Toshiba Qosmio X75 A7298 review: A desktop replacement that won’t break the bank—or your back

Toshiba Qosmio X75 A7298 $1,900.00 Toshiba's Qosmio X75 is loaded with high-end components and delivers impeccable performance. If you need a desktop-replacement laptop, this is definitely one to consider.

Most manufacturers throw weight considerations out the window when they set about designing a desktop-replacement notebook. Not Toshiba’s engineers. Despite packing a 256GB solid-state drive plus a 1TB hybrid hard drive, a Blu-ray burner (not just a player), Nvidia’s second-fastest mobile GPU, and a 17.3-inch high-res display, the Qosmio X75 A7298 weighs a modest 7.3 pounds.

It might sound odd to classify 7.3 pounds as modest. After all, the Qosmio X75 won’t even fit in some laptop bags. But considering that this laptop can play games, create and edit digital media, and handle pretty much any other task you’d normally rely on a desktop computer to perform, a 7.3-pound weight is pretty remarkable. After all, how easy would it be to lug a desktop PC, a 17-inch monitor, and an uninterruptible power supply from location to location?

Robert CardinToshiba packs desktop performance into a highly mobile machine. (Click to enlarge.)

Intel’s Core i7-4700MQ, a quad-core mobile CPU, forms the Qosmio X75's heart. It’s paired with 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 770M mobile graphics processor (which has 3GB of GDDR5 memory all its own). A dedicated GPU is great for playing hard-core games, but it will speed other tasks too.

Demanding applications such as Photoshop, for instance, will tap the hundreds of microprocessor cores inside the GTX 770M chip to accelerate image processing. In the GPU-accelerated image-processing segment of our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite, the Qosmio X75 required just over 60 seconds to complete a task that Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch—which relies on integrated graphics—took more than 5 minutes to finish.

Toshiba’s Qosmio X75 A7298 delivered a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 430, one of the best performances we've seen to date. (Click to enlarge.)

The display is bright and beautiful, but it isn’t a touchscreen (as is common with gaming laptops). Since I’ve grown accustomed to using touchscreens with Windows 8, I couldn’t stop myself from swiping my finger across the panel, which has a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, to bring up the charm bar. I’m sure I would eventually adapt to using the large touchpad for that. Lucky owners of a 4K television can output 4K video from this computer’s HDMI port. The HDMI 1.4 port is limited to a refresh rate of 24Hz, but that’s fine for movies—no one in their right mind would try gaming at 4K.

The chassis is wrapped in textured aluminum, painted flat black to give it the look of carbon fiber. An attractive (or garish—you be the judge) accent stripe, bright red and highly reflective, runs around the laptop’s edge.

You can play a blazing-fast game of BioShock Infinite at low resolution on the Qosmio X75. Crank the game up to 1920 by 1080 pixels with visual quality at the Ultra setting, and you'll still get nearly 30 frames per second. (Click to enlarge.)

The island-style keyboard is backlit with red LEDs to match the machine’s color scheme. The keys aren’t sculpted, but they offer long travel, so you don’t need to worry about unintentionally depressing them while your fingers are resting on the keyboard. When you’re playing a stealth game such as a Splinter Cell title, there’s nothing more frustrating than accidentally giving away your position because your hand grew heavy over the WASD keys (which Toshiba has helpfully labeled with arrow symbols).

The size of the display allows Toshiba to provide adequate space between the keys and to include an embedded numeric keypad, but it’s unfortunate that the arrow keys beneath the Enter key (and the function keys at the very top) are half-size.

Because the wrist rest sitting beneath the keyboard is especially wide at 4.5 inches, Toshiba was able to place a large (4.5 inches wide by 3.1 inches tall) and very responsive multitouch touchpad in this area. A large speaker grille resides above the keyboard, directly under the display. The Qosmio X75’s audio system, designed with the assistance of DTS and Harman/Kardon, is excellent: The speakers deliver crisp highs and deep, well-defined bass response.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Qosmio X75 deliver 2 hours, 22 minutes of battery life. That's impressive for a notebook that offers so much performance. (Click to enlarge.)

The Qosmio X75 has plenty of real estate to hold ports, and Toshiba took full advantage, placing two USB 3.0 ports and a gigabit ethernet port next to the Blu-ray burner on the left side. Two more USB 3.0 ports, separate mic and headphone jacks, VGA, and HDMI-out occupy the right side, and a multiformat media-card reader sits in front. I was disappointed, however, to see Toshiba give short shrift to wireless networking: A $1900 laptop deserves better than a single-band (2.4GHz) 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter.

