Puma-based Toshiba Satellite A305 benchmarked and photographed

Well, would you look at this? Toshiba's Puma-equipped Satellite A305 hasn't even left the floor of Computex and it has already been benchmarked. Kudos to NotebookReview for snagging some quality hands-on / testing time with the 15.4-incher, which came stocked with a 2.1GHz CPU, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, dual-layer DVD writer, 1.3-megapixel camera and Windows Vista Home Premium. You know you can't wait for all the dirty details and pics to boot, so head on down to the read link and save yourself a trip to Taipei.

[Thanks, Kevin]

[Ninjakamster (PS360 FTW!) @ Jun 4th 2008 5:09PM]

What the **** is the trend with notebooks being glossy, from lids to the whole body? Do people like getting their notebooks smudged up and always wiping them off?

[polvadis @ Jun 4th 2008 5:15PM]

I agree. A friend just got a $1,400 Toshiba that's shiny as hell with all the gloss. I'm not even sure about the practicality of gloss everywhere, don't your hands get sweaty when you type for long? But even without that, gloss all around is just butt ugly, and somehow the better spec'ed the laptop the more gloss they throw at it. UGGHHH!!!

[happy_penguin @ Jun 4th 2008 7:45PM]

Don't worry. It won't be shiny for long. The scratches will take care of that.

[iofthestorm @ Jun 4th 2008 8:38PM]

Seriously, the freaking things are just fingerprint magnets and I can't see the screen when it's too bright. I don't understand what the point is. I just got an HP tx2110us which is one of their tablet PCs and while it's nice and relatively cheap for a tablet, I'm thinking my next laptop (in several years anyway) will be either a Dell Latitude XT or Thinkpad X61T, or their equivalents, because they aren't ridiculously shiny.

[ijaz @ Jun 4th 2008 5:27PM]

Yeah, the gloss thing sucks. I am now primarily going towards lenovos for my laptops because I love their simplistic and rugged design. But lets see if they can address the heat and power issues of the previous Turion procs.

[Adrian Williams @ Jun 4th 2008 5:27PM]

I wonder if the womans tat real

[fourthletter @ Jun 4th 2008 5:41PM]

Thats a pretty disappointing benchmark although i know wPrime is far from a perfect performance indicator.
My old HP laptop had a Turion X2 TL-52 and it got 4.7 in Vistas performance page.
Why oh why does AMD keep wheeling out the same creaky old 64 based tech with new names attached ?
I really used to support the underdog especially when their Athlon 64 designs were so much faster than P4 but i really have switched my old laptop really broke the camels back as it could have been used as a storage heater, the Turion X2 was fast but it eat batteries whole and melted my laptop in about 14 months.
I'll be sticking with Intel (or VIA) until AMD gives me a real world reason to buy differently.

[iofthestorm @ Jun 4th 2008 8:41PM]

These processors haven't changed at all as far as I can tell, Puma just adds a better IGP and chipset to the mix.

[Eli Gundry @ Jun 4th 2008 5:54PM]

So I was reading the article and I saw that he had to sneak benchmarking software on there when no one was looking.....

Stealth benchmarking will be a staple in MGS5, just so you know.

[Pfanne @ Jun 4th 2008 8:19PM]

they really got my hopes up, when i first read the news about puma...
but these benchmarks are aweful.... i really hope they only have to fix some driver issues and the final hardware is going to be more powerfull...

[bebop @ Jun 5th 2008 4:56AM]

What awful benchmarks? The CPU bench is equal to the T61 with a 2.2Ghz C2D T7500. So the AMD is nominally clock-for-clock competitive to the C2D here. The "gaming graphics" should be compared to whatever integrated solution Intel can field currently within Centrino, seems pretty ok, but I can't comment. Battery life is disappointing, Puma was supposed to have additional power saving features wasn't it? But as the reviewer points out: early days, and again the question is "compared to Intel's performance equivalant CPU" such as the T7500.

[Pfanne @ Jun 5th 2008 7:12AM]

i saw a few other benchmarks from a german website and the turion at 2,3 ghz had in some benchmarks problems against a core2duo with 1.6 ghz...
thats dissappointing and i really hope this is only a driver issue...

[David @ Jun 5th 2008 10:32AM]

Personally I think thats quite a good benchmark, what matters is how much power it consumes to get there.