Toshiba Satellite P70-A-109

Features:

• Powerful Haswell processor
• Great screen
• Good speakers
• Component access
• Good keyboard
• Poor battery life
• Average graphics performance
• Mediocre design
• No touchscreen
• No SSD

The laptop landscape is dominated by sleek Ultrabooks, but we're pleased to see machines such as the Toshiba Satellite P70-A-109 emerge - it's a larger laptop that has more versatility and power than any ultraportable notebook can hope to match.

It's built around a high-end Haswell processor, and the rest of the specification is suitably impressive: a discrete Nvidia graphics core, two hard disks, 16GB of RAM and a Blu-ray writer. The 17-inch screen has a Full HD resolution, too.

The £1,199 Toshiba Satellite P70 needs to impress, though, because it's up against some heavyweight competition. The Samsung Series 7 Chronos - now known in some circles as the Ativ Book 8 - includes a powerful processor and a superb 15.6-inch screen in a sleek chassis, and the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart arrives with a swish all-aluminium build.

The 15.6-inch Asus Zenbook U500 mixes power with the reassuringly expensive stylings only found in Ultrabooks, and the final contender comes from Gigabyte. Its chunky P2742G has plenty of power, a 17-inch display, and reasonable battery life.

The Toshiba doesn't get off to a great start. Brushed aluminium is used for the base and the lid, and it looks good, but much of this machine is made from plastic - something that similarly priced rivals such as the Samsung and HP machines manage to avoid.

We don't like the look of the visible seals around the edges, either - it looks cheap in an age where unibody laptops are becoming more popular.

Build quality is only average, too - we pressed the base and the wrist-rest and there was a little too much flex for our liking. It's not as if the Satellite P70 is a lightweight laptop, either: its 34.1mm girth and 3kg weight make it bulkier than the 2.5kg Series 7 Chronos and the 2.25kg Spectre XT TouchSmart, and it's not far off the 3.2kg P2742G.

So it's not good-looking or light - but the Toshiba makes up for this with practical additions elsewhere. The keyboard has a firm base and a snappy, fast typing action, and the sheer size of this machine means there's room for a full-size number pad and no dodgy layout options - so you get large Return and Space keys.

The Satellite P70 allows for more internal access than we're used to seeing from more stylish unibody machines. A single large panel can be lifted away from the base, and it grants access to two RAM slots, the pair of hard disk bays and the wireless card.

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The Asus G750JX

 

When you buy a high-end gaming laptop like this, you're not only buying something that's physically large, you're also buying power - and a considerable amount of power at that.

The Asus G750JX boasts top-end components across the board, but nowhere more so than at its hugely capable heart - there's a Core i7-4700HQ processor on board from Intel in there. Launched mere months ago, this 2.4Ghz quad-core processor has plenty to offer gamers.

We know this laptop is aimed at the gaming market rather than general power users, thanks to its branding. Atop that smooth touch-finish on the lid is a Republic of Gamers logo - a sub-brand invented by Asus back in 2008 to compete with Alienware in the PC market, as well as taking on other companies for motherboards, graphics cards and other hardware.

However, with the Asus logo front and centre on the lid and under the screen, this is an Asus laptop through and through. And that's no bad thing, since Asus has packed a lot of power in - enough to go head-to-head with the competing Alienware 17 laptop, which also retails at the same price as the Asus (with a variety of more powerful options available).

Benchmarks

3DMark - Ice Storm: 108,533, Cloud Gate: 14,821, Fire Strike 3,123
Cinebench - graphics performance: 59 FPS, CPU performance: 7 pts?
PC Mark 8 battery Life (Home test): 4hrs 26mins

You don't get as many superfluous bells and whistles as you do with the Alienware machine - there's no control over what colour you have the keyboard backlight, for example. You do get that with Alienware, but what you also get is a more garish device. The Asus is far more subtler and could be used as a normal laptop when you're not taking advantage of its prowess with first-person shooters in your lunch hour.

That subtlety may mean that some view the Asus chassis as a little dull, but we liked it. It is not that portable, however, as it weighs in at a whopping 4.6kg. Moving between rooms is fine - but anything more and you'll need transport.

The 17.3-inch display is Full HD, so you won't be lacking in resolution and it has a terrific viewing angle (Asus quotes 140°). Although the laptop boasts Windows 8, the screen doesn't have the touch capability, meaning it's not the biggest exponent of the Windows 8 Start screen, Windows Store and touch-based Windows 8 apps. That's a limitation, but it's expected with such high-end displays at the moment.

The display is also backed up with Nvidia's latest GeForce GTX 770M mobile graphics processor, which offers 3GB of extra memory.

The 8GB of on-board memory is plenty, while in terms of storage, there are dual 500GB hard drives - this gives you around 1TB in total. That's an awful lot of storage, and you'll be hard pressed to fill it, despite the sizeable game downloads from services like Steam or Origin.

As well as being one of the very best laptops for gaming, the G750JX also boasts a Blu-ray drive, meaning it's excellent for watching movies on disc as well as downloaded ones. The sound quality from this laptop is also terrific, and the audio output has a boost from Asus' own SonicMaster technology - this also makes a huge difference if you have headphones plugged into the unit.

