Toshiba T235D: AMD's 2010 Ultrathin "Nile" Platform
by Jarred Walton on August 23, 2010 11:00 PM ESTToshiba T235D: the Best AMD Laptop We've Tested
After going through all the benchmarks, features, etc. we come to the final tally, and for once we have an AMD laptop that we can recommend without hesitation. You're not going to have a great gaming experience on the T235D, but for everything else it works well and the price is right. It's easy to find laptops that are significantly faster, but such laptops cost more and generally fall short in the mobility areas of battery life and size. If you want a good thin and light laptop, Toshiba's T235D deserves a close look, and it delivers a good multimedia experience as well.
Not everyone will like the styling, true, but I can say that the look has grown on me during the time I've spent with the laptop. I'd still prefer a matte finish on all the silver plastic, but the glossy silver is a nice break from all the glossy black I've grown accustomed to seeing. The T235D is a thin and light laptop in every sense of the term, checking in at under 1" thick and weighing under four pounds. With battery life of 5-6.5 hours, very few users are going to need to carry their power adapter around for a single day's use. Also of interest is the 2-prong plug on the power brick, so you don't need to find an outlet with a grounding pin—fitting for a 45W adapter.
When it comes to competition, there are lots of options in the $600 range, but few deliver the same set of features and performance as the T235D. We did a quick search on Newegg, limiting pricing to $500 to $700, with sizes between 11.6" and 14.1" and a weight of less than 4.9 pounds. Perhaps the most interesting alternative is the Acer Aspire AS1551-5448, which sports similar specs to the T235D but with an 11.6" chassis. We hope to get one of those for review in the near future, although it looks like the keyboard carries over from the other 11.6" Acer laptops we've looked at in the past—in other words, not our favorite keyboard. HP's Pavilion DM3 is another alternative that uses the Nile platform. Naturally, there's plenty of competition from older CULV designs, so if you prefer battery life over multimedia capabilities (an area where the GMA 4500MHD is a definite liability) those laptops are still an option. Finally, if you like the look of the T235D but still want an Intel option, the T235-S1350 uses an Intel Pentium U5400 (a 1.2GHz 32nm Arrandale without Hyper-Threading support) for about the same price.
Widening our search a bit, we can find Acer's TimelineX 1830T with a price tag of $600, using the i3-330UM and equipped with 3GB RAM, or it's closer to $700 with an i5-430UM and 4GB RAM. You can also find the T235D-S1340 with 3GB RAM for $520. Even at $600, the T235D-S1345 is a competitive offering, but if you jump on the Office Depot $500 sale price (good until 8/28/2010, though you can likely find a similar sale down the road), this is an awesome bargain.
If you're willing to give up a bit of CPU performance relative to Intel's Arrandale ULV i3/i5 offerings, and a bit of battery life as well, AMD's Nile platform delivers a superior graphics solution and a good feature set at a great price. After playing with the T235D, there's no way I'd want to go back to the current Atom N450 netbooks; I'll give up four hours of battery life for a much better performance and multimedia experience in a hearbeat. We'll have to see what N550 brings to the table, but unless and until Intel gets a better IGP in Atom it's going to need some help. In the meantime, while we wait to see what AMD's Bobcat and Intel's Sandy Bridge bring to the party (more on that soon!), the Nile platform is a nice blend of performance and features and should please many ultraportable enthusiasts.
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stmok - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
From page 2: "Unfortunately, if you're looking for a more potent IGP from either company, you'll want to wait for Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer architectures."=> While the mainstream version of "Sandy Bridge" will have an IGP (coming in early 2011); AMD's Bulldozer won't.
The one's with IGP are AMD's "Ontario" processor (Bobcat cores), and "Llano" processor (K10.5 based, Athlon II-like configuration + Radeon HD 55xx/56xx-based IGP)...These will be the Fusion processors that AMD will bring to the table in late-2010 and early-2011.
Bulldozer-based Fusion processors are expected to come in 2012.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
Corrected. I said Bobcat in the other places (AFAIK), but I did mistakenly put Bulldozer in there.Also worth note is that Bobcat isn't just mobile Bulldozer for a change... it's a real reworking for mobility. In fact, not only is it not like Bulldozer, but it's a pretty major change even from K10.5 and K10. More on this in the near future....
Roland00 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
There are currently some leaked slides saying NDA until tommorrow, furthermore AMD is one of the participants of Stanford Hot Chips Conference. In the program material for the conference there is this detail for Tuesday August 245:00 - 6:30
Session 7: New Processor Architectures (Session Chair: Bevan Baas, UC Davis)
...
# AMD "Bulldozer" Core - a new approach to multithreaded compute performance for maximum efficiency and throughput
Authors: Mike Butler
Affiliations: AMD
# AMD's "Bobcat" x86 Core - Small, Efficient and Strong
Authors: Brad Burgess
Affiliations: AMD
http://www.hotchips.org/printableprogram.php
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
You can get our HotChips write-up here, now:http://www.anandtech.com/show/3863/amd-discloses-b...
zshift - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
"The Turion II K625 processor comes clocked at a relatively tame 1.5GHz.... The K625 bumps the clock up to 1.7GHz while the K325 drops to 1.3GHz, making the K625 a good middle-of-the-road choice."I believe the second mention of the K625 was supposed to be referring to a different model.
Roland00 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
K665, 1700 mhzK625 , 1500 mhz
matt b - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I've been asking for a Nile platform review and Anandtech delievered! I'm glad that your reviewed the k625 too - it seems like the best Nile option, though the K325 1.3 is not much different. It was a good, balanced review. I've seen this one at Office Depot - it's been at $500.00 more than once now. If only Office Depot carried any color other than red.Thanks!
maniac5999 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
The link from graphics to conclusion didn't appear for me, not sure if it was just a firefox hiccup or if it's missing.Anyway, good article. What is really interesting is the difference in graphics performance between the HD 3200 and HD 4225. Is there any underlying architectural difference, because with the same number of shaders I'd assume that the 3200 at 500mhz would beat the 4225 at 380mhz.
While the platform looks nice, i still think 12" is the magical size for an ultraportable. Oh, and if you sent back your U230 and want to get some numbers for it, please message me and I'll be glad to run numbers for you. (I think I run low 40s on average in SC2 with my 3200 turned up to 3300 speeds)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
I missed the page title for the LCD, which messed up the links. That's corrected now.As for the HD 3200 and HD 4225, they're very similar but 4200 series uses UVD2 while 3200 is UVD1. 4000 series is also DX10.1 versus DX10 on the 3200. Per clock performance of the 4200 appears to be higher as well, but I don' t know exactly what changed in that area.
For U230 SC2 numbers, we'd need to send you our test file as well, if we're to keep things apples-to-apples. We did send that one back to MSI, sadly, but I'm not sure if there's much need to retest all the old laptops. We'll be dropping the older stuff from the charts as we move forward and focusing on the newer laptops. Given the pricing and availability, there's not much reason to buy a U230 over the T235D now. I suppose if you want 12", but in that case what you really want is a U230 update with Nile.
maniac5999 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
well, it'd probably be nice to have a better datapoint for the last generation AMD Ultrathin platform than that turd 'Ferrari One' It would also help us determine if the 4225 is really more powerful than the 3200 or if all those games are just handicapped by the slow Ferarri One processor.It's completely up to you, If you send the file I'll take out my extra 2gb of RAM and run the benchmark.