Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Toshiba Ac Adapter
Toshiba's Satellite L850 is a 15.6in laptop that's designed primarily for home use. It's the type of laptop you should consider if you want something that can allow you to do a little bit of everything, including play games.
The engine room features a third generation Intel Core i7 CPU and an AMD Radeon HD 7670 graphics card, so you can definitely get some great performance out of this laptop. However, for what it is, the L850's price point is perhaps a little on the high side. Compared to similar models on the Aussie market that offer the same amount of speed, it should be a couple of hundred dollars cheaper.
The Satellite L850 isn't the type of computer that you can easily take with you to and from the office or the classroom. At 2.4kg, with a 15.6in screen and a thick profile, it's best suited to those of you who want a portable, relatively powerful desktop replacement-style notebook for the home, something you can move from room to room. That said, if you can put up with the weight of the laptop and its large power supply in your backpack, then it can most definitely be taken on the road.
Along the edges of the chassis, you'll find a built-in DVD burner, three USB ports (two of them being USB 3.0), a VGA port, an HDMI port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and an SD card slot. The SD card slot is located under the front-right lip of the unit and can be hard to use unless you lift the notebook up off the desk a little. Cards don't go all the way in either and stick out from the chassis. Annoyingly, every time an SD card or a USB storage device is plugged in to this laptop, the pre-installed Clickfree backup software is invoked. You'll need to uninstall this if you have no intention of using it or it will drive you crazy. There's plenty of other pre-installed software that you might want to assess the future of, too.
It's a well-built laptop with plenty of space inside its chassis for the CPU and the discrete graphics adapter such as Toshiba PA3032U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3165U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3080U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3516U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3290U-2ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3381U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3097U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3396U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3467U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3380U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3237U-3ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3283U-1ACA Ac Adapter. It doesn't get too warm when it's under a full load for a while, and we didn't find its fan irritating. There is a large vent on the right side for warm air to escape and the laptop sits on noticeable rubber stands that allow the vents at the bottom of the laptop to breathe, too. It needs to be a well ventilated machine considering that it ships with an Intel Core i7-3630QM CPU, a discrete AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics adapter and a 1TB hard drive. It also has 4GB of RAM installed, with a spare slot free for expansion.
We had no issues with the Satellite L850's performance during our tests. Regular desktop performance and Modern UI apps downloaded from the Microsoft Windows store ran perfectly well. In our Blender 3D rendering test, the 2.4GHz CPU and its eight threads (four cores plus Hyper-Threading) returned a time of 19sec, which is excellent. Our iTunes MP3 encoding test was also completed in a competitive 53sec, while our AutoGordianKnot DVD-to-Xvid test completed in 38min. The CPU also showed off its strength nicely in our Arcsoft MediaConverter 8 test, taking just 7min 29sec to convert a DVD file to an MKV file.
Gaming with this laptop is possible thanks to its Radeon HD 7670M graphics adapter. You'll be able to run many modern games quite well as long as you don't mind running at low graphics settings and at a low resolution. Games downloaded through the Windows store and played through the Modern UI should also run quite well on this machine. We tried Riptide GP and Adera Episode 1, and both ran flawlessly. In 3DMark06, the L850 recorded a score of 9223, which reinforces the fact that it can be a decent gaming laptop if you are on a budget.
Storage is handled by a Toshiba hard drive (MQ01ABD100) with a capacity of 1TB and a spin speed of 5400rpm. It isn't the quickest drive in town. This was shown in our file duplication tests, where it recorded a relatively low 32.61 megabytes per second (MBps). In CrystalDiskMark, it put up a read time of 114MBps and a write time of 110MBps. Unlike many new laptops however, it doesn't have a solid state drive installed to boost the laptop's boot time. That said, boot time was still a zippy 15sec in our tests, this being the time it took for the laptop to cold boot to the Windows login screen. It was able to resume from sleep within 3sec.
The L850's battery sits along the spine of the chassis and it's removable. It has a rating of 48 Watt-hours and it provides a life that is not too bad considering the notebook's class. In our rundown tests, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi (there is a single-band, 802.11n module from Realtek in this unit), maximise screen brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video, the L850 lasted only 2hr 37min. Laptops that we've seen with similar configurations, such as the old Medion Akoya MD 98068, for example, lasted a little closer to three hours in the same test. That said, if you employ a proper power management plan, a low screen brightness, and if you only use the laptop for tasks that are not CPU intensive, you'll get a good deal more out of it.
With Windows 8 running the show and a strong configuration under the hood, the Satellite L850 feels quite zippy for everyday work. It's a good unit to consider if you want something that can be used for productivity as well as fun tasks. It will run many games quite well and can be used to run the likes of Battlefield 3 comfortably, although at low graphics and resolution levels. However, we can't help but feel that the price point is just a little too high. A few competing laptops with very similar configurations, such as the 15in Dell Inspiron 15R, can be had for a couple of hundred dollars cheaper if you shop around.
If you need help using the new Windows 8 interface on a laptop such as this one, be sure to check out our Beginner's Guide to Windows 8. We show you how to use the Start screen and all of the other features that the new operating system offers.