Big Screen Feeling with Toshiba Qosmio X505

Aimed at both media enthusiasts and gamers, the Qosmio X505 is Toshiba’s largest and most powerful desktop replacement machine featuring a quad core processor and a mid-range nVidia GPU. Does the X505 live up to expectations? Read our review to find out.

Our Toshiba Qosmio X505 review unit has the following specifications:

• Intel Core i7 720QM (1.6GHz, 6MB L2 Cache)
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit
• 18.4-inch WUXGA glossy screen (1920x1080)
• 6GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM
• 64GB Toshiba SSD
• 500GB Hitachi HDD
• nVidia GTS 360M, 1GB VRAM
• Internal fixed Blu-Ray optical drive.
• Realtek 802.11n Wi-Fi, Atheros Gigabit Ethernet
• LED Backlit Keyboard
• 12-cell 8000mAh battery
• One-year warranty
• Dimensions: 17.4 x 11.6 x 1.63 inches
• Weight: 10.5 pounds, not including the 2 pound power adapter
• Price as configured: $1,899

Build and Design
Our first impression of the Toshiba Qosmio X505 is that it is big, heavy and is a champion when it comes to build quality. When it comes to design, the X505 has a very sophisticated look. The piano black finish with metallic red highlights could appeal to people who never would have considered a “flashy” notebook. The glossy surface is a fingerprint magnet though. Even the LEDs on the notebook match with the black and red theme.

Despite the X505's all-plastic design, build quality is superb. The base of the notebook uses high quality plastic that should brush off bumps and bruises easily. The palm rest and other areas of the notebook are satisfyingly firm and gives us the impression that the internal design and structure of the notebook was carefully planned. The LCD housing does a good job of protecting the screen as well. We were not able to produce distortions on the screen with poking or prodding on the back side of the LCD housing, and it also resisted twisting motions well.

A notebook this large has to have a solid screen hinge to support the weight of the LCD, and Toshiba delivers in that respect. The hinge is firm enough to keep the notebook closed and open when needed, but the screen wobbles a little when bumped and the hinge occasionally squeaks. It also takes some effort to open the notebook.

Screen and Speakers
The Toshiba Qosmio X505 comes with a glossy 18.4-inch CCFL backlit screen with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 (the 16:9 equivalent of WUXGA). Colors are bright and vibrant, text is crisp and sharp and videos are smooth and clear. With a maximum measured brightness of about 141 nits, it is a little dim compared to LED backlit screens and will be unsuitable for outdoor use, but indoors (like on the desk that this notebook will rarely leave) the screen is stunning.

The X505 has eight distinct levels of screen brightness that can be adjusted by using Fn+F6 and Fn+F7 key combinations. The brightest settings on the notebook won't wash out colors or strain the eyes, and the dimmer settings for the screen are great for darkroom entertainment. During normal use, we would usually have to leave the screen at one of the four highest brightness levels for comfortable use.

Notebook screens tend to have poor vertical viewing angles, and the X505 is no exception. Colors and text fade fast when viewing the notebook screen from above or below. Horizontal viewing angles are much better and are quite impressive. Even at the far left or right field, the screen is still easily readable and the visual quality of text, images and videos were consistent throughout.

When we typically see that a notebook with Harman/Kardon speakers, there are high hopes that we are going to have a great listening experience. The two very large front speakers live up to our expectations with excellent audio in the treble range, but the bass range is non-existent. Music fades when there is low volume in the treble range. For a notebook this large, the lack of perceptible bass is a big disappointment.

Keyboard and Touchpad
The X505 has a comfortable keyboard that easily outperforms many other notebooks. The LED backlit keyboard uses a fairly standard layout and design that has a great amount of feedback but is just a hair too springy. The spacing and feel of the keyboard is just about right and we think many people will like it.

At first, the glossy finish on the keyboard was a drawback; the keys seemed to grab our fingers a little bit. After a day or two, with a sufficient amount of oil building up on the keys, that problem was resolved. The only unresolved problem that is that we cannot find a way to turn the LED backlight off on the keyboard...

The large amount of palm rest real estate on an 18.4-inch notebook means that the X505 has a full size keyboard, a number pad and a few inches to spare. Toshiba uses that space by including eight capacitive touch special function buttons to control media playback, volume and power settings on the notebook. It's a nice feature but there are two big problems with these buttons: they are easy to accidentally trigger and they always beep at you when you hit them. Even the mute button beeps at you when you hit it.

Like the keyboard, the touchpad requires a little bit of oil to build up for optimal use. At first we found ourselves running off of the flush touchpad, but we adapted quickly. The tactile feedback provided by the touchpad was excellent and its responsiveness was equally satisfying after we updated the touchpad drivers. The touchpad also has an on/off button (and a giant red LED indicating if that the pad is on or off) that you can deactivate if needed. The two large touchpad buttons are red and hard to miss, but they are also difficult to work with since they require a lot of force to get them to register a click.

