Toshiba is a reliable choice if you're looking for a solid mid-range laptop,
and the S50D-A-10G aims to continue that tradition with a tempting price
of £480 -around US$820, AUD$870. At this end of the market, there's an
interesting battle going on between Intel and AMD: while many systems still
make do with Intel Core-branded chips, more than ever rely on AMD's APUs.
The S50D is one such machine. It's powered by an A10-5745M, which is
the most potent APU that AMD currently puts inside laptops.
It's got four cores, and each of those uses the Piledriver architecture –
Those four cores run at 2.1GHz, and they'll hit a peak of 2.9GHz using
Turbo mode. APUs usually impress thanks to integrated Radeon graphics
cores, but Toshiba has gone one step further with this machine: instead
of relying on the Radeon HD 8610G core, it's fitted an HD 8550M
discrete GPU.