Bennett Ring23 January 2009, 9:00 AM
We've always thought gaming laptops were a bit, well, pathetic really. But this behemoth has changed all that.
It’s big, it’s burly, and it’s bright red. It’s also bloody expensive, making Toshiba’s Qosmio X300 impossible to ignore. One of the few true gaming laptops on the market, it’s the antithesis of ultra portables such as the MacBook Air. And, despite the fact that we’ve previously criticised the concept of gaming laptops, we absolutely love it. Here’s why.
Toshiba has realised that it’s impossible to squeeze the power of a real gaming PC into a regular laptop chassis. While other manufacturers compromise on the power of their components by stuffing their “gaming” laptops into regular laptop cases, Toshiba has thrown all concessions to portability out the window. The X300 is housed in a case the size of a large concrete slab, and weighing just as much, at 4.2kg. At 412 x 306 x 65mm, only steroid-abusing body builders would consider this to be easy to move around.
Regular folks might think it’s grotesque in its appearance, but to a gamer, the X300’s glowing red translucent case with flame motif licking the top is simply stunning in its audacity. Four surround sound speakers and a sub-woofer are embedded into the case, courtesy of Harman/Kardon. Yes, we did say subwoofer. They’re not quite up there with a dedicated set of standalone speakers, but unlike most laptops, they’re actually quite usable for movie and game use, yet still not as good as a decent set of headphones.
A wide range of inputs and outputs are included on the case. HDMI out, an increasingly common feature on high-end laptops, allows for big screen connectivity, while SP/DIF out provides a Dolby signal for those with decent amplifiers. 3 USB ports and a combined USB/eSATA port give you plenty of room for additional toys, while a 5-in-1 card reader will keep photographers happy. Combine the 1.3 megapixel web cam above the monitor with the internal microphone and video conferencing is a breeze.
The keyboard is a full sized jobby, along with a numpad, and we’re chuffed to see that even the shift keys are full sized. There’s no need to relearn a weird, cluttered keyboard layout if you buy the X300. The keys are a little bit “clicky” for our liking, meaning that they don’t have the silent return of other laptops. Balancing out this negative is the fact that they’re constructed of a smooth, glossy material that feels delicious to the fingertips, almost like the plastic equivalent of silk.
Thanks to the massive case, a gorgeous 17in widescreen display is included as part of the package. At a resolution of 1,680 x 1,050, it’s wonderfully crisp, yet isn’t so high res that it requires a magnifying glass to read. The image quality is absolutely superb, being one of the finest screens we’ve seen on a laptop. A glossy finish makes it unsuitable for glary conditions, a problem that is thankfully quite rare in most dark gaming LAN dungeons.
Enough about the fluff though – let’s see what goodies Toshiba has included inside this behemoth to justify its back-breaking weight, not to mention bank-breaking price.
At the heart of the X300 is an Intel Core2 Duo T9400 CPU, running at 2.53GHz. Sadly, upon browsing the BIOS it appears there is no easy way to overclock the processor. Given the high potential of these chips it’s a shame that we couldn’t wring at least another 500MHz or so out of it, which this chip could do with ease. We’re guessing that heat dissipation is the limiting factor here, because even at default speeds the laptop generates plenty of room-warming air from its rear vents.
There’s plenty of memory for the CPU to draw upon, with a total of 4GB of DDR3 memory helping to explain the X300’s high price. Throw in another gig of memory for the video card and we can see that the Vista 32-bit operating system isn’t the smartest decision in the world. Toshiba isn’t the only company in the world to install an OS that can’t make the most of its laptops memory though, and it’s great to see that upgrading to 64-bit Vista is a cinch thanks to the inclusion of recovery media for Vista Ultimate 64-bit.
Two hard drives are included in the X300, but strangely they’re not operating in RAID mode. A 200GB drive spinning at 7,200RPM houses the primary partition and OS, while a separate 320GB drive trundles along at a more sedate 5,400RPM. We’re a little surprised at the omission of RAID functionality, but to be honest RAID is more of a like-to-have than an absolute necessity.
Finally, what truly separates this gaming laptop from so many of the other wannabes is its insanely fast graphics processor. The NVIDIA 9800M GTX leaves most desktop GPUs choking in its dust, let alone try-hard gaming GPUs such as the RADEON HD 3870 or GeForce 9300M.
It’s this GPU more so than anything else that makes this a truly worthy platform for your gaming bliss. Call of Duty: World at War, Fallout 3, even the mighty Crysis, all purred by with ease at medium to high settings. A 3DMark Vantage score of 3,964 shows just how powerful this laptop really is, while a PC Mark Vantage score of 3,873 proves that it’s just as capable at productivity and multimedia apps as it is at gaming.
Some will laugh at how ridiculously big this laptop is, while others will baulk at its even bigger asking price. But to an avid gamer, watching the wasteland of Washington DC run smoothly in Fallout 3, or seeing dozens of enemy soldiers glide past effortlessly in Warhammer Online, makes the X300 hard to resist. Now if only we could unlock the full potential of its zippy processor, we’d have a laptop that would rival most gaming desktop PCs in sheer computational power. Let’s hope a hacked BIOS isn’t too far over the horizon.
