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."

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: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.

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.

Does this mean death of The BOX?

[nitsnipe]

I think there's quite a market for these types of laptops. While the the disadvantages are that they are huge, weight a ton and toast your lap, they pack quite a bit of portable power. But the battery life should be pretty good when you're running with just the integrated graphics.
First they would be ideal for people who go to LAN parties.
Second, if you are a serious designer working in 3D animation this may be the only PC you need.
Thirdly, NVIDIA CUDA has shown a lot of promise so far, with time we will have more applications that make heavy use of the GPU (hopefully a lot of cryptography applications).

And that quad-core cpu should also be really good for running several virtual machines in VMWare (or virtual box or qemu). This laptop can fulfill the heavy computer needs of most users. The only problem is whether you are ready to pay 3 times the price for a bit more portability.

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.

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.

Re:Portable Furnace

[Artuir]

"But who wants/needs the extra weight and expense and unupgradability of an SLI card you're almost never going to use?"

Uh, the people this laptop is obviously targeted to?

They don't make this kind of thing to sell it to everyone under the sun. That's like saying a Formula 1 race car is for everyone. (Gotta keep it car related for you folks, apparently.) It is very obviously a gamer's laptop and it is quite a smart design if you look at it from that standpoint. If you're using it to do office work all of the time you're obviously "doing it wrong", as the interweb sayeth.

Re:Portable Furnace

[Anonymous Coward]

But who wants/needs the extra weight and expense and unupgradability of an SLI card you're almost never going to use?

Who would ever want more than ~32 megs of video memory in a laptop? No one in their right mind uses laptops for games, and you're just going to get burned in another year or two when the next generation of video cards comes out.

My old laptop had 32mb of ram. Half way through my thesis I had to leave it at home and VNC into my home computer from uni as the software I was using to design circuit boards became too slow to update the screen as the board neared completion.

Even if in your world laptops are never used for games, it's crazy to think that all people ever do on them is edit text files and watch movies during the morning commute.

Re:ewww

[Molochi]

If by the same you mean much slower and not significant as a gaming pc, then sure.

The 9600M GT is a pretty craptastic videocard for a $2500+ notebook.