Toshiba Satellite M645: The Steady March of Progress

Conclusion: Many Compromises, but Few Alternatives

I think the most frustrating thing about reviewing the Toshiba Satellite M645 was that I wanted it to succeed and instead came away thinking about what might have been. This isn't a bad notebook by any stretch of the imagination: it runs cool and quiet, has USB 3.0 connectivity, and sports switchable graphics in a 14-inch chassis. It's also a happy sign of trickle-down for Blu-ray; my Blu-ray collection has swelled since I built my media center PC, and I won't buy a notebook without a Blu-ray drive at this point. Sandy Bridge brings improved battery life and performance with it, too, and Toshiba is gradually moving away from their aggravating Fusion finish with a better keyboard and less gloss. The problem is that Toshiba compromises and makes a lot of questionable trade-offs with a rather high asking price.

Sandy Bridge notebooks may not be on the market in full force yet, but they're coming, and we're betting ASUS will be hitting all of these bulletpoints at a lower price—that's what they've historically done (at least in recent years). Having tested the Satellite M645, I'm willing to forgive the mediocre battery capacity because the notebook still puts in a decent showing in actual running time. But why, in 2011, is a notebook being released for a grand that doesn't include gigabit ethernet? Why did the GeForce GT 525M get its operating clocks hamstrung when the chassis appears to be capable of supporting the extra thermal load? Why is Toshiba continuing to saddle their notebooks with slow hard drives when machines in the same price range are offering 7200RPM drives almost as a matter of course?

Again, the M645 isn't a bad machine. At $899 it would be justifiable, and at $799 it would be a killer deal. Besides, Blu-ray combo drives for laptops aren't exactly cheap, and keyboard backlighting is a definite plus. But the $1100 MSRP is too much, and even the $1000 street price is higher than we'd like. It feels like too much of a tax for early adopters of Sandy Bridge while retailers try to clear out their remaining Arrandale stock.

The problem is that while we'd like to see the price of the M645 drop another $100, there really aren't many direct competitors. Consider what you get: a 14-inch screen chassis, keyboard backlighting, Core i5-2410M CPU, and a GeForce GT "515M"... er... underclocked GT 525M. A search of the Internet turns up very few options, and none of them are actually cheaper and clearly better than the M645. By that metric, the Toshiba M645-S4118X is a contender, albeit one with flaws. Since we mentioned alternatives, though, let's give a rundown of the options.

MSI offers a somewhat comparable notebook with their FX420: you get a Radeon HD 6470M and lose the Blu-ray combo drive, but it's available for $800. Tack on $100 for Blu-ray, and the MSI lacks the backlit keyboard (another $40) and comes with a GPU that only has 160 cores—about 30% faster than the HD 5470 in the Dell Studio 14, if you're wanting a comparison. If you don't care about games or Blu-ray, it's a reasonable laptop, but then so is the less expensive ASUS K53E.

There are two laptops we'd seriously consider in the 14-inch market. First is the Sony VAIO C series. The Sony VPCCA15FX/W also comes with the i5-2410M, a 14-inch 1366x768 LCD, USB 3.0, 500GB 5400RPM HDD, and 4GB RAM. It switches out the NVIDIA GPU for an AMD HD 6630M, which should be pretty comparable in performance, and it supports hybrid graphics. Battery life is quoted as up to 5.5 hours, which looks comparable to the M645, and you get a backlit keyboard. So the two downgrades relative to this Toshiba are the RAM (you lose 2GB) and the optical drive (no Blu-ray support), with a price that's $30 higher. Still, it's a pretty sweet looking laptop. [Ed: Sony, if you're listening, please get in touch because we'd love to do a full review.] Dell's Vostro 3450 also stacks up well against the M645, with the same CPU and and GPU as the Sony, a backlit keyboard, and 6GB RAM; you lose Blu-ray and swap the slow 640GB 5400RPM HDD for a 320GB 7200RPM drive, for a slightly lower price of $964 at the time of writing.

Alienware also has their new M14x, but that plays in a higher price (and performance) range. $1200 will net you an i7-2630QM processor and the GeForce GT 555M, though, so it will be quite a bit faster than either the Sony or Toshiba options. It also weighs about a pound more, making it a rather hefty 14-inch laptop. At that point, you might as well start considering 15.6-inch notebooks. You can grab the Dell XPS 15 L502x with its excellent speakers, beautiful 1080p LCD, 500GB 7200RPM drive, and a properly clocked GeForce GT 525M for just $950—add on Blu-ray support and keyboard backlighting and you're looking at $90 more than the M645. Or if you can stomach the keyboard (yuck), there's the 15.6-inch Acer Aspire AS5750G-9639 for just $850.

There you have it: six viable alternatives, but none of them comes off clearly superior in every category. You can get faster laptops, cheaper laptops, larger and smaller laptops; what you can't get (yet) is a 14-inch LCD, 5.4 pounds or less, decent Optimus graphics, Blu-ray, and keyboard backlighting for under $1000. Let me be honest: I like Toshiba; my first laptop was a Toshiba and it was a great computer. The M645 definitely has a place in the market, but we're still a bit put off by the corners Toshiba chose to cut and the relatively high price. Unfortunately, that's the going price for moderately powerful 14-inch laptops.