Toshiba Qosmio X75 Review

The Good The Toshiba Qosmio X75 comes packed with an Intel Haswell CPU, new Nvidia graphics, a combo SSD/HDD drive, and even a Blu-ray writer.

The Bad The bulky design has a budget feel for a premium-price laptop, battery life is disappointingly short, and the laptop lacks newer features such as DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, or even a touch screen.

The Bottom Line Toshiba's multimedia and gaming Qosmio X75 laptop gets great performance from its high-end components at a reasonable price, but the design and some features feel dated.

Some things in the PC universe can change a lot in a short period of time. We're now living in a world of touch screens, detachable keyboards, and 12-plus hours of battery life. Other things remain stubbornly the same, much like the Toshiba Qosmio X75, a thick throwback of a laptop packed with high-end CPU and GPU parts, a flashy red-accented body, and a lack of modern concessions (no touch screen here).

But, that's not to say sticking to your guns is necessarily a bad thing. Instead of a throwback, we might call the X75 a stoically traditional desktop replacement laptop. Sure, the design may have gotten a tweak or two, and the last couple of Qosmio generations are a little thinner and lighter than the models from a few years ago, but this is still a classic anchored-to-the-desk 17-inch laptop -- a category with fewer players right now than any time in recent memory.

The main difference between the new X75 and the X875 , which was itself only launched at the beginning of 2013, is the move to the latest generation of Intel and Nvidia parts. This system has a fourth-gen quad-core Core i7 CPU , plus Nvidia's new GeForce 770M GPU, putting it fairly close to the top of the heap in performance. You could spec out more expensive systems with more bells and whistles from Alienware, Origin PC, and others, but the Qosmio is more interested in riding the line between gaming rig and multimedia machine (hence the recordable Blu-ray drive in our configuration).

This specific config, the X75-A7298, is $1,799, and includes the Intel Core i7-4700, the Nvidia GeForce 770M, a Blu-ray burner, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive/256GB solid-state drive (SSD) storage combo. If you can skip a few frills, the exact same CPU/GPU combo is available for $1,199, but without the Blu-ray, SSD, and so on. In terms of performance, I've got no complaints about the value here. On the other hand, especially for $1,799, but even at $1,199, this is essentially a big aluminum-and-plastic box that feels "budget" in the hand. Everything, from the clacky keyboard to the shiny red highlights, feels a bit subpremium. At least these don't have painted-on flames anymore. And don't get me started on a 2013Windows 8 laptop, even one intended for gaming, not having a touch screen.

If I could insert the Qosmio X75's internal components into a nicer body, with a touch screen and a silent keyboard, I'd buy one today. Instead, what we have is the guts of a great 2013 laptop at reasonable price, stuck in a body that feels a few years out of date.

Design and features

In look and feel the X75 is close to, but not exactly the same as, the recent X875 model we reviewed in April . It still features a diamond-textured aluminum shell, but the light-up Qosmio logo on the lid has been moved from the center to the lower left corner. The metallic red accents have been toned down a tiny bit (no more red hinges), but you'd have to compare the X875 and newer X75 side by side to really tell them apart.

Thin and minimalist, this is not. Nor is it the wild abandon of, say, an Alienware gaming laptop with its crazy multicolor light show. Instead we're stuck in the aesthetic middle ground, or at least what the middle ground looked like before ultrabooks.

Of course, a big part of the advantage of a giant laptop is that there's plenty of room for a large keyboard and big touch pad, with few concessions to space requirements. In this case, we get Toshiba's generous flat-topped keyboard -- a style that has not noticeably changed in a couple of years -- plus a full-size separate number pad. The typing experience is good, but the keys are little on the clacky side. Toshiba laptops also have oddly short spacebars, which I always find contributes to typing mistakes. The keys themselves are backlit -- in Toshiba red, of course, and the function keys are reversed, which means you don't have to hold down the Fn key to access the volume, brightness, and other controls on the F1 to F12 keys.

The large touch pad is a clickpad-style one, without separate left and right mouse buttons. There's plenty of room for multitouch gestures, but at the same time, I found myself frequently accidentally triggering Windows 8 swipes when my fingers wandered too close to the edges of the pad. Hopefully, as a gamer, you'll have a mouse plugged in full time.

The 17.3-inch display, which runs at 1,920x1,080 pixels, is not a touch screen, a serious omission because Windows 8, especially in its tile-based UI view, is much easier to navigate with a few strategic finger swipes directly on the screen. To be fair, none of the gamer-targeted laptops we've seen this year have had touch screens, and there seems to be a real reluctance to marry discrete GPUs with touch screens so far.

That said, the screen itself looks great playing HD video, running games, and displaying Web content, even from off-axis views, although it's very glossy and you may have to shift it a bit to avoid glare.

The Harman Kardon speakers, a Toshiba mainstay, are excellent for a laptop, with good volume and punch. Laptop speakers will never push all that much bass, but for gaming and movie watching this'll fill a small room.

The 17.3-inch display, which runs at 1,920x1,080 pixels, is not a touch screen, a serious omission because Windows 8, especially in its tile-based UI view, is much easier to navigate with a few strategic finger swipes directly on the screen. To be fair, none of the gamer-targeted laptops we've seen this year have had touch screens, and there seems to be a real reluctance to marry discrete GPUs with touch screens so far.

That said, the screen itself looks great playing HD video, running games, and displaying Web content, even from off-axis views, although it's very glossy and you may have to shift it a bit to avoid glare.

The Harman Kardon speakers, a Toshiba mainstay, are excellent for a laptop, with good volume and punch. Laptop speakers will never push all that much bass, but for gaming and movie watching this'll fill a small room.