Toshiba Satellite P855-10G

Top of Toshiba's P855 range, the 10G features Intel's much-touted new Ivy Bridge chip, and comes packed with software and hardware to back it up. It's on sale now.

Design :

his is no ultrabook. It's a heavy (2.94kg), powerful multimedia laptop that works equally well on the move or as a desktop replacement. It's finished in a classy champagne metallic effect and the ports include four high-speed USB 3.0 inputs, an HDMI output and a multi-card reader. Two of those USBs also include the sleep and charge feature, which allows you to charge your mobile phone or MP3 player while the P855's switched off.

The keyboard is a little bit of a letdown. Though the plastic keys are nicely spaced, they offer little travel, and don't give much feedback, which means they can be all too easy to miss when you're typing fast. Still, a little practise helps you get into the Tosh way of typing (heavy, basically).

The touchpad is large and reasonably sensitive, though the touch-sensitive buttons won't be for everyone.

Screen and features : 

The 15.6-inch screen offers an impressively sharp resolution of 1920x1080 pixels -- not the very highest perhaps but certainly compelling. Resolution drops somewhat for the glasses-free 3D feature to 1366x768, for which you'll need to use Toshiba's embedded Blu-ray disc player. The 3D effect works, helped by the front-facing camera which tracks your eyes to adjust the 3D image. But it's not as smooth as you tend to get with the glasses variety, and it can get a bit wearing on the eyes after a while.

The quad-core i7-3610QM processor runs at 2.3GHz but also has Turbo Boost technology which can take it up to 3.3GHz. Combined with an impressive 8GB RAM, plus hyper-threading that effectively allows it to double the number of cores to eight, and you have an extremely powerful laptop.

Performance :

It delivered a PCMark performance benchmark rating of 2,589, which puts it above Samsung's Series 9, though it came behind the HP Folio 13 ultrabook. That said, it took just one minute and 36 seconds to encode our test 11min movie for iTunes, which puts it well ahead of any other laptop we've tried so far, and in the same zone as Alienware's X51 gaming monster. And speaking of games, it offered frame rates around 290-300fps while playing Portal on its default settings, so it should be able to take most of the HD gaming you can throw at it.

Ivy Bridge processors come with Intel's HD 4000 graphics built-in, but Toshiba has added the Nvidia GeForce GT 640M, which is more than capable of playing HD video.

There's a Blu-ray drive on board that will play just about every disc format you can think of. The frankly huge 1TB of storage is welcome too, with loads of room for a substantial amount of the highest of def content.

With all that power, the battery life is less than stellar, and it managed just three hours before needing a recharge.