Ian Grayson05 September 2008, 10:59 AM
Still licking its wounds after a resounding defeat in the next-gen DVD stoush, Toshiba stubbornly continues to refuse to include Blu-ray drives in its top-end machines.
The dust might have settled after the protracted HD-DVD v Blu-ray battle, but the PC giant’s latest notebook offering still ships with just a standard DVD drive – that’s despite it coming with the wallet-emptying price tag of $3999.
The Qosmio X300 is being touted by Toshiba as an extreme mobile gaming PC, aimed squarely at well-healed gamers who want a grunty machine they can carry with them.
“We’ve created the X300, Toshiba’s fastest and most powerful notebook to date, that allows performance-hungry gamers to inhabit the most immersive game environments while on the move, whether it’s at home, at a friend’s place or at a LAN party,” says Toshiba product manager Anthony Geronimo.
Putting its inability to play hi-def disks aside, the X300 does stack up well in the performance stakes. Built around an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, it’s equipped with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX graphics card.
Also in the case are two hard drives: one 200GB drive running at 7200rpm and a 320GB drive turning at 5400rpm designed for high-speed backup.
Toshiba has included a 17-inch 1680 x 1050 widescreen monitor and five Harman/Kardon speakers (including a sub-woofer) which allows the machine to deliver room filling (and presumably neighbour annoying) sound.
Rounding out the specs, the X300 also sports an eSATA USB hybrid port that offers fast data transfer and three high-speed ‘Sleep-and-Charge’ USB 2.0 ports. These can be used to charge connected devices even when the main machine is in hibernation or switched off.
And to make sure your friends don’t miss the fact that you just dropped $4K on a new notebook, it comes housed in a head-turning fire-red casing that’s backlit with red LEDs. Let the games begin!