With a gaming laptop, the most important component is the video chipset. And currently, the fastest is nVidia's 7900GS Go. For mid-range gaming video, your choices broaden. You have the nVidia's 7600 series as well as the 8600m series. On the upper end of the mid-range there is the 8700m GT. Currently, the only laptop that have the 8700m GT is Toshiba's X205 series.

There are only 2 models in the x205 line currently: Toshiba X205-S9349 and X205-S9359. The model I purchased was the lower end X205-S9349. The differences? First, the screen resolution - 1440x900 vs 1650x1050. The CPU is also different - T7100 vs T7300. The hard drive - 2x120GB vs 2x160GB. And lastly, the OS - Vista Home Premium vs Ultimate. The video card is the same however.

The X205 is based on the new Santa Rosa platform that uses the new Socket P processors.

The list price for the X205-S9349 is $1,899.99. However, Fry's Electronics (and now Best Buy) have a huge reduction in price. I picked it up for $1,499.99 from Fry's Electronics.

Core 2 Duo T7100 1.80GHz 800MHz FSB
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (32-bit)
2048MB DDR2 667 RAM
1024MB Intel Turbo Memory
17.0" widescreen
WXGA with TruBrite Technology 1440x900 resolution
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8700M GT 256MB DDR3 discrete memory
up to 255MB shared memory w/NVIDIA TurboCache technology
240GB of total Hard Drive, 2x120GB 5400rpm
HD DVD-ROM/DVD SuperMulti (HD-DVD ROM drive with DVD recorder)
Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965 AGN (802.11a/g/n)
Bluetooth® V2.0 EDR
Built-in 1.3MP Webcam and microphone built into LCD bezel
56k Modem
10/100/1000 LAN
4 harman/kardon® stereo speakers with subwoofer
PC Express Slot
1-ExpressCard™ Slot
5-in-1 Bridge Media Adapter
6-USB (2.0)
1-i.LINK™ IEEE-1394
HDMI output port
S/P DIF output port
TV-out (S Video)
9.37 lbs.
1-Yr Parts and Labor, 1-Year Battery Warranty


In the Box
Like many big-box laptops, you get lots of ads in the package. You also get a quick-start guide, a set of recovery DVDs, and a Windows Anytime Upgrade DVD. The AC adapter is HUGE - about the size of a real brick. And, of course, the laptop itself.

The laptop was packaged pretty well. The screen was covered by a foam bag that protected not only the screen, but the entire LCD panel that included the dark red (black cherry is the only thing that came to mind) shiny lid. This also helped protect the keyboard.

It is as exciting as opening any other laptop box. Not the Apple experience, but this is Toshiba we're talking about.

Ergonomics
There's no hiding it - even if you wanted to... this is a HUGE laptop. The 17" wide screen is every bit as big as it sounds, as well as the fact that it includes a full-sized keyboard along side a number pad - not usually found on laptops due to their size. This makes desktop keyboard users feel much more at home. even the Ins,Del, Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn buttons are clustered together like it does on a standard 104 keyboard, unlike most laptops that pinch them down on the right, taking up precious space from the much-needed Backsapce and Enter keys.

The keyboard feels mushy, but you do get used to it after a while. I find that I can type much quicker and more comfortable due to the size - but ONLY if I place the laptop on a table or desk. On my lap, it is off-centered (off to the left) due to the number keypad. This makes it difficult to type when the laptop is on your lap. The Fn buttons doesn't seem to work without additional software (more on that later).

The touchpad have a wide patch which matches the wide screen. Also, if you tap the upper right area of the touchpad, the entire pad glows blue and you see icons on the touchpad. It looks very cool, and almost like an OLED screen (but it's not). This have programable touch buttons as icons that let you launch programs of your choice as well as change the volume. I think it's a bit redundant since the volume knob isn't far from the touchpad. Also, I hated this "feature" because many times I have accidently turn on the blue glow by tapping the upper right corner trying to move the mouse pointer, click, or double-click. When the blue light activates for the buttons, the mouse pointer doesn't move. So imagine my surprise when my mouse doesn't move anymore! I keep inadvertantly tapping the top right corner when I just want to tap the pad!

