Performance (cont’d)
Speaking of graphics, the E-240 is fully DirectX 11 compatible and should be capable of better performance than previous low-voltage processors. But is it capable of handling real gaming?

Toshiba Satellite C655D AMD E-240 Fusion APU Notebook Review - Mobile 30

Toshiba Satellite C655D AMD E-240 Fusion APU Notebook Review - Mobile 31

Toshiba Satellite C655D AMD E-240 Fusion APU Notebook Review - Mobile 32

The answer is; not really. At the native resolution of 1366×768 neither Far Cry 2 of Just Cause 2 are enjoyable at medium or low detail settings, respectively. The games look fine, but the graphics firepower just isn’t there.

On the other hand, the 3DMark score is clearly better than previous solutions available from AMD and Intel. It even stomps the ION graphics provided by the ASUS Eee PC 1201N. With this in mind, I decided to run two more tests that are probably more relevant to how this processor will be used.

Toshiba Satellite C655D AMD E-240 Fusion APU Notebook Review - Mobile 33

Toshiba Satellite C655D AMD E-240 Fusion APU Notebook Review - Mobile 34

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a great indie tower defense game available on Steam. It isn’t the most demanding game in the world, but on high detail settings it looks quite good, and I think it’s generally representative of the kind of 3D graphics you’d expect from an indie game. The performance of the E-240 here was great, as it managed an average of 22 frames per second. Although closer to 30 would be preferable, it isn’t necessary in games with a slower pace, and backing the detail settings of this game down to medium results in a nice bump if you really feel an average of 22 FPS is insufficient.

That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is the Youtube performance results. At 720p fullscreen the performance of the E-240 is workable; it’s noticeably choppy, but you can at least tell what is going on. Bump the resolution up to 1080p, however, and the entire video comes close to a halt. To be fair, it’s unlikely that any E-240 powered laptop will have a display that capable of fully realizing the difference between a 1080p and 720p Youtube video, but I was hoping that at least 720p would display without chop. This is a big negative, in my opinion; Youtube is used by almost everyone, from teenage tech-heads to grandmothers.

With that aside, it’s time to move on to our final test; boot and resume times.

Toshiba Satellite C655D AMD E-240 Fusion APU Notebook Review - Mobile 35

Here we see, once again, that the processor in a laptop does not always determine its boot times. Although far from the quickest laptop to boot, the C655 is barely bested by the Lenovo U260 and ASUS G53, both of which have substantially quicker processors. The same goes for resume times.

Overall, these performance results are mixed. On the one hand, it’s obvious that the graphics capability of the E-240 processor in the C655 is strong. But the single-core 1.5 GHz CPU is simply insufficient for many tasks.

Subjectively, the slow performance of the E-240 in our benchmarks was reflected in day-to-day use. Programs load slowly and web browsing can become a pain once you’ve opened more than three or four tabs. I received a “This Program is Not Responding” error on multiple occasions, not because a program was actually malfunctioning, but rather because the E-240 was overwhelmed and couldn’t switch tabs, load a program, or move a file quickly enough to keep Windows from thinking something had gone wrong.

When the netbook craze hit about two years ago, many commenters said that netbooks were great because they provided all of the performance your average user reasonably needed. That was false then, and it’s still false today. Yes, Auntie Brown, who checks her email once a day and thinks of the soft drink whenever someone mentions “tab browsing,” is unlikely to mind the performance. But most users are going to have to negotiate with the limitations of the E-240 on a regular basis. This might be a reasonable sacrifice considering the price, but it would be simply untrue to act as if the limitations of the E-240 won’t be obvious to anyone who uses a computer regularly.

« PreviousNext »