Toshiba Qosmio X300-150

[HawkMan]

Toshiba Qosmio X300-150 review

Design

The laptop has a black and red design. On the inside it’s very nice, with some nice chrome details with red plastic over creating a very neat effect combined with the mostly black of the laptop. It also has quite nice red lighted touch buttons as well as a lighted red bar on top of the touchpad.

However it also has some unnecessarily “look at me” cool teen gamer features. Like the triple red led effects on the upper corners next to the front speakers. And I’m not a huge fan of the red tribal flame graphics on the top cover of the laptop. Though that’s a taste thing, I’m not a fan of the graphics, and I’d rather my laptop cover be slightly more anonymous. I’f they done a dark red metallic that fades to black towards the edges(like acer does with their blue Gemstone laptops) I’d personally find that more tasty. But I can see other people would also like this graphics. But for me it’s a bit of a negative.

Once opened though it’s mostly all good, with a black surface, with a nice textured pattern on the surface, chrome mouse keys with a fingerprint scanned in between, and the red chrome details and red lights really do fit well with the black surface. The darker red color on the bezel around the screen, on the inside is also a lot nicer to me personally than the top.

There’s one big complain on the design on the inside though, Glossy keys. They like to reflect all light from the screen, and can in the right conditions be unreadable and often hard to read. Other than that when they’re not, they show every fingerprint. Look good to start with, but not great on a usability point.

Design: 3/5

Build Quality

Build quality so far is excellent on this thing. Yes it’s a lot thicker than most other laptops but that’s to be expected since it is a gamer/performance laptop. It feels solid and I haven’t noticed anything that doesn’t seemed solidly built as of yet.

And unlike my acer, the bottom screws haven’t all started falling out by themselves. Which I find is kind of a plus :). I am curious about dirt eventually falling through the big mesh on the cover over the rear speakers, but on the other hand, the big mesh will also make it easy to vacuum out any crap.

No latch on the screen, which means it has the slightly tighter and more solid hinges and that the screen will stay where you place it without feeling “loose”. Feels unusual not to have a latch on a big laptop to start with, but overall the quality of the hinges means it’s unnecessary and you just have to get used not having to hold in a latch to open the screen.

Build quality: 5/5

Functions

As for extra functions the laptop comes with a mini MCE remote that fits into the express card slot (it also comes with a dummy, that makes the expresscard slow more flush that with the remote). Nice feature for those that use it. Personally I have a mediacenter, and had to disable the remote receiver on the laptop to avoid starting MCE every time I opened the EPG or played a movie or anything on my actual media center :).

It also has a volume control wheel, and actually one, which I often miss on laptops nowadays. It’s a bit of a cheat though as it isn’t an actual start to stop potmeter, but just an endlessly rolling wheel. But it least it has one.

Above the keyboard it has the now obligatory row of touch buttons, one to start mediacenter, media playback buttons, sound mute, lights, webcam and dolby. The Dolby key simply starts the dolby sound panel wich allows you to do some simple adjustements of effects and bass. The webcam key is fairly self explanatory, and the light key will turn of all the laptop lights. The red lights on the touch buttons, the light on the on/off key, the strip above the touchpad and the silly upper corner leds. But not the super bright led on the WiFi toggle switch on the front.

It also comes with enough input/outputs for regular use with the following list:

• VGA

• HDMI

• Network

• ESata/USB2

• 3x USB2

• FireWire

• Mic in

• Headphone out/SPDIF TOSLink

• Memory card reader

The touchpad is also an ALPS device rather than the now more popular Synaptics pads used by most other manufacturers. I personally missed the ALPS pad from my old… OLD Toshiba and its back and forward gestures as opposed to the corner hotspots used by Synaptics. Of course, it’s kind of a letdown that the ALPS driver is somewhat limited in its design and the driver recognizes what exe is running and the back and forth gestures only work in some browsers.

Functions: 5/5

Performance

I bought the laptop because I wanted something I could actually use not only for regular web surfing, but also Photoshop, Lightroom, 3DS Max AND gaming. With the following specs I was expecting to do fairly decently:

• Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 / 2.53 GHz ( Dual-Core )

• 4 GB (Installed) / 8 GB (maks.) - DDR3 SDRAM - 1066 MHz ( 2 x 2 GB )

• NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GT - 1024 MB

I was far from letdown, in fact it outperformed any ideas I had. And plays any game I’ve thrown at it (Except age of Conan) at Max settings. On top of that, While my old Acer would get horribly hot on the surface, especially in the hand rest area, even from just idling. This not only runs whisper quiet (it speed up a bit when playing games, but by then the minor fan speed increase is drowned out by the game sounds) it’s also cool to the touch on the entire surface. In fact even the exhaust air coming out the back of the laptop is barely warm, unlike the F16 jet exhaust from my old Acer.

The large dual fans seems to be what allows it to run so quietly and combined with the large heat sinks, keeping it perfectly cooled. And can in fact even be run in passive cooling mode.

Performance: 5/5

Audio & Video

It’s a gaming and media laptop, which means you expect a few things from it in regards to Screen and audio. The screen itself is fairly standard laptop stuff, 1440x900 without the greatest vertical viewing angle. It’s ok, and looks great when gaming and watching movies, but in some situation vertical color variations can be visible and it’s not the best for photo work, but it’s ok. A bigger res screen would have been nice, but would also have reduced performance when running games at native res.