We also liked the trackpad and found the backlit keyboard very responsive. It's even big enough for Asus to have also included a numerical keypad, too.

The battery life is actually reasonable for a device of this power - we clocked it at two hours and 59 minutes. Asus claims up to four hours with power saving techniques, but we feel this is unrealistic.

What did surprise us was how cool the laptop kept even at full-pelt. There was some heat generated, but this was offset by the large dual fans with rear vents - this means the noise and heat is kept behind the lid and away from you.

There are also other accoutrements you'd probably expect from such a device, like Gigabit Ethernet, an integrated webcam, card reader, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and some USB 3.0 ports. Display connectivity is also plentiful, with VGA, HDMI and Mini DisplayPort.

Overall, the Asus is a superb gaming laptop. With the Blu-ray drive, it betters the Alienware 17 (its top competitor), but both seem expensive compared to other options on the market. A high-end gaming laptop may be a step too far for your wallet. But, if you can afford it, this is a superb buy.

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Samsung Series 7 Ultra

 

Pretty much everything about the 13-inch Samsung Series 7 Ultra shouts premium. And so it should, given the price.

The cost alone butts it up against rivals such as the Asus Zenbook, Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Air - remember that the latter model, while running Apple's OS X straight out of the box, can have Windows 7 or Windows 8 installed on it should you wish.

The Series 7 Ultra runs Windows 8 Pro. The main reason for the price is the presence of so many premium features, chief among them an AMD Radeon HD 8500M graphics chip, which Samsung has taken the rather unusual Ultrabook step of including, alongside the 1.8GHz Intel Core i5 processor.

That means that it's one of the most capable 13-inch laptops around, thanks to the extra graphical grunt. You'll have no issues playing all but very high-end games on this machine and the AMD-powered graphics ensure the pin-sharp 1,920 x 1,080 HD touch display is more than adequately supported.

The touch is superbly accurate, but like any other Windows 8 machine, using the touchscreen in Desktop mode is something of a letdown. Still, for flipping through pictures and zipping around the Windows 8 touchscreen, the display is terrific, with superbly vibrant and crisp colors.

The overall design of the Series 7 Ultra is slim and sharp. It's typically Samsung, with a lovely brushed metal finish everywhere but the bezel of the touchscreen, which is a rather ugly black. At a mere 1.9cm thick, this is a thin device and the ports have been designed accordingly.

The two-tone lower chassis is designed to hide them away, and there's a pull-down vanity flap for the Ethernet port, too. You get a fair amount of connectivity, with mini Display Port alongside a full-size HDMI jack, switchable headphone/mic port and three USBs - but only one of these is USB 3.0. It does seem strange that the extra cost of more USB 3.0 tech is such a problem for a premium notebook like this.

There's an SD card slot, but it's hidden away under a fiddly and plasticky flap - we reckon this will easily shear off unless you're careful.

The on-board speakers are also given a boost thanks to JBL sound technology.

The only specification that disappoints is the size of the storage. 128GB isn't unusual for an SSD inside an Ultrabook at this price point, but it's still rather limiting if you want to use the Series 7 Ultra as your main machine.

If you have a lot of music or photos, you will want to get hold of an external hard drive and possibly make plenty of use of cloud storage. We can't wait until bigger SSDs start arriving at this price point.

The reason SSDs are used is, of course, speed - the Series 7 Ultra zips along thanks to the drive as well as the 1.8 GHz Core i5 of course. And we think it's a good idea that Samsung didn't decide to use a tiny flash drive in tandem with a larger hard drive, which it's done with several models, including the Series 5 Ultra.

The battery life is decent, too - we got six hours in normal use and even managed to eke it out to eight hours by changing the screen brightness and other options. Unfortunately, it doesn't match up to some other laptops in this class, notably the new 13-inch MacBook Air, which can handle eight hours fairly easily.

Another drawback of the Series 7 Ultra is the weight, which is surprisingly significant at 1.6KG - that's several hundred grams heavier than some rivals like the XPS 13, and it's a whole half kilogram weightier than ultra-light Ultrabooks, such as the stablemate Samsung 900X3C.

We did find the keyboard ever so slightly spongy to use, but it's something you soon get used to with this Samsung machine. The trackpad is a little irritating, mainly because the trackpad buttons are just too easy to click for our liking and we found ourselves easily making erroneous moves when clicking and dragging or performing other complex trackpad manoeuvres.

There are plenty of Samsung apps already pre-installed and although they were fairly innocuous, we were rather irritated by the Norton security software pre-installed. There are also pop-ups everywhere to begin with and even though we didn't accept the trial, the browser and other areas of the desktop were still littered with its detritus.

We think there are two compelling reasons to buy the Samsung Series 7 Ultra: the first is the Full HD screen and the second is the extra graphics support from AMD. This is what really sets this Ultrabook apart from the pack, but it's also responsible for the premium price point.

However, if it's portability you value over everything else, we think you're better off looking elsewhere. While the Series 7 Ultra doesn't have an issue with power, it does have a slight weight problem.

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