Toshiba Qosmio X775: Toshiba's Gamer Grows Up
by Dustin Sklavos on August 17, 2011 12:25 AM ESTThat Old Familiar (Terrible) Screen
Stop me if this sounds familiar: 17.3" TN panel screen, 1600x900 resolution, with mediocre viewing angles, poor contrast, accuracy, and gamut. In fact, this is the same model panel we just tested in the Toshiba L775D, a fact that actually bothers me more knowing this Qosmio costs twice as much. You can get a Qosmio X775 with a 1080p screen (120Hz no less!), but you'll pay $1,899 for the privilege of buying the top of the line model which comes with a built-in emitter for NVIDIA 3D Vision.
The results pretty much line up with the other Toshiba notebook: this is still a stunningly mediocre TN panel. In the case of the Qosmio X775, though, Toshiba seems to have made a trade-off: the backlight is more intense, for better or worse. As a result, the contrast ratio remains about the same, but the whites are brighter...and so are the blacks.
Viewing angles are the same as they ever were, with the screen washing out pretty quickly. This is a part of my major problem with these crappy TN panels, their lack of ability to do so much as produce a single uniform picture. Hopefully with eIPS being reasonably cheap to produce and running wild on the desktop space, we'll start to see better quality panels becoming more common in notebooks.
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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.