Toshiba Qosmio X770 - Your New Pet Monster

 Your New Pet Monster

Make no mistake about it. As long as there are PC games, there will definitely be gaming laptops. Wait, did you say you’d rather play your games on a desktop? That may be a valid point, but for some, being tied down to a single LAN cable or even a single location is not an option. For these folks, there is an urge to remove themselves from these needless shackles, and to enjoy their games anywhere and everywhere.

Besides, it makes organizing a LAN gaming party that much easier. Just pop one of these monster notebooks into the bag and you’re good to go. Hence, we would like to introduce you to what may potentially be your gaming companion. Traveling gamer, meet your new best friend, the 17.3-inch Toshiba Qosmio X770.

At first glance, you might not know what to do with this behemoth (3.34kg) of a notebook. Do you let it stay on your desk, or do you start playing the latest games at your nearest Starbucks? Well fortunately, the answer is, “you can do both”. Its Core i7-2630QM processor (quad-core, 2.0GHz) is fast enough to allow it to be a fairly competent productivity machine for serious work (what is serious work?), while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M (with 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM) and 8 GB of system memory are stout enough to take on all the games you can throw at it.

The NVIDIA 3D glasses (part of the NVIDIA 3D Vision package) and software that come with the machine even allows you to play your favorite games and movies in stereoscopic mode, even if they weren't designed for them. But at S$3799, you’d really have to ask yourself if a portable, powerful, loud and 3D capable gaming machine is what you need (we already know it's what you want).

 

Metallic Plastic

The Qosmio X770 is big. So big that the conventional laptop bag you already have just won’t cut it. Its exterior is completely plastic, with a grey metallic finish with splashes of (blood) red on the Qosmio logo and the bottom of the lid. The organic looking texture on the lid surrounding the logo helps with controlling fingerprint smudges.The shape of the Toshiba Qosmio X770 seems to complement the organic texture found on the lid, with no hard or sharp edges jutting out, ready to draw blood. Everything here is rounded which allows for it to be held fairly comfortably.

The use of plastic all over the machine is however quite disappointing, given its high price tag. It doesn’t matter if the plastic has a finishing called “Metallic Urban Grey” because metallic looking plastic is still plastic. But of course it’s also thanks to the plastic finish that the X770 weighs in at 3.34kg rather than something closer to 5kg (which reminds us of Dell's chunky Alienware series).

There are no ports found on the back of the machine, so don’t bother looking there for anything. All of the ports that you need are found on the left and right profiles of the laptop, which include three USB 2.0 ports, a single USB 3.0 port, an HDMI output, VGA out, docking connector and power jack. The Blu-ray drive is also found on the right side of the notebook. Towards the front of the machine, there is the 5-in-1 card reader slot, along with a row of status LEDs that are visible (big plus point) even when the lid is down.

 All-You-Need Inside And More

Open up the laptop, and you will be greeted with the same color scheme, and the same metallic looking materials, with the same red gradation. The touch-sensitive multimedia controls are close to the screen, just the way we like it because pressing the function button to change the volume is not how we roll, especially when we’re hard at work shooting zombies (yes we're Zombie fans!) and/or enemy soldiers.

The Harman Kardon stereo speakers are located at the edges of the red gradation, which is a good spot because it doesn’t get in the way of anything. Sound from the Qosmio X770 is exactly how you’d imagine it to be. It’s clear, crisp and most of all, it’s LOUD, perfect for hearing the enemy sneaking up on you. The subwoofer also delivers bass that while isn’t earth-shattering, is quite adequate for a portable gaming machine, and even better for movies on the go (but please not in the bus, library or train without your headphones).

The red backlit chicklet keyboard - while not surprising these days - is very much appreciated. Keys are placed a good distance apart from each other, ensuring that typing is a relatively pain-free experience. And even though the QWERTY portion of the keyboard was fairly spacious, Toshiba also found enough space (granted that's not very hard for a 17.3-inch notebook) to include a number pad. These extra keys allow for gamers to attach gaming functions to them, a feature that could be invaluable to experienced players. One noticeable flaw would be the presence of slight keyboard flex, that irks more than hinder, allowing you to live with it just fine.

The X770’s off-center track pad is fairly large, but seemed to be dwarfed by the overall size of the machine. There is a track pad on/off switch button on the top of the track pad that helps fill the void between the track pad and the keyboard, which typists will appreciate. But that also leads to a slight problem we had.

