Toshiba Satellite 5220

John Gillooly discovers that for notebooks, blue is one screamin’ colour.

With the hubbub around Intel’s Centrino notebook marketing strategy and associated hardware, the burgeoning desktop replacement market has faded into the background. Which is a shame, because while thin and light notebooks have enormous wanker value, performance freaks understand the need for a multi-gigahertz, big-screened, graphically laden, genital scorcher of a notebook.

We have looked past the murky depths of Centrino-hood and found that Toshiba’s Satellite 5220 is such a laptop without the heat-based dangers of fatherhood. It is packed with features enviable on a desktop system: a 2.4GHz Mobile Pentium 4 processor; 64MB GeForce FX 5600 Go graphics; 15in UXGA screen; Harmon Kardon 2.1 audio built-in and a DVD burner. It’s certainly the most powerful laptop to enter the Atomic Labs.

And it is damn sexy. In the world of notebook design nothing comes close to Toshiba’s tough blue plastic clamshell with Audi TT influenced rear end. It is big, weighty and has enough blue glowy bits to soften the blow of moving away from the desktop.

Instead of a boring touchpad for mousing, Toshiba uses something it calls a cPad, which is a small monochrome LCD touchscreen with its own software, capable of running applications in its own right while also doubling as the touchpad. These include handy things like a calculator and calendar, making the cPad a useful device rather than the novelty one would expect it to be.

Another outstanding part of the design is the sound system. Usually notebook speakers sit squarely in the tinny and annoying basket, but Toshiba has continued its partnership with Harmon Kardon to design the speaker system for the 5220. This consists of two satellites built into the rear corners of the unit and a small subwoofer embedded in the base. While you will be unlikely to break any noise pollution laws with these speakers, they are remarkably crisp and clear and fine for gaming, DVD watching and listening to MP3s. And if they aren’t enough then you can always plug external speakers in.

The DVD burner in the 5220 supports DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R and CD-RW, which is a great achievement for a notebook PC, but falls behind the current trend towards desktop drives that support both the ‘+’ and ‘–‘ DVD standards. Besides this there is also a 5,400rpm 60GB hard drive and an expansion bay that can take another hard drive, battery or optical drive.

But all the features in the world matter little if the notebook performs like an underclocked Sinclair ZX 81. Thankfully it’s in the performance stakes that the Satellite 5220 leaves competing models for dust. This is thanks to the grunty, but by no means top end, 2.4GHz Mobile P4 CPU. For gaming however, the real heart of the machine is NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5600 Go chip.

We keep being blown away by the performance leaps that come with each new generation of laptop graphics, so we were eager to benchmark the sucker in pursuit of the holy grail of 10,000 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE Pro. We compared the results with the last great notebook performer in the labs, the Dell Inspiron 8200, which used a 2GHz Pentium 4-M and a previous generation MOBILTY RADEON 9000 graphics chip.

Frankly, it is astonishing to see how far notebook performance has come in such a short amount of time. We first tested the Satellite with Unreal Tournament 2003 to see real world gaming performance and were quite pleased. At 1,024 x 768 it averaged 63 frames per second, which is a very playable speed. This dropped to a passable average of 41 frames per second at 1,280 x 1,024 and a chuggy 25 frames at 1,600 x 1,200.

We then compared performance in 3DMark2001SE Pro with that of the Dell Inspiron 8200 and were suitably blown away. The 5220 was 25% faster than the Inspiron at 1,024x768 and 30% faster at 1,280x1,024.

Frankly, this is astonishing performance for a notebook. It’s a shame that modern games like UT2003 are not playable at the native 1,600x1,200 resolution of the Satellite 5220’s UXGA screen, but that’s a minor concern. This is hands down the finest notebook for gamers we’ve seen, and the fact it’s so incredibly laden with features is icing on the cake. The price tag is definitely daunting, but very reasonable for what you get.

Toshiba has again delivered the complete package with the Satellite 5220. With raw speed to burn, features galore and one of the best-looking cases out there, this is one of the most tempting luxury items on the market.