50, a battery up-time of just two hours is hardly anything to shout about in this day and age - even if it's a large multimedia machine. Naturally it lost out to the MSI and Lenovo notebook comparisons by quite a bit, but there are several reasons. Firstly, the P50 has a much smaller 43Wh battery capacity than the MSI GE40's 65Wh battery, while the Y500 has a monstrous 72Wh battery. 

Secondly, the Intel Haswell processor in the P50 (47W max TDP) requires more power than the that used on the MSI GE40 (37W max TDP). We also noted that it has about the same power consumption as the Lenovo Y500 (single GPU mode) that's using a previous generation Intel Ivy Bridge processor and the last generation graphics engine that's supposed to collectively consume more power than the new generation hardware on the Toshiba Satellite P50. Looks like the choice of components used on the P50 is either not well optimized or Toshiba hasn't put a lot of thought in power optimization.

Another important note with regards to the reported figures is that the MSI GE40 was tested differently and that resulted in much better battery up-time. While testing the MSI GE40, we encountered problems to run our current benchmark standard using Powermark. As such, we had to resort to running a video loop till the machine ran out of battery. Historically when we made the switch from running videos to using Powermark about a year ago, we've tested enough notebooks to make the call that the difference in battery life figures were small. However, this discrepancy is very much wider on the new Intel Haswell platforms as we've seen with the MSI GE40 and again when we recently reviewed the Apple Macbook Air (2013 edition). This meant that the new processing platform is very much more efficient in tackling video workloads and thus doesn't tax the new machines much.

Having said that, you should then focus more intently on the outcome of the Lenovo Y500 and other past multimedia notebooks like the HP Pavilion dv6. You can see that the competitor's notebook from a year ago, comes out ahead of the brand new Toshiba Satellite P50 with over half an hour more battery life. While that doesn't sound like much, it accounts for 30% more battery up-time over the Toshiba machine's measly two hours.

Overall, this just means that while the Satellite P50 doesn’t have a class-leading battery life and while it's not bad, it's still a bit disappointing. Use the machine with caution when not near a power outlet as time flies with social media distractions these days.

Portability Index

Perhaps the Toshiba Satellite's slimmer build can help the portability aspect of the device? Our unique portability index helps users decide how portable a machine is to take it out and about by factoring in the machine’s battery life, weight and volume. This index works best when compared with similar class notebooks to give you a proper comparison playing field since these numbers swing greatly across various notebook types and sizes.

Needless to say, the smaller MSI GE40 Ultrabook gaming notebook fared a lot better, but the Toshiba Satellite P50 is not in competition with it. What about against a true gamer notebook like the Lenovo Y500 with a similarly sized screen? The Satellite P50 is more comparable here, but it still loses out to the chunkier and heavier Lenovo Y500 (weighs 2.9kg and measure in at 36mm thick).

What about against a direct comparison with an older multimedia notebook like the HP Pavilion dv6? As seen from its review, it's Portability Ratio is 0.371, which is better than the Toshiba Satellite P50. This is despite the fact that the HP machine weighs more and this is thicker than the new Toshiba P50. 

Looks like the small battery capacity of the Toshiba Satellite P50 is hurting it more than one expected as its reasonably lighter frame at 2.4kg and thin profile at just 25.8mm (for a multimedia machine) didn't help it much. It's not bad, but it's just middling and we expected better from a new generation machine.

Priced Right

If you’re looking for a capable multimedia notebook to get you through school or work, the Toshiba Satellite P50 should definitely be in your sights, simply because it’s one of the first multimedia notebooks in the market to sport a fourth generation Intel Core processor.

Its design and build quality is also good, thanks to the use of aluminum on its lid and keyboard well - especially when you consider its reasonable price point of $1699. For that price you’ll also get a nice sharp full HD display (1920 x 1080 pixels resolution) as well as a basic mid-tier discrete GPU and a DVD optical drive. And you get all this in a much slimmer profile than was available previously. Its performance in terms of gaming and computing was also fairly decent, allowing you to indulge in the latest games (though at medium level settings). Multimedia performance was also positive with its quality, wide-angle friendly screen and its loud and clear Harmon Kardon speakers.

However there are certain things that users need to be mindful when getting the Toshiba Satellite P50. First of all, its battery life isn’t fantastic. It’s enough for casual usage when you’re out and about, but we don't recommend it for intensive usage when not plugged to the wall socket, such as gaming or video/graphics editing/rendering. Also note that there’s no removable battery, so battery swapping to solve its battery life woes is out of the question. Then there's the display which isn't a touch enabled, hence you cannot get the full Windows 8 experience that that ships with the notebook. And what good is a modern multimedia notebook without a Blu-ray drive? This machine only ships with a DVD drive by default.

Lastly, while the machine’s keyboard is great for people who like to type quietly and don’t expect a lot of feedback from the keyboard, those who prefer more key travel and a more resounding feedback, might want to have a quick test drive first to gauge your expectations. Otherwise, the keyboard is pretty usable and should appeal to most mainstream users. Also consider that it comes with LED-backlit keys and that the key well is a solid aluminum base that doesn't flex and you would most probably look forward to using this machine.

Now while all this sounds pretty reasonable for S$1699 price tag, the notebook would have had a much better value proposition if it didn't have the drawbacks mentioned above. As always, penny-pinchers can definitely find more affordable options in due-time if all they are concerned about is hunting specifications for as low a price point possible. However, the Toshiba Satellite P50 is for a different crowd who want a stylish, quality machine that they can rely upon, be it for work or entertainment with good multimedia qualities and doesn't cost a lot.

For users who need a machine with a touch display to make the most out of Windows 8, they can also opt for the Toshiba Satellite P50t, which looks the same but comes with a touch display. However, take note that while the P50t costs the same as the P50 (S$1699), but it's running an older Intel 3rd generation processor instead of the new 4th generation processor. If you're willing to wait, the P50t will be refreshed with a 4th generation Intel processor in August, but we can't be sure if it will be priced the same or cost more.

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