Toshiba X300 gaming laptop "fastest ever"

Known more for its solid if sometimes stolid business laptops and mainstream consumer notebooks, Toshiba is cutting loose with a pumped-up gaming portable.

The Qosmio X300, showcased in Sydney recently as part of Toshiba’s launch of its Windows 2008 notebook lineup, is “the fastest computer we can build” according to Mark Whittard, General Manager of Toshiba Australia.

This means a meaty spec set built around high-octane components. The processor is Intel’s latest Core 2 Extreme X9100 mobile processor from the new Centrino 2 family – which kicks off at 3.06GHz, although it’s unlocked and thus overclockable to boundaries as yet unknown.

Whittard was unable to reveal specifics on the graphics system, other than to say that it used an “unannounced” Nvidia GPU but would “have in excess of 1GB of video RAM” when the X300 was let loose at the end of next month.

Our first thoughts was that the GPU could be a new member of Nvidia’s GeForce 9M series, which was in fact announced last month during Computex and which Nvidia claims to be up to 40% zippier than the previous GeForce 8M line. Press releases from overseas divisions of Toshiba cite the X300 as using an Nvidia GeForce 9800M GS card. But who knows how different our machine might be, and what’s being cooked up back in the Nvidia labs?

Regardless, the X300 is highly likely to support on-the-fly switching between integrated graphics and discrete graphics – a feature common to Intel’s Centrino 2 chipset and the GeForce 9M series (the later terms it ‘Hybrid SLI’). The notion is that dedicated graphics can run full-bore when the notebook is drinking deep from an AC socket, but when you’re out and about the integrated graphics can take over pixel-pushing duty in order to extend battery life (with the obvious side effect of reduced graphics performance).

Also tossed into the pot are dual hard drives to 640GB and a 5.1 Altec Lansing speaker system. And just in case you don’t get that this is a fire-breathing laptop, the lid is patterned with licking red flames – subtle, it ain’t!

The theme is continued with the warm glow of red LEDs illuminating the multimedia bar, the touch pad and the bezel surrounding the tweeters which are embedded into a textured black palm rest, which in turn contains a touchpad that’s smoothly integrated into the panel rather than sitting as a discrete object.

About the only thing that Toshiba hasn’t done is introduced a new gaming brand instead of making the X300 a member of the Qosmio family. We’re thinking that ‘pwnage’ could work. Yeah. The Toshiba Pwnage X300.

But if you think this big boy can’t get any beefier, Whittard told APCmag.com there’s already a second generation model on the roadmap. This will get the same Quad-Core HD graphics processor as the new Qosmio G50, along with an upgrade to an 18 inch screen. We also got the impression that Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9300 quad-core notebook superslab might also find its way under the hood of the Pwnage – sorry, Qosmio – X400.