The X205 is also pretty thick - much thicker than any other 17" notebooks I've seen. The cooling vents seem to take up a lot of space. That's right, there's an "s" in vents - you have one on each side. One is for the CPU while the other is for the video chipset. The machine actually runs very cool when not stressed. Even when gaming, it only gets warm and not scorching hot as you would expect. The fans are very quiet during standard computing, but when stressed, you can hear them kick up. It's still not very annoying. The thickness also allows for space for 2 hard drives. After opening up the unit to check out the hard drives and memory, I found that there was even more space between the motherboard and the plastic cover. There is just a lot of space for components to breathe! This helps the X205 stay cool by sacraficing portable size.

There are buttons on panel above the keyboard that provides function for power, browser, media player, play/pause, stop, skip back, and skip forward. The power button blends in with the other buttons, which is harder to find if you aren't really looking for it. This is where the speakers are located, too. There are 4 harman/kardon speakers located here. They are not surround sound, but 2-way speakers for the left and right channels. They look impressive with a shiny red ring, black rubber flex materials, and silver aluminium caps. They were made to be seen! They also sound very good for laptop speakers, but more on that later. BTW, they are paired with a small sub-woofer on the bottom of the laptop.

The light for Num Lock is annoying for a surface that does not have any other lights. You can turn it off, but you'll have to remember to turn it back on if you decide to use it. The red LEDs used for indicators are much welcomed compared to the bright blue LEDs that blind. And no matter what you do, the Satelite logo will always be lit up by a red LED. It's not that annoying actually, since it is located all the way to the left where your palm would probably be covering anyways. It's also not as bright as the indicators.

In the front, you have 4 audio ports. From left to right, audio in, mic in, line out, and headphones. The volume knob is next to the audio ports. I was happy to see this as I thought it was a physical volume knob. It turns out that it just controls the software volume in Windows. It doesn't have a stop - it keeps spinning either way without any physical stops. That was disapointing. As I expected, volume gaps between each step are too wide for my taste. When the laptop is busy crunching away on the hard drive (and OS locks up a bit), the volume cannot be changed until system resources frees up. THAT is very annoying.

Next to knob is a SD/MS slot. Nothing special now-a-days. A nice convience. With the size of the X205, I was hoping it would have space for every card made - just add CF and xD!

Still on the front, all the way to the left (of the audio ports), you have a hard switch to turn off the wireless LAN. With it turned on, you get a red LED indicator. The Intel wireless LAN does everything! It can use A, B, G, and N standards! The 802.11n standard is still in draft, and won't be ready yet. I am actually surprised that Intel went ahead and produced an 802.11n card before it was standardized, since Intel seem to be strict with standards. I just hope that when the N standard gets finalized, this Intel wireless card can be updated to reflect the standard and not the draft.

On the left, you have a port for the AC adapter, VGA, gigabit ethernet, 2 USB 2.0 ports, S-Video, HDMI, mini-Firewire/iLink, and an expansion slot. I was happy to see the HDMI connector, since the X205 have an HD-DVD drive and the software to play HD-DVD movies. The large screen and the iLink/Firewire port makes this a great laptop for video editing as well.

On the right,
you get the HD-DVD/DVD recorder drive, 56k modem phone port, and 4 USB 2.0 ports (a total of six with the other 2 on the left side).
I find that I keep accidently open the HD-DVD drive when I grab the laptop, since the button protrudes a bit instead being recessed.

There is nothing on the rear, surprisingly. Instead, the screen is hinged on the rear instead of by the panel where the power and multimedia buttons are.

The screen is glossy, and is a joy to look at. It can, however, reflect like a mirror at objects behind you if are watching something dark or if objects behind you are really bright. This no different than other glossy screens. You can always add a layer of matted plastic to get the screen to have more of a anti-glare property. It can get pretty bright when set to the max. The colors are vibrant, and is the perfect screen to watch movies on.

The 1.3MP webcam is situated on top of the screen at the center. It is between the latches. There is a mic next to the built-in webcam. When in use, a blue LED lights up to let you know that you are being watched.

In Use
Windows Vista Home Premium was pre-installed and setting it up on first boot is your standard affair for large-box big-name laptop. However, there are lots of extra junk software, and I rather have a good clean slate. The recovery DVDs will be of no help here since it will just reinstall all the software and junk software that Toshiba installed from the factory. Instead, I used the "Windows Anytime Upgrade" DVD, which really is just a standard Vista install DVD. After backing up the licensing info from the factory installed Vista, I reinstalled Vista from scratch and restored the license. This gave me a clean slate. Before this, I installed WinXP Pro so that Vista will recognize it. This will allow me to dual boot to XP to see if I can downgrade to XP sucessfully.