We felt that a giant notebook should naturally come with a giant track pad that utilizes all of the space it can find (an example would be the unused space where track-pad switch is located). Something else to note is that the texture of the track-pad is also unique, blending the surface area in with surface of the palm rest. It’s still pretty obvious where the track pad ends and palm rest begins, but it lends the entire area a pleasant uniform look.

The large 17.3-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels resolution) screen is actually one of our favorite things about the Qosmio X770. It has a full HD resolution and best of all is a 120Hz screen which supports 3D viewing. We tried looking at the monitor from several different angles and didn’t find any strange artifacts like those found in cheaper screens. It’s quite glossy, but the bright LED back-lights helps tremendously when viewing it under the harsh light.

To complement the 3D display capabilities of the screen, you get not one, but two front-facing cameras above the screen, because it just isn’t enough to watch or play your games in 3D anymore. Sometimes you just need to be watched in 3D too. In case you’re wondering, that’s not all the 3D enabled Qosmio X770 can do. There’s also the very neat party trick of 2D to 3D conversion that the Qosmio X770 supports.

It not only converts your exisitng non-3D digital movies and games in real-time, it can also convert your Blu-ray / DVD titles to output in 3D. Sounds too good to be true? Maybe, because there seems to be a catch. It’s imperative to note that the converted images and movies have to be down-sampled to a lower quality in order for the graphics chip to churn out two images simultaneously which are then shown in very quick succession (and offset a bit) to give the 3D effect.

 Performance Benchmarking

The Toshiba Qosmio X770 sports the latest second generation Sandy Bridge processor, and is based on the same chipset as the HP Pavilion dv6, one of the latest multimedia laptops we've reviewed in recent times. For comparison’s sake, we also selected the MSI GT660, one of the better gaming machines we have had last year, to illustrate where today’s powerhouse machines stand in terms of performance.

But something interesting to note is that today’s multimedia notebook with discrete graphics is almost on par with yesteryear’s gaming grade notebook which used the best mobile GPU available then. This probably gives an insight into what actually contributes to the X770’s stellar performance over the MSI GT660. We’re inclined to attribute it towards the advancements made in the latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M (at time of writing, but now taken over by the newly released ) GPU giving it much higher graphics processing throughput.

PCMark Vantage

In our PCMarksVantage test, the Qosmio X770 pulled ahead (8224) of both other notebooks by a large margin. This is partly thanks to its discrete graphics card, which gives it extra firepower in terms of 3D scores that boosts its overall scores. The extra RAM and speedier hard drive also contributed to the scores but it pales in comparison to notebooks packing SSDs, which have scores in the five-figure range. So for gamers who would like to push the machine’s potential to the limit, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to actually consider swapping one of the two already fast 500GB 7200RPM hard disks for an SSD to increase its overall competence exponentially.

3DMark 06

In our 3DMarks06 test, the Toshiba naturally trumps over the other machines with scores well over 16,000, thanks to its powerful discrete graphics card. And if you aren't convinced yet, then you need to know that the scores were for full HD resolution, while the rest were running the benchmark on 1024 x 768 pixels resolution. Of course contributing to the end results are the faster Core i7-2630QM processor and 8GB of RAM. A powerful GPU these days also provides many more advantages besides gaming. Some software that have traditionally taxed the CPU to its limit have also recently been made to take advantage of the system’s GPU (think Photoshop) in order to get rendering or encoding done much faster, easing reliance on the CPU, freeing it up for other tasks.

Far Cry 2 (Updated as of 15th October 2011)

If you need further proof that the writers here at HardwareZone are as "hardware" centric as our name suggests, here's one for you. We've recently retested the Toshiba Qosmio X770 and the latest updated iteration of the HP Pavilion dv6 which features a new Core i7 processor that has a higher clock speed. Unfortunately as they are notebooks different classes, we only have scores based on resolutions tied to their class. The Qosmio X770 was tested on a full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) while the dv6 was tested on the usual 1024 x 768 pixels. The Toshiba Qosmio X770 still scored fairly well compared to the newer gaming notebooks sporting newer graphic cards. At the time of its initial testing, the Qosmio X770 was also the highest specced machine available in the market, but has since then its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M has been outclassed by the latest NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M found on certain newer machines. After the retesting has been done, we've also found out that certain circumstances had led to the Qosmio's inflated Far Cry 2 scores, and the new scores reflected here are the result of several rounds of benchmark testing. The Qosmio's impressive scores here indicate that the X770 is not only an adequate gaming machine, but it's also capable of handling semi-intensive graphical work such as photo or video editing. Don't expect it to replace a desktop though, because the graphic card its running is a mobile variant, and is meant to consume much less power than a desktop graphic card.

