Toshiba Satellite C670-14P review

Unsurprisingly for a budget laptop, the C670 doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card. Instead, the processor’s integrated chip is used. This is fine for everyday use, and even 1080p video playback on an external display, but it can’t cope with modern games. Our Dirt 3 Benchmark brought the laptop to a crawl, managing just 15.3fps. You’ll need to drop the detail settings to play most games, although older titles may be more forgiving.

In everyday use, we found the C670 easy to use thanks to its spacious full-size keyboard. Although the keys are all placed very close to one another, the springy keys had plenty of tactile feedback to make us confident our presses were registered by the operating system. There’s also room for a separate numerical keypad, which should speed up data entry. Unfortunately, the very small touchpad is poorly matched to the massive screen, as it forced us to make several sweeps just to span the desktop. The touchpad buttons below it felt a little stiff, but were also sturdy and responsive.

Connectivity was slightly disappointing, given the size of the laptop; there’s plenty of room for extra ports next to the DVD re-writer, but Toshiba has only included two USB ports and a multi-format card reader on the other side of the chassis.

In spite of this, the C670 is still a great value 17in laptop. The screen alone makes this the ideal budget replacement to a bulky desktop PC, and decent performance shows you get plenty for your money. However, the Samsung RV720 has a near identical set of components and a much nicer chassis, for around £30 less.