Toshiba Launches Laptop With Three GPUs

arcticstoat writes to mention that Toshiba's latest line of high-powered laptops has three GPUs included. Both the Qosmio X305-Q706 and Q708 come with an integrated GeForce 9400M for day-to-day processing tasks but have a pair of GeForce 9800Ms in SLI that kick in when you need the extra horsepower. "The [Qosmio] X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven't seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet. The system comes with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the costlier X305-Q708 comes with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU."

Comments

Portable Furnace

[Brain_Recall]

Does it come with its own fire extinguisher?

Re:Portable Furnace

[eclectro]

Does it come with its own fire extinguisher?

Actually no. But you can get that at the Autozone when you go to pick up the car battery you'll need.

Re:Portable Furnace

[the_womble]

The whole point of this is to improve battery life compared to laptops that only have the higher performance GPU: you use the more efficient GPU when you do not need the performance, and the better performance one only when you do.

Re:Portable Furnace

[Jeff DeMaagd]

A three GPU notebook is actually Toshiba's way of making triple damn sure that nerds don't reproduce.

Re:Portable Furnace

[jandrese]

You say nobody uses laptops for games, but you clearly have not been to any college lan parties lately. This is clearly a luggable designed for gaming, not a commuter laptop. The battery life probably sucks and it no doubt weighs a ton, but even so it's a lot easier to carry around than a full tower and the game performance should be more than adequate. Sure it'll be obsolete real fast, but these kinds of laptops aren't meant for the budget minded consumer.

Re:Portable Furnace

[PitaBred]

"obsolete" is a relative term, too. Some people who buy these realize that brand-new games might need some settings turned down, but they're still playable. Not everyone needs to run Crysis at 2560x1980 or whatever the hell it is as soon as it comes out. Two 9800's in SLI are pretty damn quick, and they'll still be pretty quick in 3 or 4 years, when laptops normally start dying. Game manufacturers make sure that people with older hardware can play their games because very, very few people actually buy new, top-of-the-line hardware to play ANY games.

I like this portable-desktop approact to laptops

[shinmai]

At first the idea sounded idiotic, but I might actually replace my outdated desktop with something like this. I've now used laptop computers pretty much exclusively for about two years now. I do have two desktops at home, but I rarely use them, and they're more for quests who stay long enough to need a computer they can use. I do everything on my laptop, and if I need more uumpf, I use VNC to connect to our bedroom-server-thing or use one of the desktops remotely. I notice that whenever I actually sit down on a desktop computer for more than a few minutes, at some point I feel the need to pick the thing up and move somewhere to do other things while continuing to work with the machine. While there have been more and more powerful laptops in recent years, I've still been waiting for a real powerhouse of a machine to actually toss out my old desktop instead of just replacing my latest laptop. Something like this might be it.

ewww

[gEvil (beta)]

My, that's an ugly looking laptop. Here's hoping Toshiba (or someone else) makes something similar in a nicer looking body.

Re:ewww

[ZenShadow]

That's called the MacBook Pro.

Re:ewww

[nitsnipe]

Here's a sexier one:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tlosborne/Osborne/Osbornehistory/Adamosborne/osbornecomputerspecsheet.jpg

Re:ewww

[Draek]

Yeah, except that a 9400+9600 hybrid SLI setup isn't the same thing as a twin 9800 SLI one, sorry.

I see where this is going...

[Frizzle Fry]

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

Re:I see where this is going...

[llamalicious]

The funny thing about that Onion piece, is the a couple years later Gillette really went and made a five-blade razor.

Score one for the onion!

I actually hadn't thought of it before..

[shinmai]

..but Toshiba often seems to launch new and previously unheard of things in their computers. Still they're not very popular (at least with anyone I know) when compared to the more "mundane" manufacturers.

The problem with desktop replacements

[Piata]

As someone that is using a laptop as desktop replacement, I have to say it's great to be able to have so much portable power but it does have it's downsides:

1. They tend to weigh a lot, making travel with it a bit of a pain and an annoyance for daily use in multiple locations.
2. They tend to run extremely hot.
3. They cost a lot more for the equivalent desktop hardware.
4. Less upgradable.
5. Nvidia doesn't update their mobile chipset drivers.

My next computer will definitely be a desktop.

Battery Life

[aardwolf64]

Battery life is an amazing 2.4 seconds, but you can buy an extended battery and extend the life to 1 minute 15 seconds. Or, almost long enough for it to boot up.

Pricing?

[CaptainPatent]

The [Qosmio] X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven't seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet.

I think I saw UK pricing on that somewhere... oh yeah:

The [Qosmio] X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven't seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet.

Re:Pricing?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the UK price, it's the US price converted to GBP. It's entirely conceivable - and, in fact, likely - that the laptop will retail for a different, higher price in the UK.

At least, that's the way it always goes.

Re:Pricing?

[should_be_linear]

Its more like:

The [Qosmio] X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven't seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet.

Implementation is key to this

[GIL_Dude]

After having fought with the Lenovo T400 (with the ATI graphics and the built in Intel graphics) in "switchable" mode, I can only hope that Toshiba was able to implement theirs in a way that works well even across the edge cases of configuration and usage.

For example on the T400, it switches (by default) to the Intel integrated when you go to battery. If you use the machine on a port replicator with dual monitors (like is common for us) you get the two screens identified as number 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2. AND - when you redock, they switch back and forth (primary screen switches from one side to the other). It works so poorly in a docking scenario that we just disabled it in the BIOS (so it is always on the ATI or 'discrete' graphics).

This is one of those ideas that sounds great, but if implemented poorly leaves me scratching my head and wondering why someone designed something so stupid.

Here's hoping that Lenovo works this out and that this implementation from Toshiba works right out of the gate.

Who needs battery life...

[Wiarumas]

Who needs battery life when you can play Fallout3 on the crapper!

Re:Cool, but..

[CaptainPatent]

Can it run Crysis?

run crysis?

With how hot that thing gets it is crysis!!

bois not linux or vm friendly

[sgt scrub]

Every Toshiba I have looked at, after finding out mine had this issue, has hvm disabled. Not "they use a bios that is not "Intel Virtualization Technology-enabled". Flat out disabled with no way of turning it on. Add to this the fact that every bios update for my laptop has made it more and more difficult to get Linux running properly. No sound? hack bios rebuild kernel and init. No fan for GPU? hack bios - rebuild kernel and init... I'm waiting for the bios that looks to see if I have nothing vista'ish on the drive and disables me turning it on.