The Synaptics touchpad on the X505 also has a few other productivity features like circular scrolling, multi-touch zoom and multi-touch rotation motions, and even two-finger scrolling, which required us to space our fingers uncomfortably far apart for the touchpad to acknowledge the gesture. The rest of the features worked well.

Ports and Features

Let us be real – this is an 18.4-inch desktop replacement machine. Toshiba has the room to put any type of port on this computer that they want, and they did a good job of including the essentials. With three USB ports, one combo eSATA/USB port, audio ports, a Firewire 400 port, SD card slot, Ethernet port, VGA out and HDMI outputs, the notebook has almost everything a user needs. The X505 also has an ExpressCard/54 slot above the optical drive so you can expand upon the notebook as you see fit. There is even space for a DisplayPort connector on the notebook, but we are unsure why Toshiba chose to omit that feature. Our only complaint is that we wish there were more USB ports. The VGA port might baffle you a little, but Toshiba smartly figured that a lot of HDTVs have VGA ports dedicated for computer connections (and not all HDTVs have enough HDMI inputs). Let’s have a quick look around the notebook.

Left: Ethernet, combo eSATA/USB, another USB port, HDMI out, Firewire 400, Blu-Ray optical drive and ExpressCard/54.

Right: Audio in/out, 2x USB ports, a VGA out port, AC power and a security lock slot.

Front: Wireless on/off switch, SD card slot.

Back: Nothing.

Performance and Benchmarks
The Toshiba Qosmio X505 is among the largest notebooks we've seen, and it packs an equally large punch in the performance sector thanks to a powerful quad core mobile i7 processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, a strong nVidia GPU and a fast solid state hard drive.

A quick look at these performance numbers reveals that the Toshiba OEM SSD keeps up with the aftermarket competition fairly well. The critical figure, 4K reads and writes, is still 10-15 times faster than a traditional hard drive and as a result, the notebook feels much more responsive. Given our experiences with current aftermarket SSDs, it's difficult to differentiate the performance between the Toshiba OEM SSD and the competition.

wPrime processor comparison results (lower scores mean better performance):

PCMark05 measures overall system performance (higher scores mean better performance):

3DMark06 comparison results against notebooks @ 1280 x 800 resolution (higher scores mean better performance):

The Toshiba Qosmio X505 also scored 9250 PCMarks in PCMark Vantage, and 5766 3DMarks in 3DMark Vantage.

CrystalDiskMark hard drive performance test:

Heat and Noise
During light and medium workloads, the X505 is nearly silent. While we can sometimes hear the LCD inverter buzzing and the fans gently running in the background, for all intents and purposes, the machine produces very little noise during normal use. It also produces almost no extra heat, except around the rear center of the notebook. Considering that it comes with a powerful dedicated GPU and a quad core CPU, it is impressive that the notebook is this cool and quiet.

During gaming or benchmarking runs, it was a slightly different story. The hot spot of the notebook got little bit hotter, but the fans were much more noticeable. They were not high-pitched, whiny or obnoxious, but the fans make their presence known. Users playing games or running power hungry applications might want to turn up the volume a little.

Battery Life and Bundled Software
The X505 is stocked with high performance components to help reduce power consumption. Toshiba included the "eco Utility," which is a custom power management suite. Does it affect anything? Aside from altering your display brightness settings, Windows 7 power configuration settings and turning off a few LEDs … not really. When enabled, a little green LED turns on, so you get a warm, fuzzy feeling that you are helping to save the planet.

However, the "eco Utility" is useful for reliable power consumptions readings and shows a graph of how much power the computer is using. Even when the display is down to half brightness and Windows 7 running on a "balanced" power setting, the computer still manages to pull between 35-45W.

With that power draw, the notebook manages to run for one hour and 35 minutes before the battery drops out. It's not great, but it's also not bad for a desktop replacement, either.

But what is bad is the amount of bundled software that came with the X505. Trial bloatware for backup tools, office tools, anti-virus software, financial management software, online/social gaming applications and much more was found on this system. By the time we installed a few of our own benchmarking tools and one game, only 5GB of space was left on the primary hard drive. Between the Toshiba restoration partition, the OS and bloatware, more than 40 GB of the 64 GB SSD was used up. As a point of reference, Windows 7 installation with Microsoft Office included would use about 20 GB of space.

Conclusion
The Toshiba Qosmio X505 is a gigantic notebook that is more than capable of handling many things thrown its way. Designed for both gamers and computing enthusiasts, the notebook offers a great screen, decent keyboard, above average build quality and a high performance platform that stays cool and quiet.

It is not without flaws though. The most pronounced negatives on the notebook is a lack of audio capabilities in the bass ranges and the amount of bloatware that came pre-installed on our test system.

Ultimately, it's a nice machine, but is it worth $1,899? That is a question best left to you, but for the performance and quality that the X505 delivers, it could be.

Pros:

• Massive, beautiful, 18.4-inch screen
• A ton of power, yet little heat or noise
• Nice build quality

Cons:

• Poor speaker performance (no bass)
• Mouse buttons are difficult
• Bloatware and spammed advertisements