Windows XP drivers were hard to find. You have to go to Toshiba's European site to get them. There are still some software that is suppose to control the Fn keys that is missing. Thus, i could not control the screen brightness in Windows XP. The only device there is no driver for is the Intel Robson Memory module, which is what Vista uses for Readyboost (flash memory cache to speed up hard drive access). This is expected since Windows XP does not use this feature. The webcam was automatically detected by XP, however.

In Vista, every driver and software was easily found on Toshiba's website. Every function the laptop had to offer was availbe upon a clean install.

The Biometric fingerprint device works in both version of Windows, allowing you to register usernames and passwords to different fields and applications, including the login of Windows. I actually used it, and like it! It is pretty accurate.

The T7100 is pretty speedy for 1.8GHz, while the 2GB of RAM is expansive enough for current games and applications. The 1440x900 screen resolution isn't as bad as I thought it would be on a 17" wide screen. I was afraid the resolution would be too low and fonts will look too big. However, I've noticed that I sit further back with a large screen (as long as it sits on a table), and so the lower resolution isn't much of a concern.

The sound is simply amazing for a laptop! Almost like a portable boom box! There is enough bass to satisfy movie watchers on the go, thanks to a subwoofer located on the bottom of the laptop. Due to the size of the laptop, the speakers are given room to flex their muscles and not as confined and tinny as most other portables.

I am a hardcore Battlefield 2142 player, and this laptop seem to play it at all the highest visual settings without any hiccups. The only thing is that under Vista, BF2142 is unstable and prone to crash after playing for a while. I experienced none of the instability in Windows XP on the same laptop. The audio in XP, however, seems to be given an artifical 3D sound processing and is very annoying. I couldn't figure out how to disable it (if it can be disabled).

Upgrading
The X205 actually has a video card that you can upgrade, since it uses standard MXM connectors. If nVidia's 8800m GT comes out, you can swap the 8700m out! So this laptop can last a good while this way. However, to upgrade the video card, you have to almost dissasemble the entire laptop to get to it.

The CPU is easily upgraded, too! You can actually access the heatsink covering the CPU so replacing it may not be as bad as upgarding the video card.

The hard drives are easy to access, as well as the memory. They are consider user replacable, and because of this, have easy to access panels. The hard drives pull out easily and a cage needs to be removed from the old hard drive and installed on the new hard drive before you can slide it in. The memory is nothing special - just a panel you remove, and you have access to both DDR2 SODIMMs. You can add up to 4GB of RAM, but remember that you'll need a 64-bit OS to use all of it.

While the HD-DVD/DVD recorder drive is not really meant to be replacable, it is just a standard slim optical drive. If you can match the front plate, it can slide into the slot just as easy as the original drive. Just make sure you reuse the drive cage from the original drive.

Benchmarks
Of course, we are here to play games on this machine, so I decided to benchmark it with 3DMark05 and 3DMark06. I tested it under Windows Vista Home Premium, since it was the original factory-installed OS. The results used the default test parameters set by Futuremark. Here are the results:

3DMark05 - default settings
Width 1024
Height 768
Anti-Aliasing None
Anti-Aliasing Quality 0
Texture Filtering Optimal
Max Anisotropy 4
VS Profile 3_0
PS Profile 3_0
Force Full Precision No
Disable DST No
Disable Post-Processing No
Force Software Vertex Shader No
Color Mipmaps No
Repeat Tests Off
Fixed Framerate Off
3DMark Score 8711 3DMarks
GT1 - Return To Proxycon 36.2 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest 26.9 FPS
GT3 - Canyon Flight 43.5 FPS
CPU Score 8508 CPUMarks
CPU Test 1 5.2 FPS
CPU Test 2 6.2 FPS
Fill Rate - Single-Texturing 2242.0 MTexels/s
Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing 8045.8 MTexels/s
Pixel Shader 185.0 FPS
Vertex Shader - Simple 88.4 MVertices/s
Vertex Shader - Complex 96.5 MVertices/s
8 Triangles 7.0 MTriangles/s
32 Triangles 27.9 MTriangles/s
128 Triangles 109.5 MTriangles/s
512 Triangles 234.7 MTriangles/s
2048 Triangles 194.0 MTriangles/s
32768 Triangles 179.1 MTriangles/s


