Quad-Core Gaming Laptop Computer from Toshiba: X305-Q725

The X305 is a 17" gaming laptop computer. Here Toshiba stick with a maximum native resolution of 1680x1050 instead of 1920x1200, but not everyone likes the small text on WUXGA displays. The X305-Q725 Toshiba laptop computer is one of the most recent versions, but it's not the fastest either for gaming or other purposes. Here's a quick look at the base specifications. As stated, this is a gaming laptop, which is obvious with one glance at the 9800M GTX graphics chip. NVIDIA hasn't launched a new top-end mobile GPU for almost a year, and the current 9800M is just a minor revision of the previous 8800M. The 9800M GTX is slightly slower than the desktop 8800 GT 512MB that was launched in late 2007. Similar to the renaming of the 9800M GTX+, the new GT 100M/200M are renamed versions of the older GPUs. NVIDIA states that they use "a highly-refined 55nm variant of the G92 graphics core", but it's still essentially the same G92 core at heart. NVIDIA's own documentation suggests that the GTX 280M will be on average 22% faster than the 9800M GTX utilized in the Toshiba X305, so it's not a dramatic difference in performance. However, if you are looking for maximum performance, clearly you would now want the GTX 280M - preferably in SLI. As it stands, even without the newly launched mobile GPUs, a single 9800M GTX is going to end up being slower than dual 9800M GTS SLI solutions, though it will also use less power. Looking at the chassis, you can be immediately struck by the sheer size of the X305. Besides being very large, the chassis feels somewhat cheap because of the plastic materials used for construction. It does not look worse than most other laptops, but when looking at a notebook with a nice aluminum - or even partial aluminum - exterior and can immediately notice the difference. When you spend this much money on a notebook, it would be nice to feel like you're getting the absolute best in materials and workmanship, and we honestly can't say we feel that way. It's not all bad news for the Toshiba, though. Some people will like the bling and styling of the chassis, and we will agree that the chassis is good looking. The chassis also comes with four speakers that manage to produce a very good sound encountered in a laptop. The large chassis also manages to deal with hot components quite well, and temperatures for the exterior of the chassis were typically cooler than many other laptops - even those that may not target the gaming sector.
As expected, Toshiba offers plenty of expansion ports on the X305. Users get three USB ports, plus one more that can function as either a USB or an eSATA port. FireWire, gigabit Ethernet, ExpressCard/54, and audio ports are present. A small cover on the right side at the integrated flash reader (xD, SD, or MS), along with a modem. HDMI and VGA ports provide the external video connectivity. Considering the size of the notebook, there seems to be plenty of space where more USB ports can be added. This notebook is clearly intended to stand out from the boring laptops and make a statement of power. The X305 comes in a bright design that is sure to turn heads, and perhaps it's also meant to convey just how "hot" this system is.
The optical drive is moved to the front of the X305. Toshiba didn't add a Blu-ray drive, which is a little surprising considering the target market and price point; upgrading to a Blu-ray reader would have added less than $100, and that would arguably be a better choice of where to spend money than some other included options.
An interesting item I didn't mention yet is the volume knob on the right side. This is a pseudo-analog dial, which can be a bit more convenient when you want to adjust the volume quickly. However, you need to reach a certain threshold in terms of how fast you spin the dial to get the system to recognize that you are adjusting the volume, so fine-grained tweaks can be a bit tricky. The only other item to mention is the WiFi on/off switch on the front of the laptop.
The keyboard is one area we really feel can make or break a laptop, particularly in a DTR system where presumably you will do most of your typing. It is possible to adapt to any keyboard layout, certainly, or you could use an external keyboard, but most people will use what comes as part of the laptop and they'll want it to feel right. The keyboard layout is nice, including the number keypad, as it provides access to all the commonly used keys. It's not bad, but the keys do feel a little soft, and personally I like a keyboard with a bit more texture. The glossy/smooth keys work fine, but I'd still rate the keyboard in the Dell XPS M1730 as being better - plus it includes LED backlighting as an added bonus. One nice feature that the keyboard includes are shortcut "zoom" keys (Fn+1 and Fn+2), which quickly switch between resolutions. This functionality should be seen on more laptops in the future - especially laptops with higher DPI LCD screens. It's not perfect, but it's better than going through the display settings dialogs under Vista just to switch resolution for a while.