It also does not come with a BluRay player, for me that was ok, I didn’t need or want BluRay and definitely didn’t want the price jump a BluRay player would bring. In fact that’s also true for the screen, I had a limited budget and this was an expensive laptop, in fact it was pretty much as expensive as I could go. And I definatley got my money’s worth on, and it didn’t have the stuff I didn’t want.

That isn’t to say everyone wants a WXGA screen and no BluRay player, luckily the Qosmio X300 is made in multiple variants and this is one of the lower end models . so if you want it you can get WSXGA screens or Full HD and BluRay. Or Double Hard drives which can be run in Raid for extra disk performance and all that.

As for Audio The quad Harmon Karon Speaker system with a sub-woofer between the fans, really provides excellent sound for a laptop. Normally laptops have pretty crap sound and you’re forced to use headsets. This one though can not only play loud, it also plays good. As a Side not, while it has 4 speakers, it’s not a quad surround system like the one on the Acer media center laptops, but stereo only with the sound duplicated on the rear speakers. While you may think the solution on the Acer sounds better, that’s only on paper. In reality the sound quality on them is pretty poor , and the surround effect from a 5 speaker system where all the speakers are on a small surface in front of you is fairly minimal.

Audio& Video: 4/5

Battery time

Kind of a silly point on a laptop like this. Battery time is hardly a focus point on a performance laptop like this, despite that however I have so far been pleasantly surprised. I don’t have hard numbers yet, in fact I haven’t used it enough on battery for window to have created time estimates for the percentage of battery remaining yet.

Overall you can’t expect this to complete with ultraportables or MacBooks or Netbooks for battery time, it isn’t even intended to. You can however play for at least an hour or so on the tiny provided battery (and yes I said play and in games). Which is pretty good. My old Acer would last 2 hours if I treated it like Queen Sheba and kept the lid closed when it was new :p. but then Acer was never .

So while it doesn’t last as long as some other non-gamer 17 inch laptops, I need to set a score for the class of laptops it is. But I’ll be conservative since I don’t have much to compare with. I won’t give it full score :p

Battery time: 4/5

Conclusion

It’s a good solid laptop, with some great design and some design mistakes. It’s a big piece of hardware but makes up for this with performance, audio and cooling which are all excellent. It also doesn’t have the drive on the left side (which always annoyed me on my acer), interestingly in fact it places it facing forward. And no hot air blowing on my mouse hand, again a good plus.

Overall, being fair and not just going all out saying my new laptop is perfect , I’ll give it a 4/5 overall. Saying that though, The points that do detract from the score, such as the screen, primarily, would be fixed by going for a more expensive X300 model. Other things like the gaudy red led lights in the upper corners and the red tribal graphics, that can only be fixed by wire cutters and spray cans :p

Conclusion: 4/5

[ToneKnee]

That's an ugly laptop...

[HawkMan]

That's an ugly laptop...

Except for the flames on top it looks really good actually.

you shouldn't judge the looks by those pictures anyway.They don't even do the tribal flames justice, they're not nearly as ugly or visible as that, they'r emerely subtle color changes in the metallic paint.

[Gravity Blue]

I have never been a fan of Toshiba laptops, the specs are reali realli gud but the weird design really kills the whole deal. plus i dont like the positioning of speaker... its weird.

Dell laptops for the win!

[HawkMan]

I have never been a fan of Toshiba laptops, the specs are reali realli gud but the weird design really kills the whole deal. plus i dont like the positioning of speaker... its weird.

Dell laptops for the win!

I like the speaker position, and more importantly it provides for the use of very good speakers, and not the crap paper thin ones.

Witht he Dell XPS line being the only comparable option I tried setting up a similar model, and price wise it just couldn't compete, on top of that the graphics solutions where worse, with the best option being a 8700 before they jumped up to a dual 9800 gt, makes no sense.

I also think that the X300 series at least has a better design than the XPS lines, witht he nice curves and red chrome accents on the inside. As far as the top go, I don't care for the tribal flames on the Toshiba, I also don't care for the "caustic" effect top of the Dell.

The only real positive thing with the Dell's are the customization when you order, but again that comes at a price. custom built units will allways cost more than having a a few core lines.

Also one of my reasons for goign witht he Toshiba is because of previus experience with their build quality when I was studying, a lot of peopel chose dells, their build quality wasn't quite up to scratch. Sure better than Acer(not saying that Acer is bad, merely... meciocre... and sometimes bad), but not good either.

[+jamesyfx Subscriber²]

The performance is amazing, but like most recent Toshiba laptops - far too much gloss (Glossy keyboard? What are they thinking?), little bit too chunky, and those horrid horrid Harmon/Kardon speakers.

Those pictures kinda make it look better than it does. In real life it's a lot smoother looking, less defined. And the red is a lot redder.

[Vice]

That laptop looks terrible. Sorry but it just does I would never own anything that fugly.

[Subject Delta]

I kinda like it, but I would never use a Laptop over a Desktop as a gaming machine

[logicwin]

whats with the companies need to photoshop its products, like everyone does it >_>

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

it's so gaudy