19. Summary

Toshiba's Satellite 5200 definitely offers a mobile entertainment machine that possesses several outstanding features:

As far as system performance is concerned, the machine is totally convincing. The maximum battery life with office applications is just below three hours, which we rank as good.

How far Toshiba exploits the performance capacity of nVIDIA's current top model for mobiles, the GeForce FX Go 5600, can only be estimated. Neither the GPU manufacturer nor the notebook maker was able or willing to make binding statements about the clock rate used for the core and the graphics memory. We cannot explain why Toshiba does not provide details, or why it is preventing common tools from reading these values correctly. As already mentioned above, that type of behavior merely provides fertile ground for rumors about the stability of the GeForce FX Go 5600 at maximum clock speeds.

However, the results yielded with 3D graphics show that, from now on, games with full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are possible on a notebook with acceptable frame rates. For true gamers, however, the driver error with the odd game title - as seen on the test device, at least - will prove annoying. Toshiba should act on this immediately. Although the DX 9-capable GPU tested is closer to the performance level of a desktop system than its predecessor, the GeForce4 Go , mobile GPUs still conceal the disadvantage that, even with the most recent drivers, support proceeds very slowly. The notebook manufacturer also does not offer the user any upgrade option in the form of a plug-in card.

At this point we cannot answer the question of whether nVIDIA or ATi offers the more sophisticated DX 9 graphics solution. In a preliminary test on an engineering sample, the Mobility Radeon 9600 proved to be quite powerful. In about a week we should be able to reach a verdict, based on a model available on the market, on which of the two is faster. So stay tuned.