Overall, the design is pretty much what you would expect from a 17" notebook with support for dual GPUs and quad-core processors. It's large, heavy, and can be extremely fast. The power brick is huge, adding a couple more pounds to the total carrying weight - and if you ever go on the road, you will definitely want to bring along the power brick, as battery life struggles to break the one hour mark. There are quite a few different X305 models, with the main difference being the selected components - note that the X305-Q725 we're looking at only includes a single GPU, while the X305-Q708 includes dual 9800M GTS and a QX9300 CPU - and costs $1700 more. We'd like to see the option for a 1920x1200 LCD - preferably one that can provide color accuracy and a color gamut to match the rest of the top-end components. We would also really like to have an integrated GPU with the option to shut off the power-hungry 9800M GTX, but so far few manufacturers have offered such an option with high-end mobile GPUs, which is truly a shame. The X305-Q725 gaming laptop computer comes fully populated, so the only way to upgrade the memory or hard drives is to remove what's already there.
At the top of the motherboard, you can see the GPU module, and there's room to the right for an oversized card. Most likely, the SLI variants have an extra large GPU module. Listing all of the components and specifications inside of the laptop is easy enough to accomplish, but that doesn't really tell you much about what it's like to really use the laptop on a day-to-day basis.
Overall performance is very snappy, easily fast enough for anything that we do on a regular basis. Then again, outside of gaming and a few specific benchmarks, and processor made in the past three years would meet our requirements. The quad-core CPU does keep things running smoothly even when there are lots of applications open, helped out by the 64-bit OS, SSD, and 4GB of memory. It's a good thing too, because the default system configuration has a ton of running processes. Even after trimming out the fat (running Internet security suite and antivirus software can make a system feel extremely sluggish), we are still left with 60 running processes, which is far more than usual. Quite a few of these are driver related: modem, GPU, audio, Intel chipset and RAID utilities, touchpad, and five Toshiba specific processes related to power saving and keyboard shortcuts. A clean installation on a desktop would usually involve about 40 processes, but most laptops have at least 10 extra processes for the integrated components.
The latest universal mobile drivers from NVIDIA have made things better, but the experience still isn't as seamless as desktop solutions. If you don't absolutely require maximum 3D performance, a single GPU can be a more pleasant experience, but I think most people looking at this sort of laptop are going to be interested in 3D performance. We can also run into situations where we are CPU limited, since very few games take full advantage of four processing cores. In most instances, a higher clocked dual-core CPU like the 2.66GHz P9600 is going to provide a better gaming performance than the 2.0GHz Q9000. Faster quad-core parts are available, which would help matters, but the Q9000 simply wouldn't be the processor of choice.
The general opinion is split on the topic of SSDs; some of us think they're great, and others feel they're just too expensive for what they offer. For better or worse, Toshiba includes a 64GB SSD in the X305-Q725. That adds at least a couple hundred dollars to the price, and we can think of other ways to spend that money (like a second GPU). Perhaps more importantly, however, is that Toshiba shows some seriously brain-dead reasoning when it comes to partitioning hard drives. As shipped, the 64GB SSD only has 50 GB of usable space, with 15 GB already occupied by the operating system and other utilities. Where did the remaining space go? We will be astonished to see that Toshiba had included a 12 GB recovery partition - yes, on the SSD! The whole point of having dual hard drives, one for performance and one for storage, is that you don't use the performance drive to store less important, infrequently accessed data. A recovery partition is the ultimate in infrequently accessed data, and Toshiba used 20% of this expensive media for that purpose.
The X305 Toshiba laptop has a 1680x1050 display, but it only "officially" supports resolutions of 1680x1050, 1280x1024, 1280x720, 1024x768, or 800x600. Noticeably absent are standard 16:10 aspect ratios like 1280x800 and 1440x900, and unfortunately we were not able to hack in support for those resolutions.
This gaming laptop computer model is fast, but it's also heavy and expensive, and unfortunately for Toshiba there are similarly priced notebooks that are faster, offer better battery life/features, and/or are much more practical from a price/performance standpoint. Toshiba's own X305-Q708 is more promising, at least from the pure performance perspective, with 9800M GTS SLI and a QX9300 CPU; admittedly, that's at an even higher price point. We simply don't see a lot of need for this type of laptop at present - i.e. with a lower clocked mobile quad-core CPU. If you're in the market for a powerful desktop replacement notebook - or perhaps a mobile workstation - you might as well go all the way. Saving a couple pounds but getting similar battery life and lower performance hardly seems practical; weight just isn't a critical concern with a 9+ pound notebook. Overall, the X305-Q725 with the Q9000 looks like a good choice for highly threaded workloads, and the SSD can help in a few instances as well. However, there are competing laptops that offer similar performance for less money, or more performance for a similar cost, which makes the X305-Q725 more difficult to recommend.

