Toshiba's Satellite C55-C5 is a plastic gadget whose overall impression perfectly fits its low price. The moderately robust plastic casing, inferior input devices and the short battery runtime make the laptop feel cheap. But the CPU power, which is not limited in battery mode, and the Nvidia GeForce GT 740M mobile midrange GPU forge a solid multimedia package with impressive benchmark scores.
The Intel Core i5-3230M (2x 2.6 - 3.2 GHz) with two physical cores and Hyperthreading as well as the DirectX 11-capable Nvidia GeForce GT 740M midrange graphics card offer sufficient computing power for demanding tasks. However, the narrow 64-bit memory bus limits gaming suitability to a limited extent. The older GK107 version of the GT 740M, which is installed in this model, lags behind the more recent GT 840M with its twice as wide 128-bit memory bus.
As usual with budget notebooks, screen quality is an area of weakness. The Satellite C55-C5's low-resolution panel, which is only readable a few degrees off-axis, suffers from mediocre contrast ratio and colour coverage with only 60 percent of the sRGB colour space. As a result, the display is milky and fuzzy with poor readability. Its brightness of only 247 cd/m2 is also rather modest.