Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 review: A rare slim gaming laptop, at a mainstream price

Why can't I get what I want? It doesn't seem too complicated to me, but I find myself frustrated at every turn by the PC industry. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I want a reasonably thin, reasonably good-looking laptop, with a high-quality touch screen, and a decent discrete graphics card for gaming. Of course, I don't want to pay too much for it.

7.7

Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277

The Good

With a new Intel Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia GPU, a 1TB hard drive, and a touch screen, the <b>Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277</b> is a genre-buster laptop.

The Bad

Hitting its $999 price clearly required some compromises, and the low-resolution 15-inch screen takes the fun out of gaming and media watching.

The Bottom Line

The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 comes close to being a great mainstream slim gaming laptop, but it's undone by an unimpressive display.

The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 is the latest to promise this to the world, but deliver significantly less. It's painfully close to being a near-perfect laptop, offering a new fourth-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, a reasonably good Nvidia GeForce 740M graphics card, 12GB of RAM, and a huge 1TB hard drive, all for $999.

What's not to like? Well, if you've got a solid CPU-GPU combo for playing games, you're going to want a decent screen to play on, and that's where the S55t-A5277 falls painfully short. While it's a touch screen, which is practically a requirement for Windows 8 these days, it has a low screen resolution of 1,366x768 pixels. That's rare in midprice, midsize laptops these days, and I can't imagine feeling good about paying $999 for a laptop that's not at least 1,600x900. On top of that, the screen just doesn't look very good.

I had high hopes for the S55t-A5277 as a mainstream gaming laptop that could also work as an everyday slim 15-inch productivity machine, but the poor display sticks a real wrench in that plan. Laptop gaming is a question of choosing priorities, with high-end gaming rigs such as the Toshiba Qosmio X75 and Razer Blade lacking a touch screen, and most sub-$1,000 laptops being stuck with basic integrated graphics.

That one major flaw, the screen, aside, the S55t-A5277 is more than powerful enough for everyday use, with a slim body, optical drive, plenty of ports, and better components than you usually find outside of very expensive premium laptops. It's so close to what I want that it's especially frustrating to see it fall short.

Design and features
Toshiba's entire laptop line has been slightly redesigned for the 2013 back-to-school season, although the S55t-A5277 isn't radically different from previous Toshiba Satellite models. The body is a mix of brushed aluminum and black plastic, with an understated two-tone design that would work in an office, coffee shop, or at home. If the system cost a few hundred dollars more, it would be too plastic-feeling, but as priced, it's just right.

While not as thin and light as Razer's Blade gaming laptop, the S55t-A5277 is close to other 14- and 15-inch ultrabook-style laptops we've seen (although that term is used too extensively these days to cover a very wide range of sizes and weights). It's just over 5 pounds and a hair thicker than 1 inch, but considering the discrete GPU and Core i7 CPU, that's pretty good.

Toshiba's keyboard style is built around chunky square keys that offer a satisfyingly deep click under your fingers. This keyboard looked and felt a lot like the one on the recent Qosmio X75, with generous flat-topped keys, plus a full-size separate number pad. Toshiba laptops have oddly short spacebars, which I always find hard to get used to, but at least the function keys are reversed, which means you don't have to hold down the Fn key to access the volume, brightness, and other controls on the F1 to F12 keys. The keyboard is also backlit, which is a nice extra in a midprice laptop.

The offset buttonless click pad is closer to the left side of the laptop body, centered under the similarly offset keyboard (the number pad pushes the keyboard and touch pad to the left). The pad itself is large, so there's room for multitouch gestures, and two-finger scrolling is reasonably smooth.

No company is as adept at cluttering the Windows 8 tile interface with adware as Toshiba. By default, you're treated to full- and half-size tiles for WildTangent games, as well as Vimeo, Hulu Plus, Norton, eBay, I Heart Radio, and others. This was the industry standard several years ago, to be sure, but since then, most PC makers have moved to a more stripped-down initial setup, knowing that consumers like to pick and choose what tiles, icons, and shortcuts they see every day.

