Toshiba Qosmio X870-119 3D Gaming Laptop Review

We take a look at Toshiba's latest 3D Gaming and Entertainment Laptop.

by Greg Hook
Gaming Review

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119 3D Gaming Laptop Review
MSRP: £1,699.99

Introduction

Gaming laptops, in this reviewer's opinion anyway, are something of an acquired taste. On the one hand you have the fans who will never consider a desktop and want the portability that a laptop offers and on the other hand, you have the desktop gamers who can't understand why someone would pay so much for something that a desktop PC costing half as much can easily out perform. Despite this, the ability to play your favourite games or watch a Blu-ray regardless of which room in the house you are in, or even if you are not in the house at all, is particularly enticing. As technology keeps improving and minimising components, many manufacturers are now bringing out gaming laptops that should hopefully offer a gaming solution that won't immediately be dismissed by their desktop PC siblings.

From the well established (but pricey) Alienware to manufacturers such as MSI, Asus, Scan and Toshiba, there are now plenty of options for the gamer on the move. Following on from the Toshiba X770 released in 2011, this improved specification Qosmio X870-119 offers a 17" Full HD 3D screen with a massive 16GB of RAM, an i7 processor from the new Ivybridge platform, SSD, HDD and a Nvidia GTX670M graphics adaptor with a huge 3GB of VRAM. Toshiba say the X870 is 'Turbo-charged gaming and entertainment' and 'designed for both gaming and multimedia enthusiasts' and from a first glance at the specifications, it would appear to meet those claims. Of course specifications never tell the whole story, so let's take a closer look and see if Toshiba lives up to our expectations.

Design and Aesthetics

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Toshiba have kept with the Qosmio styling on this X870 model, albeit with a few changes. Gone is the deep red from the X770, replaced with black and just a few splashes of red around the edges, hinges and touch pad. It's more of a sleeker and understated design than the previous model with a chequer plate metallic finish above and below the keyboard and on the back of the screen itself. You still get the red backlit keyboard and also red lights on the 3D and power buttons but that's it. No glowing red light on the touch pad or various other buttons that was seen with the X770 model. In our opinion this is a rather lovely laptop and surely is up there amongst the best in the aesthetics stakes. As Toshiba claim, it certainly is a striking design.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Toshiba have also not let us down in the build quality. The keyboard and buttons all feel well made and as with the X770 you don't get the feeling that one of the hinges will snap if you close the lid from the wrong place - it's all very solid. But there are a few negatives. We are not sure what Toshiba have done with the power connection, it is still the same four pronged design, but for some reason it feels very loose with a lot of side to side movement. It doesn't feel like it will fall out, but does not have the same secure feel as with the previous model.

There has also been a design change with the touchpad and the keyboard. Firstly the touchpad, gone are separate left and right buttons, which have now been incorporated into the touchpad. It mostly works but, apart from the very top of the touchpad, the whole thing now clicks if you press it without anything actually happening, so quite often you will be clicking away expecting a response only for none to come. The previous touchpad design with the separated left and right mouse buttons was much preferred. The touchpad also features multi-touch functionality giving you the ability to zoom, scroll and rotate, although it very rarely appears to work as suggested.

On the keyboard, Toshiba have removed a lot of the shortcut buttons that were above the keyboard in the X770 and incorporated them into the function keys, unfortunately this now means if you are a fan of Windows F key shortcuts, you will find yourself opening all kinds of options which you had no intention of doing. Our favourite is ALT+F4, which closes a window, but initially it required using a third key to get it to work. Thankfully there is a way of setting the F keys to be the priority but with a lot of space above the keyboard we are not sure why Toshiba have changed from what worked so well with the X770.

Weight and Exhaust


Being a 17" gaming laptop, it's no surprise that this is a fairly heavy piece of kit, especially compared to your average laptop. Although weighing in at a none too shabby 3.4kg, which is 200g lighter than the previous model, you won't get a dead leg if you have it on your lap for too long. Compared to similar specification gaming laptops from Alienware (4.26kg), Scan (3.9kg) and Asus (4.5kg) the weight is obviously something Toshiba have worked hard to keep to a minimum whilst balancing the needs of the overall design and specification.

In the reverse of the X770, the heat is now exhausted from the right hand side of the machine. A side exhaust is always welcome on laptops such as this which helps to banish that feeling of your legs slowly cooking whilst you watch a Blu-ray for example. It does create a lot of heat though, which given the components inside is no surprise and you always have the added benefit of a hand warmer close by on cold day.

Connections and Interface


Toshiba have not skimped on connections with the X870-119. You get 4 USB 3.0 ports (2 per side) of which 2 of these support their new 'sleep N charge' system, whereby you can connect USB devices to the laptop to charge them up such as a mobile phone, even with the laptop itself is powered off. Along with this you get the standard headphone and microphone jacks, LAN port, RGB VGA monitor port and HDMI out. No connections to the rear in keeping with the previous model and to the front is just the memory card reader, which is compatible with SD, miniSD, microSD, SDHC, SDXS and MultiMedia cards.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

The Blu-ray rewritable drive (BD-RE) is located on the left of the machine and above the keyboard are the 3D and power buttons. At the top of the screen we have an integrated HD 3D Web Camera (1,280 x 800) with built-in microphone. A quick test of the camera revealed good quality images, even in 3D, although unlike the 3D gaming and Blu-ray playback a large amount of external flicker is seen. Also from a personal perspective you do look a bit of an idiot talking to someone on a webcam with a huge pair of 3D glasses on!
Our review copy arrived with Windows 7 installed, configured and ready to go. It's always worth spending a good amount of time updating all the drivers and programs as you will most likely find updates and patches to improve the overall system, along with the many windows updates that are available if you choose to install them. This is where the benefit of a custom built PC comes in, you get a machine that has been updated to the very latest drivers, software and even BIOS meaning as soon as you get it you can start enjoying it straight away. But saying that it's probably only a 30 minute job to get yourself up to date.

