Toshiba Qosmio X775: Toshiba's Gamer Grows Up
by Dustin Sklavos on August 17, 2011 12:25 AM ESTGaming Performance
While the Toshiba Qosmio X775 and its NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M don't jump whole hog into the highest end of mobile gaming hardware, there's enough performance here to merit a pretty broad look at it across our spectrum of tests. Note that it features a screen with a 1600x900 native resolution; while I'm not a fan of that resolution on 17.3" notebooks, you'll see it does seem to be about the right resolution for the GTX 560M.
Right away from our medium tests, you can see why the 560M probably didn't need this suite of tests run. We tend to want to test performance class GPUs like the 560M and Radeon HD 6800M series at our medium and high presets, but the 560M bridges the gap between high and ultra. Medium settings barely put a dent in the 560M. That said, for whatever reason the Qosmio seems to suffer some overhead compared to our other i7-2630QM systems in StarCraft II; hopefully moving the bottleneck further to the GPU will let the Qosmio shine.
Somehow the ASUS G73SW continues to be a freak of nature, outperforming the Qosmio X775 despite the X775's more recent drivers and 100MHz core clock advantage. The X775's performance isn't bad necessarily and the clocks are running at spec, though the benchmarks it leads in, the leads are fairly slight. As with PCMark, there appears to be some optimization left on the table, or possibly the use of Optimus is having a slight impact on performance.
There it is. At our ultra setting, the 560M finally begins to break away from its predecessor, though we don't seem to be quite there yet in terms of pure performance. Given that the 460M and 560M have the same memory bandwidth, there are likely some titles where that's the bottleneck. Ultimately, though, the GeForce GTX 560M is by no means a bad gaming GPU, but it still can't hang with the top end graphics hardware. This is a mainstream gaming part best suited for 900p or 1080p, but definitely not with 4xAA enabled on all titles.
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arvee - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
Nice to see two drive bays, a must-have feature for me now. But 2 RAM slots? What?You guys really need to take a look at the MSI GT780 for a review. I got one a month ago and am (mostly) in love, it was an easy decision to skip past the ASUS for this baby. My only complaint is about the keyboard but I suspect it may be particular to me and I have I'll be sending it back to them to check it out when I have time.
Apart from the excellent specs on the MSI compared to the competition, I love the look of it because I'm not much of a gamer, more of a power user and I don't need awkward looks when I take it with me on business trips.
-- Rod
randinspace - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
About the keyboard on your MSI laptop: it's NOT just you, their build quality just sucks... Fortunately humans are adaptable creatures and I've somehow gotten used to the keyboards ridiculous unresponsiveness after a few months with the laptop I have that was made by them.arvee - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
The GT780 has a custom keyboard made and branded by Steelseries, they're using it as one of their major selling points. I am slowly getting used to it but shifting from the *beautiful* das keyboard on my desktop is quite an adjustment!fgmg1 - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
What is up with the off-center touch pad? I used a couple laptops with the touch pad centered around the space bar (with a number pad) and found it very difficult to find my way to and from the keyboard and touch pad.Maybe I'm old fashioned and like my touch pads aligned center of the screen, but I kept fingers kept falling to the left (or off) of the touch pad. Perhaps my movements were strictly keyboard-to-touch pad and back; I was just using the notebook as a normal user, browsing the web and such.
Either way, I was able accommodate, though throughout the process it felt somewhat unnatural. I almost felt as if I should shift my body slightly left for the keyboard/mouse -- which I did.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
The idea is that if you're typing, you'd have your palms resting to the left and right of the space bar, and you wouldn't want them on the touchpad. It looks a little odd, by my personal experience is that if the touchpad isn't directly below the space bar, I repeatedly brush it while typing -- that can suddenly move the cursor so I'm typing somewhere else, which is very annoying.Paedric - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
Would it be possible to have the GPU temperatures?Meaker10 - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
They can contain castrated Nvidia cards, 128bit mem buses (instead of 192bit) and the associated ROPs are gone too.I am now running a 16F2 barebone (GT683R based) and IMO offers the best value proposal. It comes with an attractive list of features:
15.6" form factor.
2 HDD bays (plus optical)
4 mem slots.
1920x1080 screen
Good speakers
Good cooling (that does not draw air from below so you can use it on your lap)
Darkstone - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link
That is not true. All asus models i can find have 1.5GB or 3GB of memory. This means a memory bus with a multiple of 3. Thus, 192 bit.Meaker10 - Friday, August 19, 2011 - link
http://event.asus.com/my/2011/productguide/PG_Aug-...Oh look, all 15" models come with 2GB of ram.
jabber - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link
Sorry but was it a 16yr old that designed the styling for that?If I pay that much money for a laptop then I want it to look a little grown up at least.
Just a mess.
And all those horrible stickers all over it. Horrid! Yes I know they can be peeled off but they make windows laptops look a mess in the showroom.