But despite everything there is to like about the system's design, components, and features, you can't get away from that screen. On a true budget laptop, a 1,366x768-pixel-resolution, 15.6-inch screen with an overly glossy glass overlay and poor off-axis viewing might be a reasonable tradeoff, but for $999, and with the expectation that the included Nvidia GeForce 740M graphics card is going to be used for gaming, it's tough to swallow. For everyday use, it'll suffice, but you'll find a lack of screen space, and it's not even optimal for 1080p HD video content.

The Harman Kardon speakers, long a Toshiba staple, are good for a 15-inch laptop, but not especially distinguishable from other midsize multimedia systems. With more space for bigger speakers, the 17.3-inch Qosmio X75 we tested recently had the kind of room-filling sound you want from a laptop that's playing games, movies, or music.

Connections, performance, and battery
The old-fashioned VGA port may be slowly going out of style with PC makers, but you'll still find one here, alongside a more useful HDMI port. I always appreciate dual headphone/mic jacks over a single combo audio connection, but the lack of Bluetooth seems like a less-than-optimal way to save a few bucks on this configuration.

While our very well-equipped $999 review configuration has a Haswell-generation Core i7 CPU, with discrete Nvidia graphics, 12GB of RAM, and a big 1TB hard drive, you can get the Satellite S50 series down to $549 with a last-gen Core i3, no GPU, a 500GB hard drive, and 8GB of RAM -- but that's pretty standard for the $500-to-$600 category, and every version includes the same 1,366x768-pixel touch screen.

In benchmark tests, the new fourth-generation Intel Core i7-4700MQ performed excellently, and was nearly identical in application tests to the high-end Qosmio X75 desktop replacement laptop we recently tested. This is probably more CPU than anyone buying a mainstream 15-inch laptop needs, and should future-proof the system a bit.

The Nvidia GeForce 740M GPU is the other big hardware highlight, as it's very rare to find a slim midsize laptop with a discrete graphics card, and it's also rare to find a GPU paired with a touch screen (although, as mentioned previously, this particular screen doesn't quite measure up). Despite this, gaming performance was a bit underwhelming, as the GeForce 740M isn't nearly as powerful as the next couple of mobile GPUs in Nvidia's chain.

For our tests, we output the video signal to an external monitor, so we could run games at 1080p (the resolution we test other gaming PCs at), and the S55t-A5277 ran our BioShock Infinite test at 11.5 frames per second, and Metro: Last Light at 4 frames per second. Of course, both of these are intense tests run at high detail levels. Anecdotally, Metro: Last Light ran decently when the resolution was dialed back to 1,600x900 and detail levels were set to low, and other games ran well at 1,920x1,080 with medium or low detail levels. The system is fine for mainstream PC gaming, but higher-end PC games will hit a ceiling. If you're restricting yourself to 1,366x768, it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Battery life might be a problem with a Core i7 CPU and a graphics card, but the new, very efficient Intel Haswell platform continues to make strides. This system ran for 4 hours and 32 minutes in our video playback battery drain test, which is decent for the high-end specs, but still about 3 hours less than the Razer Blade gaming laptop managed.

Conclusion
The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 comes so tantalizingly close to being my perfect slim, midprice gaming laptop that the ways it falls short feel even more pronounced. Just having the option to put these high-end parts in a very mainstream-looking 15-inch laptop is a big plus, but hitting that $999 price clearly dictated some cut corners along the way. In this case, the low-quality, low-resolution screen is such a visible part of the machine that it makes it hard to appreciate how good the rest of it is.

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System configurations

Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277
Windows 8 (64-bit) Intel Core i7-4700MQ; 12GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 740M; 1TB HGST 5,400rpm hard drive

Razer Blade 14
Windows 8 (64-bit); Intel Core i7-4702HQ; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M; 128GB Samsung SSD

Asus VivoBook S500CA
Windows 8 (64-bit); 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U; 6GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 32MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 4000; 500GB HD + 24GB SSD

Toshiba Qosmio X75-A7298
Windows 8 (64-bit); Intel Core i7-4700MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 770; 256GB SSD+ 1TB 7,200rpm HD

Sony Vaio Fit SVF14A15CXB
Windows 8 (64-bit); 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3427; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 32MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 4000; 750GB Toshiba 5,400rpm hard drive