Driver Toshiba NB510
Review Toshiba NB510 from pcpro.co.uk
The netbook fad may have died down, but Toshiba is one of several manufacturers keen to prove there’s life in the form-factor yet. Its little NB510 looks strikingly similar to last year’s model from the outside, but it’s the first to sport Intel’s Cedar Trail update to the Atom platform.
Cedar Trail isn’t a huge update, but it does bring some improvements. It brings a die-shrink to a 32nm fabrication process, a change that promises lower power consumption and less heat output. It now has support for faster DDR3-800 and DDR3-1066 RAM (the previous models topped out at DDR3-667), and although the CPU architecture remains relatively unchanged from the previous Pineview platform, the integrated GPU gets a big boost.
Cedar Trail waves goodbye to the old GMA 3150 and ushers in the all-new GMA 3600 and 3650 cores – tweaked versions of PowerVR’s SGX 545 chipset. Where their predecessor struggled even with standard-definition video streaming, the new generation introduces Full HD hardware decoding. It’s a change that means you can expect to see HDMI ports appearing as standard on Cedar Trail netbooks.
