Mobile Computing News

Photo: Toshiba

The Toshiba is mostly black, with a liberal spread of scarlet red. It looks like a high-performance Toshiba gaming laptop, which may be attractive to some but off-putting to others. If red isn’t your thing, steer clear. If it is, and you prefer your machine look like it can put in the heavy legs, short of putting aerodynamic slits on their machine, the Toshiba Qosmio X500-128 looks the part.

Display

The glossy display, at 18.4-inches is enormous. Really, it is huge, making this laptop less and less like a laptop, to be fair. The display’s aspect ratio is the contemporary 16:9 but with an unusual resolution of 1680×945. And, at 18.4 inches, its an absolute energy sapper. Added to that it weighs in at a hefty 4.6kg, so this desktop replacement notebook isn’t meant to be used on your lap, so to speak. It’s meant for a desk where power is not a concern.

With regards to the screen’s actual performance, we were disappointed relative to our expectations. Naturally, gloss makes outdoor use a no-no – but given the heftiness of it all, you aren’t planning on doing that are you? Additionally, the viewing angle is respectable along the horizontal plane. Where it is not so impressive is on the vertical plane, with colour and brightness being lost with the slightest movement.

Input devices

The keyboard on the Toshiba Qosmio X500-128 is fantastic. Given the unreal proportions of this desktop replacement notebook, you’d expect the keys to be well spaced, which they are. An isolated number pad is also included, which is always a plus.

On the other side of the coin, the touchpad on the Toshiba Qosmio X500 is atrocious. Inputs on the buttons are hit and miss, with frequent unresponsiveness being the order of the day. The actual touchpad has difficulty tracking mouse movements, leading to an overly jerky and laggy experience. How Toshiba, who have among the best input devices in all of computing, could let this ship in this condition is beyond us.

Performance

The one area we expected not to be disappointed in is in performance, with the Toshiba Qosmio X500 obliging. Our two biggest concerns were how competent a media player it was, since the massive screen plus built-in Blu-ray ROM leant itself to this. Our second concern was how it performed in gaming stakes, especially considering that bizarre resolution.

With regards to Blu-ray playback, there’s nothing to report here but the good. The omission of 1920×1080p is disappointing, but hi-definition content slightly scaled down still looks great, and most users will be hard pressed to see a difference.

On a gaming front, we ran the gamut of resource hogs, with Crysis, and Modern Warfare II, and Dirt 2 to put it through its paces. With Modern Warfare II and Dirt 2, the game ran over the minimum 30fps one expects on full resolution with settings on high and anti-aliasing at 4x. Crysis, as is normal with Crysis, was not at all agreeable with that, so with setting scaled down to 1024×768 resolution and medium, it stabilised over 30fps. Clearly the Nvidia GeForce GTS360M and the Intel Core i7 720QM matched with the high RAM count makes this a very capable gaming laptop, though getting an external mouse is a must.

The verdict

In all, the Toshiba Qosmio X500 is a fantastic gaming laptop. It isn’t at the absolute bleeding edge of what desktop replacement notebooks or gaming laptops can achieve, but it’s pretty close. With the Intel Core i7 720QM and the Nvidia GeForce GTS360M doing the heavy lifting, this Toshiba gaming laptop wins on all counts. Buy this. It’s great value for money. But don’t forget to get a mouse to go along with that because the trackpad really is that bad.