I was surprised at how quietly the Qosmio X75 ran, considering all the high-performance hardware stuffed inside it. Less surprising is the brief battery life, though 2 hours, 22 minutes is still more than enough time to watch a full-length movie (not that this behemoth would fit on an airline tray table). This computer can do it all and anywhere, so it's a great choice for a desktop replacement.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Toshiba Qosmio X775-Q7170 Review: Is 'Entry-Level Desktop Replacement' an Oxymoron?

The Qosmio X775-Q7170 is the entry-level model of the Qosmio X770 series of desktop replacement laptops. The Q7170 sports the same snazzy design as other laptops in the series: a 17.3-inch widescreen, a red-backlit keyboard, and a fade-to-red color scheme. However, it comes packed with some less-impressive hardware components and no 3D display.

Our review model, priced at $1150 (as of March 23, 2012), has an Intel Core i5-2450M processor, 6GB of DDR3 memory, a 640GB hard-disk drive spinning at 7200 rpm, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M graphics card. Since the graphics card doesn't support 3D Vision, Toshiba offers a tray-loading DVD-SuperMulti drive in lieu of a Blu-ray disc player. The X775-Q7170 has built-in Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) and Bluetooth 3.0, and it runs 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.

The X775-Q7170 earned a score of 82 on our new WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, which means that it was approximately 18 percent slower than our baseline configuration, which has an i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card. This score isn't stellar for a desktop replacement laptop, but it's not bad for the price.

The Qosmio looks like its brothers in the X770 family, which is a good thing if you favor the chunky, plastic, super-polished gaming rig look. The chassis is almost entirely dressed in striated gray plastic, except for the very bottom of the lid (when the computer is open), and the very top of the keyboard deck, where the gray gives way to shiny metallic red. My colleague Jon L. Jacobi likens the Qosmio's casing to a tricked-out street racing car, and that's exactly what it looks like: shiny, fast, and a little tacky.

Toshiba also slaps the Qosmio logo on the lid of the machine in red mirrored plastic, which only serves to make the entire thing look cheaper and more garish.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan of the Qosmio's overall look. But if you like gaming rigs with lots of shine and pretty lights, this may be the machine for you. The X775-Q7170 has a large keyboard with red backlights.

Turning the keyboard light on doesn't just light up the keyboard; it also lights up a strip across the top of the touchpad and six of the seven touch buttons located above the keyboard. I admit that the red lights look pretty cool when the entire machine lights up.

Aside from the full-size keyboard with ten-key number pad, the Qosmio's keyboard deck contains a large touchpad (with two discrete buttons and an on/off switch), and seven touch buttons (Eco Mode toggle, Wi-Fi toggle, Keyboard Light toggle, Play/Pause, Mute, Volume Down, and Volume Up). On either side of the touch buttons are two Harman/Kardon stereo speakers (Toshiba also supplies a bottom-mounted woofer for extra audio kick).

The keyboard's Chiclet-style keys are smallish, but they provide good feedback and are less stiff than smaller keys tend to be. The touchpad has a slightly rough texture, which seemed to trip up the smoothness and precision of my typing. The touchpad's large buttons are composed of shiny plastic and feel a little flimsy, as though they might break within a year. Since this is a desktop replacement, I suggest using an external mouse.

The Qosmio X775-Q7170 offers a generous selection of ports, considering that a large battery, fan, and optical drive occupy most of the back end. You get four USB ports (three USB 2.0, and one USB 3.0 with Sleep and Charge), VGA- and HDMI-out, gigabit ethernet, headphone and microphone jacks, and a lock slot. You'll find a memory card reader on the front of the machine.

This desktop replacement sports a glossy, 17.3-inch LED-backlit display with a native resolution of 1600 by 900. The screen generally looks good, with bright colors, good contrast, and decent off-axis viewing angles, but it falls short of full HD, and that fact is noticeable on such a large display. You can distinguish individual pixels, which makes content--including images, video, and text--look slightly fuzzy. At the desktop replacement level, this is definitely a bummer.

Video played smoothly on the laptop, despite the fuzziness. Basic HD streaming and DVD playback worked without a hitch, but you may want to consider another machine if you're looking for a strong gaming rig. In our Crysis 2 gaming test, the X775-Q7170 earned a mark of 69 out of 100, and managed frame rates of around 46 frames per second (at high quality, and 1366 by 768 resolution). Audio sounded good, however, thanks to the bottom-mounted woofer and the top-mounted speakers. The headphone jack delivered excellent sound, too.

The Qosmio X775-Q7170 disappoints as a gaming machine/desktop replacement, and it's too big to function well for any other purpose. Thanks to the extra-large battery that protrudes from the bottom of the laptop, the machine does get decent battery life for its category (about 4 hours, 30 minutes in our tests), but that means little when you're lugging around an 8-pound machine. Still, if you're looking for a laptop that you can play games on in a pinch, this model might be worth considering.

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