Toshiba A665-3DV: 3D or Not 3D?
by Jarred Walton on October 6, 2010 12:05 AM ESTBig Battery for Okay Battery Life
With relatively high-end components and no switchable graphics, battery life is understandably not going to set any records. However, Toshiba does make some amends here by stuffing in a gigantic 12-cell 98Wh battery. The result is that while the system uses quite a bit of power, it can still manage over four hours of battery life in ideal circumstances. We set the CPU for 0% performance (hey, a quad-core i7 with Hyper-Threading is still plenty fast even if locked to 933MHz) and calibrated the LCD to 100nits—58% for the A665-3DV.
Considering the performance, battery life is actually quite respectable. 4.5 hours at idle, 3.5 hours for Internet use, and 2.5 hours of x264 playback manages to beat out the ASUS N61Jv and the AMD-based Toshiba A660D. The catch of course is that the battery capacity is literally twice that of many of the other laptops in our list. If you want all-day mobility, you're still better off with something like the ASUS U30Jc. However, if you're after a quad-core notebook with a fairly fast GPU, the A665-3DV acquits itself well enough. Note of course that in the relative battery life metric, it does place dead last out of the tested laptops, with the other quad-core i7 (Dell Studio 17) one rung up the ladder.
(Incidentally, we're also looking into the ASUS U35Jc battery life a bit more to see if we can figure out why our figures are so much worse than the U30Jc; other sites are reporting better battery life on the U35Jc, so we're running some additional tests to see if we can track down the cause/resolution.)
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Stuka87 - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
What a horrible resolution. 1366x768 on a 15.6" display!? This res is almost usable on a 12-13" display (And thats pushing it), but on a 15.6"?? Is this machine tailored towards old people with vision issues or something?Ok, back to reading. Had to vent :)
Spivonious - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I agree that 768 vertical pixels is not very much to work with, but the screen here is still 100dpi, which is slightly better than the standard 96.nubie - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I for one think it is the correct choice.How is the video card to push more pixels than that anyway?
Buy a different laptop, or upgrade the panel yourself if it bugs you.
blackshard - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Thanks a lot for the hwmonitor readings! :)It's really interesting to see expected temperatures and real battery capacity in such notebooks!
Michaelsm - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Yes, Thanks a lot for the hwMonitor readings. As I commented the other day, my Toshiba (M645 with a 6 cell) had an initial wear of 36%!!! 3 cycles later it is down to 7%.cknobman - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
until the industry gives up on the freaking 3D gimmick.nubie - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Have you tried it?I have made several 3D setups myself and favor passive glasses and dual monitors or projectors (1 per eye).
In many situations the 3D is stunningly immersive. Racing games for example have a fantastic feeling of speed as the depth of objects hurtle toward you.
Watching the apex of a corner approach and searching the distance for your braking point feel good. As does overtaking a slower car.
Even if you personally feel it is a gimmick, how is the industry or how are you personally caused any harm?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
If you missed it in the text, we're looking to replace Peacekeeper with something that feels more relevant. Does anyone have a good "Internet benchmark" they want us to start using? Something that captures the speed of page loads, transitions, etc.?Stuka87 - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I have looked around a bit for my own reasons, and outside of the ones made by the browser makers (which are all pretty biased one way or another), there isn't much to choose from.I think I pretty much came up with just needing to write one from scratch using the browsers API with FireFox or the like.
alphadog - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I'm getting pretty tired of the lack of properly-sized LCDs on laptops. I know the LCD is one of the more costly components in margin-thin laptops, but really? 768 vert?!?