3DMark06 - default settings
Width 1280
Height 854
Anti-Aliasing None
Anti-Aliasing Quality 0
Texture Filtering Optimal
Anisotropic Level 1
VS Profile 3_0
PS Profile 3_0
Force full precision No
Disable HW shadow mapping No
Disable post-processing No
Force software vertex shader No
Color mipmaps No
Force software FP filtering No
Repeat tests Off
Fixed framerate Off
3DMark Score 4672 3DMarks
SM2.0 Score 2103
HDR/SM3.0 Score 1842
CPU Score 1442
Game Score N/A
GT1 - Return To Proxycon 16.778 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest 18.264 FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley 0.456 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 0.730 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight 16.293 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze 20.540 FPS
Fill Rate - Single-Texturing 0.000 N/A
Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing 0.000 N/A
Pixel Shader 0.000 N/A
Vertex Shader - Simple 0.000 N/A
Vertex Shader - Complex 0.000 N/A
Shader Particles (SM3.0) 0.000 N/A
Perlin Noise (SM3.0) 0.000 N/A
8 Triangles 0.000 N/A
32 Triangles 0.000 N/A
128 Triangles 0.000 N/A
512 Triangles 0.000 N/A
2048 Triangles 0.000 N/A
32768 Triangles 0.000 N/A

Hard Drive Benchmarks
There are 2 hard drives, but they were not set up as a RAID array. In fact, there really isn't any way to do so in the BIOS. You are just left with 2 hard drives on their own. The first drive is a Fujitsu MHW2120BH SATA150 drive. It's a 120GB hybrid hard drive with 386 MB of flash memory. The second drive is a Toshiba MK1237GSX SATA-II drive. It's a standard 120GB hard drive. Both spins at 5400 RPMs and have 8MB of cache.

Using DiskMark, I was able to benchmark both of the drives.

Fujitsu MHW2120BH
Sequencial Read: 25.69 MB/sec
Sequencial Write: 26.41 MB/sec
512k Reads: 13.72 MB/sec
512k Writes: 17.47 MB/sec
4k Reads: 0.815 MB/sec
4k Writes: 1.271 MB/sec

Toshiba MK1237GSX
Sequencial Read: 38.24 MB/sec
Sequencial Write: 38.72 MB/sec
512k Reads: 20.07 MB/sec
512k Writes: 20.41 MB/sec
4k Reads: 0.679 MB/sec
4k Writes: 2.001 MB/sec

It seems that the Toshiba drive is much faster than the Fujitsu!

Battery Life
Battery life is pretty good for a 17" gaming laptop. I was pretty surprised, actually. With the screen brightness at its minimum, surfing the net with wiFI on, typing up ePinions, and other light-duty work, I was able to clock in 2 hours 32 minutes. That may sound short, but consider that it is powering a large screen!

Playing back DVD shortens the life to around 1 hour 35 minutes (screen brightness 3 ticks above minimum). It was just barely enough to watch Oceans 11.

Unfortunately, I do not have a HD-DVD to test, but I'm sure with the extra processing power required to decode such a beast, battery life watching HD-DVD would be shorter than watching standard DVDs.

It takes about an hour and a half to fully charge the battery when not in use. With the laptop on and in use, the battery takes a full extra hour to charge.

Verdict
This is not a laptop you would want to buy if you are going to lug it around all the time. Unless you are a gamer with a job that requires you to travel, I don't think this will satisfy you. The battery life is horible for plane use. People will hate you for bringing it out on the flimsy tray. It is, however, the perfect desktop replacement. It's good to lug around the house (from the bedroom to the living room). It could also be great to lug to a friend's house for some fragging fun or a LAN party.

Having the Firewire, harman/kardon speakers, and 17" screen may well suited for audio/video editing and content creation as well. It can serve as a luggable multi-media player. With HDMI, this would make a good HD-DVD player if you want to lug it to a friend's house and show off what HD content can do to their brand new HDTV. (Shame that most HDTV owners are still using SD signals, huh?)

Personally, the laptop is too large for my taste. Instead, I opted for a Compal IFL90 - a barebones laptop with a slower video chipset (8600m GT) and a 15" wide screen. My brother decided this laptop suits him, and bought it from me instead.

For $1,499.99, it was too good of a deal to pass up. The X205 is actually a faster machine than my current gaming desktop, thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo (my desktop is an overclocked x2 3800 ). The video card is still not as fast as my 7900GTX, but it does do DX 10 (7900GTX is only DX9).

In the end, this is a specialized laptop for specialized uses. It seems to fit my brother's need for a portable gaming machine that doesn't need to be lugged to work and used during travels. Traveling only to a friend's house to play, or on his bedroom desk or living room while watching TV, the X205 serves his needs well.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1499.99
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: Greater than 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50