Notebook Hunter

Entertainment buffs are going to get a lot of mileage out of the Toshiba Satellite A660/07R. Not only does it have the requisite Blu-ray burner and TV tuner, it’s 3D-capable as well! For $1,699 it’s definitely one of the best value entertainment notebooks for sale at the moment.

Keeping the Blu-ray burner and TV tuner humming along is a slightly old but still fast Intel Core i7-740QM (1.73GHz) processor. In addition to playing Blu-ray movies in 3D and recorded TV, the 3D functionality is well utilised by the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 350M graphics card. Call of Duty: Black Ops is a very new game that’s been designed specifically to work with 3D, and the graphics card has the grunt needed to run it at high settings. It might not be a gaming notebook, but the performance is much better than many other entertainment notebooks. Finally, there’s 4GB of RAM to keep programs and games happy.

For burned Blu-ray movies and recorded TV the 640GB hard drive is reasonably large, but an external USB hard drive might come in handy in the long run. Normally a 15.6in (1.366x768 resolution) screen would be a let-down in an entertainment notebook, but the resolution is limited by the 3D technology in the screen itself. It’s still good quality though, and it’s not going to seriously hamper enjoyment of Blu-ray movies. Surprisingly enough the portability is equal to many allrounders, as the A660 weighs 2.62kg and measures 35.6mm thick, 254mm deep and 380.5mm wide.

See the Toshiba Satellite A660/07R in the Notebook Hunter database here.

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