We hope you already understand going into this review that the X305-Q725 is going to have rater dismal battery life. To say that battery life isn't a major focus is a big understatement. This is evidenced by the battery itself, which is a 6-cell 58Whr unit. The single GPU means that the X305 consumes less power than most SLI notebooks, but with the smaller battery we still end up at just over one hour of mobile usage before you need to plug in.
If you choose to run your LCD at maximum brightness, you may lose anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes depending on the laptop - the latter is mostly for ultra-mobile options while the former is for gaming notebooks. We'd really like to see more fine-grained adjustment here, as cutting the brightness in half is far too big a drop for one "step". However, even at the reduced brightness the battery life is poor (and we only lost about 5 minutes by setting brightness to 100%).
What's more surprising, however, is that there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way of increasing battery life. The Clevo D901C behaves in a similar fashion, so it appears many desktop replacement systems spend very little effort in improving mobility.
As we've mentioned in the past, Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro provide an almost untouchable amount of battery life. To give you a true apples-to-Apples comparison, we've calculated the amount of battery life you get per Whr (Watt Hour) of battery capacity: The X305-Q725 actually does better than a couple notebooks in life per Whr, beating the D901C by 67%. The combination of a 45nm CPU with DDR3 memory results in only moderately high power requirements. Obviously, the desktop CPU and second GPU in the D901C really kick the power usage up a notch.
Power requirements when a laptop is plugged in don't necessarily reflect power requirements when a laptop is on battery power. In particular, high-end GPUs run at lower maximum clock speeds when using the battery power. Power requirements are actually pretty reasonable, considering the components in the X305-Q725. Despite the high-end components, the X305 remains relatively quiet during operation. The large chassis has plenty of room for air circulation, and noise levels are competitive with most other notebooks. Temperatures are also quite reasonable for the X305, with the bottom of the laptop measuring 25-28C under load, except for the very back edge that reached 33C in places. Exhaust temperatures at load are much warmer at up to 45C, however, so you definitely don't want to block the back of the system. While many would assume that such a large, powerful notebook would be hot enough to fry eggs, the reality is that it often runs cooler than midrange options simply because of the size of the heatsinks and fans. We have stated repeatedly that laptop LCDs pale in comparison to typical desktop LCDs, and the X305 doesn't break any new ground. If you're not a fan of large desktop replacement notebooks, the X305-Q725 won't change your mind. It's still bulky and heavy, battery life is poor, and performance still isn't anywhere near the level of top desktop solutions. However, some users don't want a desktop and don't mind the added size and weight; all they want is a powerful laptop that they can transport from place to place when the need arises. If you're looking for that sort of system, can the Toshiba X305-Q725 meet your needs?
For gaming performance there are faster options out there. We don't even need the new GTX 280M graphics chips to surpass the single 9800M GTX; two 9800M GT or 8800M GTX chips will offer up to 80% more performance. You might guess that such laptops will cost more than the X305-Q725, and certainly some do, but others are available at very competitive prices.
So if gaming performance isn't the selling point, what about the quad-core CPU? Is the X305-Q725 with the Q9000 a good selection for highly threaded tasks? If all you need is raw CPU performance, there are other laptops with quad-core CPUs that cost quite a bit less. One example that just launched is the Gateway FX P-7808u, which has a GeForce 9800M GTS 1GB and a Q9000 and retails for around $1850.
If you want even more performance, there's no beating desktop CPUs. The Clevo D901C can support up to a Q9650 (3.0GHz), which should be about 50% faster in CPU limited tests than the Q9000. Throw in dual 9800M GTX GPUs and in some cases it will be nearly twice as fast. Clevo also has the D900F ready to begin shipping in April, which will pack a desktop Core i7 CPU for true workstation level performance. The X305-Q708 is another option if you like the design of the 725 but want more performance. It includes dual 9800M GT cards, though, so from a price and performance standpoint the Clevo D901C would be the better buy.
Looking at the big picture, the X305-Q725 currently has an MSRP of $2700. That's less than a faster, more powerful DTR, but the jump from $2700 to $3300 is only a 22% increase for 50% to 100% more performance. If you're willing to spend $2700 on a large, powerful laptop, an extra $600 that will bring non-linear performance improvements seems pretty reasonable. (Note that you can skip the second 9800M GTX on the D901C and save the $700.)
For what you get, the Toshiba laptop X305-Q725 is a decent DTR (desktop replacement) type notebook. It definitely doesn't break any notions about what a desktop replacement can provide, but the overall feature set is pretty good. If you feel you need a quad-core CPU, high-end mobile GPU, and an SSD, the X305-Q725 is a viable option. However, the periodic stability issues are a serious concern, and when you're spending this much money that can be a deal breaker. We don't recommend DTRs for most users, but even so we feel there are better options out there. This is not going to be a best selling laptop computer.