Battery Performance

As a general rule of thumb, the bigger your notebook, the more / bigger / powerful components it packs, and the more power it needs. This rule is especially evident in gaming notebooks that we've seen over the years, with one not even lasting past the 40-minute mark. In light of these yesteryear notebooks' poor battery life performance, the massive Qosmio X770 actually did pretty well, lasting for 1 hour and 22 minutes in our movie looping test. While it isn’t better than the MSI GT660’s 1 hour 57 minutes, you have to give the Toshiba a slight discount for being a much larger machine with a larger screen to keep running. Of course the other difference is that it doesn't have as large a battery capacity as the MSI or HP notebook.

Power consumption

In terms of power consumption, the Toshiba Qosmio X770 also throws up some rather interesting figures. We know that Intel and NVIDIA have been touting the lower power consumption and increased capabilities of their latest chips, and the Qosmio X770’s 25% less power consumption (versus the MSI) is the clearest indication yet. However if you look back to the previous chart, you will notice that although the X770 consumes less power, the battery also depletes about 30 minutes earlier than the MSI. This clearly points to the smaller battery pack on the Toshiba notebook as pointed out earlier, resulting in a lower battery life.

Portability Index

Make no mistake. At this size, the Qosmio X770 is best served as a desktop replacement notebook. Even its battery life testing outcome mandates that it must be plugged in most of the time. But if you do have to carry it around from place to place, then just imagine you are carrying two thin-and-light notebooks. In our portability test, which basically calculates if it’s worth your time to lug the machine around versus how much work you are going to get out of it, the X770 didn’t give us much surprises.

For something that big, and that power hungry, its ratio here will definitely be on the low side. However our chart here lets you look at the larger picture when compared with other notebooks. If we were to compare the Qosmio X770 with other gaming machines, then its ratio is pretty average, and is quite acceptable for its class of notebooks. And if you take into consideration how much power it’s packing, (which we think you’re probably eyeballing if you’re reading this article) then it shouldn’t deter you from getting one of the newest gaming machines out there.

 Piggy Bank Breaker

These days, when people think laptops and notebooks, they literally want something they can put on their laps without causing any actual stress on the femur. But of course there also exists users who are much more particular about the performance of their machine. When we talk about performance however, it usually isn’t about doing actual productivity work (which we’re happy to say the Qosmio X770 is adept at too). What we’re looking at from this notebook's perspective, is the gaming capability of the machine.

The 17.3-inch Qosmio X770 will definitely be able to live up to expectations of most gamers looking to get a portable gaming rig (beats carrying a case and screen around for gaming parties, no?). For students who’d like to be able to do some work as well, you can rest easy and show the PCMarks Vantage scores to your parents, citing its number crunching capabilities as well. Another aspect which it should excel at though is as a portable makeshift rendering machine, for imaging professionals who need the extra power for processing photos or videos.

And in addition, it even has stereoscopic 3D capabilities, starting from its 3D web-cam function. In the box, there is also a pair of NVIDIA 3D shutter glasses that lets you view 3D images and movies on the screen (and it does it without a separate transmitter as it has been integrated within the notebook). It also does 2D to 3D conversion, so essentially all the games and movies that you own could be viewed in 3D. But of course such a sensational capability adds a sizeable premium to the price. So it will be wise to size up 3D as something that you need or want with your gaming laptop before you hand over any cash.

Sadly though, even when you include the stated scenarios that work in the Toshiba Qosmio X770’s favour, it is actually hard to justify the need to spend $3799 on it. Because for what Toshiba is asking you to cough up, there are competing machines out there which offer slightly better value. Unless of course the zombie-like color scheme (at least the X770 has a color scheme, while other brands only have black and black on top of black) really appeals to you.

Battery life for the Toshiba Qosmio X770 also dictates that it has to be near a power socket most of the time, so you can forget about intensive gaming away from a power source. But again, if you managed to reach this far into the review, we’re guessing you’re looking for a machine powerful enough to handle your gaming needs. In which case, the Toshiba Qosmio X770 is very likely what you are looking for. The question that now remains for you dear reader - do you like what you're seeing and are you ready to break your piggy bank for it?

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