Toshiba A505D-S6987: A Look at Turion II Ultra M600 Performance
by Dustin Sklavos on June 23, 2010 10:57 PM ESTToshiba A505D-S6987 Gaming
We ran all of our gaming tests at 800x600—our traditional resolution for low-power GPUs—and at the native resolution of the notebook, 1366x768. You can't expect the world from the Mobility Radeon HD 4200, but at least you can game on it. That's more than you can say for Intel's old 4-series IGP, and even the current HD Graphics have teething issues in the drivers that AMD more or less conquered a long time ago. Okay, lots of graphs coming….
800x600 gaming is doable on most titles, though it won't impress relative to other laptops with discrete graphics. The A505D takes the lead over the M300-based 5542 and the i3-330M, with the exception of the Mass Effect 2 result where the outdated drivers penalize it. And that's something you may encounter on more than one occasion going forward, unless Toshiba decides to opt back in to AMD's mobile driver program. They really should, and while it's not critical for something like the A505D, other laptops with discrete graphics are a different story.
We'll save you the trouble: only Empire: Total War and STALKER are really playable at native resolution, just like the Acer 5542. The faster M600 CPU doesn't make more than a small difference in gaming performance. Most of the other games outside of Mass Effect 2 ran fine at the lowest settings and 800x600, but we can't really recommend performance-hungry monsters like Far Cry 2 or Crysis: Warhead. As a side note, the recently released time-destroyer Magic: the Gathering—Duels of the Planeswalkers runs decently enough on the HD 4200. If you're a Magic nerd, and this author can neither confirm nor deny his own status, the HD 4200 is going to suit you just fine.
But speaking of beasts like Crysis: Warhead, game play was... troubled. Troubled in the sense that when we loaded up the game, the ground just plain didn't render. It wasn't there. That makes our results for Crysis: Warhead questionable. If you can get the ground to render instead of having Psycho floating in space, odds are performance just isn't going to cut it for the game. Of course that would most likely mean updating the drivers, and since Toshiba elected not to be a part of AMD's mobile driver program you would have to hack the drivers using Mobility Modder. Mercy of mercies, though, the Radeon HD 4200 at least ensures the unit's fan never has to spin up aggravatingly loudly, and is liable to allow at least some gaming on the battery without severely draining power.
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veri745 - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
I'm REALLY looking forward to review of the Danube and Nile platforms, but these Tigris notebooks are just not interesting. horrid battery life in a 15.6+" form factor...blech.JarredWalton - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
I agree, but it does help set the stage for the next review, plus there are lots of Tigris laptops floating around. They perform well enough and often can be had for a song, provided you're not after long battery life in an ultraportable chassis.Anyway, the Toshiba A665-S6059 just arrived this evening, and I unpacked it a couple hours back. It's radically different in looks from the A505D, and it throws in a lot of other extras. Quad-core P920, HD 4200 + HD 5650, textured lid/palm rest, and a thinner chassis to boot. Granted, it costs $875, but it looks like it idles at around 13-14W. That's still only good for 3.5 hours of battery life, but blame it on the paltry 48Wh battery. We'll have the review ready for next Friday is the plan....
Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
Oh, I see, Jarred. Keeping all the fun ones to yourself? ;)pmonti80 - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
What I would love is laptops with AMD's new CULV equivalent. Don't remember the name though.JarredWalton - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
That's the Nile platform, which is the lower wattage version of Danube. We're working to get one of those for testing as well. An no worries, Dustin... we'll get you some other stuff. ;-)Roland00 - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
Here are the specific models of the new Nile PlatformThe Nile platform (2010) are 9W, 12W, 15W processors with DDR3 support. All these processors are Champlain processors with the new memory controller.
9W, AMD V105, Single Core*1.2 Ghz, 512 kb L2 cache total
12W, AMD K125, Single Core*1.7 Ghz, 1 mb L2 cache total
12W, AMD K325, Dual Core*1.3 Ghz, 1 mb L2 cache per core, 2mb total
15W, AMD K625, Dual Core*1.5 Ghz, 1 mb L2 cache per core, 2mb total
15W, AMD K665, Dual Core*1.7 Ghz, 1 mb L2 cache per core, 2mb total
The Danube platform (2010) are 25W, 35W, 45W processors with DDR3 support
VivekGowri - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
Ooooh. Quad core + HD 5650 for $850 sounds like fun. It doesn't look all that great though (and the screen is pretty sadly low res - 1366x768 is not okay on a 16" display) and Toshiba is quoting 2.5 hours of battery life. That's not a good sign right off the bat. I'm scared for the results battery life tests, though it doesn't sound like they should take very long ;)Should be interesting to see how AMD's "more cores for less money" strategy works in the mobile space. Just gonna place a bet that it won't work as well as the desktop chips for two reasons: power consumption and heat. Will wait for benchmarks though, it should have a lot of fun with the encoding benches.
JarredWalton - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
Initial idle battery life testing is under way, and it's looking like 3.5 hours is going to be about right. Obviously, Internet and x264 will put a much bigger load on the system. 2.5 hours seems about what you'd get if the HD 5650 stayed active.Quirky system, though: I haven't found a way to disable the dGPU other than unplugging the laptop. I mean, sure, if you're plugged in having the GPU enabled is reasonable, but I do wish there were a way to manually engage/disable it. Also, the lack of AMD driver updates is disheartening... and there's not even an ATI CCC with the current drivers, so I'm not sure what version of the drivers it's running.
$850 is a tough sell given the competition, but at least it looks like battery life won't be bad. The 1.6GHz clock speed may prove a bigger issue for some, but for heavily threaded workloads the quad-core CPU should come close to (or surpass even) some of the i3/i5 processors.
HHCosmin - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
hello. i'm the proud owner of an acer timeline 3820TG featuring an i5 540m and a switchable (manually) 5470 which i do not really need... but that is a different story. i read some reviews and they were complaining that you cannot turn off the discrete card when plugged in. that is not true and it's also not so obvious.goes like this: when you plugin the lappie the discrete ati gpu goes active. then you can go to the ati control center (or something) and there it says that the discrete ati gpu is active. you also have two buttons: one is to enable the "power saving gpu" and one is for the... err power hungry and hot gpu. :) you have to press the button that sys about enabling the power saving gpu and wait. it takes a bit of time to make the switch and the desktop may go dark.. etc but after a while it will say that the integrated gpu is active. all this is on a special page... and you just have to find it. good luck!
fabarati - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link
Does it have AMD's Turbo-whatever? If it does, does it work well?