TOSHIBA QOSMIO G45 PENRYN LAPTOP REVIEW

A complete entertainment package from Toshiba, this one takes care of all your gaming and entertainment needs and it couples an HDTV tuner and 1080p resolution support.

Design
The design of the notebook is very flashy, with an extreme black glossy outer and a white glossy internal. Inside, there are touch sensitive buttons to control many tasks, and chrome dials along with bright blue LEDs which light up power button and volume control dial along with every touch button while the notebook is in operation. The build of the notebook is sturdy but a few creaking noises were observable. The build thus suffers a bit, and could have been better. A 17” WXGA screen, solely based for entertainment, has great quality and a nice glossy finish. The horizontal viewing angles are superb, but the vertical angles are still narrow. The connectivity options are present in abundance, and they include HDMI, S-Video, VGA for display, USB, LAN, Card Reader, Firewire and WiFi.

Performance
The notebook is powered by an Intel Core-2-Duo T9300, 3GB of RAM and 2 160GB hard drives and a 8600M GT graphics processor. The configuration is quite powerful and it achieves all the tasks that an entertainment oriented notebook should perform. It managed a score of 5,865 PCMark05 and 3,775 3DMark 06. It includes an ATI TV DIGITAL CABLE TUNER and a HD-DVD burner. The burner in itself is quite expensive, which increases the cost of the notebook, but it is a great addition for an entertainment notebook. The battery life is poor, and while watching a DVD, it only lasted somewhere around 60 minutes, which should not have happened, since its an entertainment notebook, and no movie is less than 90 minutes usually.

Conclusion
Superb performance, and it definitely justifies the price tag to a large extent. The Penryn processors increase the performance to a large extent. But for a gaming notebook, better options are available, some of which are actually cheaper.

Pros
+ Great screen
+ Good additional options

Cons
- Gaming performance could have been better
- Battery life is a disappointment.

Value For Money

Our Rating