Toshiba's Portégé R705 13.3" Ultraportable Notebook

by Ray Willington — Thursday, December 30, 2010, 01:04 PM EDT

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SiSoftware Sandra & Multimedia Benchmarks

Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2010

Synthetic Benchmarks

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2010, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default speed along with 4GB of DDR3 RAM running in dual-channel mode.

CPU Arithmetic Test; Click To Enlarge

CPU Multimedia Test; Click To Enlarge

Memory Bandwidth Test; Click To Enlarge

Physical Disc Test; Click To Enlarge

Our gauntlet of SiSoftware SANDRA tests show this particular ultraportable hanging close with other thin-and-light platforms. Everything was just about par for the course, though the CPU exceeded our expectations somewhat and the HDD tests made obvious how slow a 5400RPM hard drive in comparison to more expensive SSD options. No huge surprises here, but actually, just being able to keep pace with machines that are generally more expensive (and larger) than this one is impressive in its own right.

To test multimedia capabilities, we attempted to play back a 720p WMVHD clip, a 720p H.264 clip and a 1080p H.264 video clip.

Click To Enlarge; 720 H.264 - Toshiba Portégé R705-P40

Click To Enlarge; 720p WMVHD - Toshiba Portégé R705-P40

Click To Enlarge; 1080p - Toshiba Portégé R705-P40

In our video playback tests, we see that the Portégé R705-P40 is plenty capable of handling high-definition video. Both 720p and 1080p clips were perfectly smooth, even with applications running in the background. If you're only looking for good HD media playback (and don't much care about gaming), this machine is a champ. We'd definitely trust it as a media playback device for HDTVs via HDMI, despite only having an IGP pushing the graphics.