To read my other posts about the Toshiba Qosmio G40 Click Here

I was very lucky over the Christmas break to still have the Toshiba Qosmio G40 on loan from Toshiba.

Typically you get a week to review stuff, but I got lucky with Christmas  break in the middle I had the G40 for nearly 3 weeks.

This review model was tricked out with Core2Duo 2.4Ghz, 512mb NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT Video Card, HD-DVD Writer and a lovely 17″ Widescreen 1920×1200 resolution screen and is an absolute joy to use.

I have previously said on this site I am a really bad “Computer Gamer” but I did want to see what the  video card in this laptop was capable of.

I chose Half Life2, Return of Castle Wolfenstein which both installed and worked well under Windows Vista Ultimate. I grabbed these from my Steam account so about a 5.5gb download.

I though that the 4200rpm hard disk speed would hinder performance when loading levels but was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the experience was on both these titles.

Next up I grabbed the Demo of Bioshock (a 2gb download again from steam) a game that demands a powerful machine. Sadly this refused to load. I suspected that the graphics drivers would need updating and found that on the official Toshiba site more recent ones were available.

Tip:I tried getting the drivers from  Nvidia first and they said go to Toshiba.

The download speed for the updated video drivers from a toshiba.de (German) domain was shockingly slow at about 15kbs, files on my connection can come down at 450kbs. So that was a little frustrating.

Then when I read the video driver readme file I saw I also had to perform a bios update as well as a driver update so I got to thinking, if the bios update went bad I could have a £2000 brick on my hands. So I erred on the side of caution and decided not to bother.

Between downloading games and drivers I kind when off the boil.

To be honest I didn’t really want to spend my holiday doing technical support, I get enough of that in the day job.

So in conclusion The titles I played all looked and sounded fantastic, but with PC gaming there is always an element of D.I.Y involved. I used to like that when I was younger and learned a lot about DMA’s and IRQ’s getting things to work.

However I would imagine that the type of potential customer for a Qosmio G40 isn’t really a twenty something gamer or family looking for a laptop. This begs the question who is the target audience for the  G40?

The best analogy I have on who the Qosmio G40 is aimed at is well…Lexus drivers really, the Qosmio at this spec level is reassuringly expensive at £2000+ ish. The G40 does ooze quality but like lexi its not for everybody.

So I prematurely ended my incursion into G40 gaming. To be honest what I was more interested in was delving into HD-DVD which will be the subject of my next post about the Toshiba Qosmio G40.

Official Link: Toshiba Qosmio G40

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Equipment Reviews, Hi-Definition, Toshiba, Toshiba Qosmio G40. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.