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With so many budget Intel laptops available, it’s easy to forget that AMD-powered systems such as the Toshiba Satellite S50D-A-10G can be just as good value when choosing a good general purpose laptop.
The S50D-A-10G uses one of AMD’s latest Richland-based A-series processors, a quad-core A10-5745M APU, which can increase its clock speed from 2.1GHz to 2.9GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom. Paired with 8GB of RAM, it scored 36 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which is roughly equivalent to the processors found in a Core i3 Ultrabook. This is more than enough speed for everyday office tasks and browsing the web, but it may struggle slightly if you have several applications open at once.
Graphics are provided by the processor’s integrated AMD Radeon HD 8610G chip and a 1GB Radeon HD 8550M Dual Graphics chip. This makes the S50D-A-10G a surprisingly capable gaming laptop for those on a budget, as it completed our Dirt Showdown test with a perfectly smooth frame rate of 30.6fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution. Lowering the detail and disabling the anti-aliasing will raise this further, but you should be able to play most 3D games at a reasonable speed. Just don’t expect it to play ultra-demanding titles, such as Crysis 3.
This gives the S50D-A-10G a huge advantage over other similarly priced laptops, and it’s well built, too. Measuring just 24mm thick when closed, we found barely any flex in its glossy plastic chassis and its brushed aluminium palm rest gives it a little more style than your typical general-purpose laptop.
There’s a wide range of ports as well. You’ll find three USB ports, two of which are USB3, VGA and HDMI video outputs for connecting the laptop to an external display, a multi-format card reader, a DVD rewriter, a Fast Ethernet port and separate headphone and microphone jacks. It also has a large 1TB hard disk for storing your files and one of the USB3 ports also supports Sleep and Charge, so you can charge external devices even when the laptop is turned off or in sleep mode.
The S50D-A-10G’s backlit keyboard was great for typing. The keys are positioned quite far up the laptop compared to other general-purpose laptops, but its spacious palm rest gave us ample room to rest our hands while typing. Its well-spaced keys were a little flat, but they still gave a good level of tactile feedback and we were typing at full speed in no time at all. Toshiba has also included a numeric keypad on the right hand side.
More space below the keyboard means there’s also more room for the touchpad. Its large all-in-one surface was very responsive when navigating our desktop and the cursor remained stationary when clicking on files and icons. Windows 8 gestures also worked perfectly and we were able to execute multi-touch gestures such as two-finger scrolling and pinch-zooming without a hitch.
The S50D-A-10G’s main weakness was its 15.6in screen. We don’t normally expect budget laptops to have particularly great image quality, but the S50D’s 1,366×768 display left a lot to be desired. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 59.2 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is around average for a laptop of this price, but its severe lack of red, blue and magenta coverage meant that colours looked very oversaturated and almost white-washed.
This was certainly the case with our subjective image tests, as our solid colours were all lacking in depth and richness. Whites were also quite grey and its high black level of 0.72cd/m2 meant that solid blacks appeared almost grey depending on how we angled the screen. Our solid blacks also revealed that the lower half of the screen was lighter than the top half.
The screen’s contrast levels were more promising. Despite recording a poor contrast ratio of 318:1, we could still see plenty of detail in our high contrast test photos as long as the screen was set at the right angle. However, if we tilted the screen further back, the screen’s narrow viewing angles kicked in and obliterated the entire image. This shift in contrast wasn’t so noticeable when writing text documents, but you’ll need to keep the screen in a very tight sweet spot when viewing photos and watching films.
The S50D-A-10G’s battery life was also disappointing. It lasted just 3h 59m in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is below average for a laptop of this price. This shouldn’t matter too much, though, as the laptop’s bulky weight of 2.4kg means it will probably spend most of its time tied to a desk.
The Toshiba Satellite S50D-A-10G is a decent laptop with great graphics performance, but there are much more powerful laptops available for the same price such as the Best Buy-winning Asus X552CL.
