Retro Review: Toshiba Libretto 50CT - Part 2
11th August 2026
In Part 1 we thoroughly explored the Toshiba Libretto 50CT and did a teardown to see what made up this cute little Windows 95 sub-notebook PC. In this Part 2, we'll run some benchmarks on it, and I'll also provide links to all the downloads I have for the device.
Benchmarking
My machine here has already been upgraded to Windows 98 SE, and it is fairly snappy. Something I noticed during my teardown and testing is that a previous owner had already given this little PC a speed boost by forcing the FSB from its stock 50 MHz to 66 MHz, making the Pentium 75 machine actually run at 100 MHz with a 1.5x CPU clock multiplier. I don't have before and after benchmark figures, sadly, but it's great this has been done. As I mentioned in Part 1, there are ways to further overclock the 50CT by increasing the CPU multiplier to 2x and even 2.5x, though from what I've read pushing it in this way will make the CPU run very hot and is far less stable at these speeds.
First, let's run some system information software on it:
SIV reporting processor
info and cache timings
SIV reporting graphics controller and memory timings
CPU Dhrystone and Whetsone performance
And now for some synthetic and real-world benchmarking. Note all of these were run in real mode DOS, not in a DOS window in Windows(!):
SpeedSys v4.78 - this is on par with a standard Pentium 100
Using ChkCPU and CacheChk confirmed
the 100 MHz and just a L1 cache present
NSSI's main opening page (which I forgot, *was* running in a DOS window, hence why it reads Protected mode in the info screens. The benchmark tables further down were run in pure DOS, so Real mode)
NSSI detail pages
Superscape v1.0 and v2.0 benchmarks
Chris' 3D Benchmark in 320x200 and 640x480
PC Player benchmark at 320x200 (8bpp) and 640x480 (8bpp)
Downloads
I have the original floppy disks for the Toshiba Libretto 50CT, but also found a number of other useful tools, utilities, and drivers when writing this article. For Windows 95, Toshiba provided a graphics driver for the C&T 65550, but Windows 98 came with its own.