Given the price tag of £1700, the specification is very high, although in the GPU department it is lacking. You get the new Intel Ivybridge platform i7-3610QM Quad Core (hex thread) CPU running at 2.3Ghz or 3.3Ghz in turbo mode (which the system will do automatically for you when needed) and a massive 16GB of DDR3 memory running at 1600MHz. Along with an Nvidia GTX670M graphics adaptor (192bit @ 598mhz). As mentioned previously, for the outlay here you would really expect a far more powerful graphics adaptor; the Nvidia GTX680M would be the minimum and in our gaming test section this lowly GTX670M was really brought to task and is not much of an improvement over the previous X770 model that featured the GTX560M.

The Qosmio X870 also comes with a Sandisk X100 128GB solid state drive promising read speeds up to 500 MB/s and write speeds of 355 MS/s (check the test results page to see how this fares). The 128GB results in a drive of 101GB formated space but due to the many Toshiba programs installed you actually only get free space of 59.1GB. The system arrived with only 43.1GB of free space but this was due to a 16GB pagefile.sys file which can easily be moved to the other drive to save memory. As Windows normally uses about 20GB or so and allowing 12GB for the hiberfil.sys file, that gives you a fair idea just how much space is taken up with the Toshiba programs and other items installed. In can be reduced even further since there is about 6GB of Microsoft Office 2010 waiting to be installed (and activated once you have paid for it!) The screenshot below from Treesize shows the available space as seen after the laptop was first turned on.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Along with the SSD we also get a Toshiba 5400 RPM 1TB HDD. Usable space after formatting of 931GB. This is a generous size to see in a laptop and should be enough for most of what you plan to do with it, although a faster 7200 RPM drive for example would have been welcome given that you may run out of space on the SDD fairly quickly

Battery Life


The most shocking aspect of the X770 that we reviewed previously was the poor battery life, so we were keen to see how this new X870 model fared in comparison. Toshiba had revised their maximum battery life estimates down from the 'up to' 2 1/2 hours on the X770 to just 2 hours with this new model, so already we feared the worst. Whilst performing better than the disastrous gaming battery test on the previous model, the X870 still fared extremely poorly. A game of Battlefield 3 with a fully charged battery will give you only 28 minutes of gaming time, that's barely enough time to get started and into the game. It's recommended to charge the battery up fully and let it go flat a few times to ‘optimise’ it from new, which we did here, but the battery time remained the same. £1700 for 28 minutes of gaming on the move is not what we would call an enticing deal. Obviously given the specification and power requirements we were not expecting hours from the battery, but 1 hour would be nice at least.

The bad news continues when you try and watch a Blu-ray. Again from a fully charged battery you don't even get enough time to watch a whole film, not even a very short one! Standard Blu-ray gives you just 58 minutes of battery life and on a 3D Blu-ray you get only 43 minutes. The battery life indicators are also most unhelpful. You check it at one point and it says you have 90 minutes left, 10 minutes later you look again and it says you have just 40 minutes left, so don't take this as gospel, it appears to be extremely inaccurate. Given the short battery life unless you are doing some casual web browsing or just staring at the desktop you will most likely need to ensure you are plugged into the mains or have another power source to hand. You can of course purchase another fully charged battery for £88 but they seems to be beside the point.

As with the X770, the system does have a feature called Toshiba eco Utility which puts the laptop in the most economical state it can to reduce the power consumption. Although it is a pointless feature for gaming or watching a Blu-ray because it lowers everything including the backlighting so much that you can't actually see what you are doing. It appears to be one of those features that you can turn on and see just how much power you are actually using but doesn't have any long term use. The power supply itself produces an extremely annoying whine and given that you have to keep it plugged in most of the time, that really will start to get on your nerves. We hope this is just an issue with our review sample but if every power supply for this X870 model is like this, Toshiba may have a problem.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

3D Display and Playback

As with the previous model you get Toshiba's excellent TruBrite® Full HD TFT 3D vision display with LED backlighting, which offers 1920 x 1080 resolution (16:9 ratio) and a response time of 5 milliseconds. It's one of the areas that this laptop really excels in. With the Nvidia 3D you get a dimming in the brightness due to the glasses which the high brightness glossy display more than makes up for. For non-3D you may wish to lower the brightness slightly but overall the colours are strong and bold and you really get the impression that you are dealing with a quality screen here. Using Passmark's Monitor Test will give you some idea of how it copes with colours. The Qosmio X870 screen is a fine example of a superior laptop screen.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
One of the major positives for the laptop is it's built-in 3D. Using the supplied Nvidia 3D Vision active shutter glasses the 3D quality from the Blu-ray discs in our test suit was excellent overall. Testing with the same discs you tend to notice differences and compared to the previous X770 model the 3D did seem to be a lot better. The 3D had great depth and didn't suffer from being too dark or losing too much of the 'HD' quality. The Nvidia glasses are reasonably comfortable and will easily fit over your glasses, if you wear them. Compared to other 3D tests, there were no settings to remove flicker from your peripheral vision and it didn't give this reviewer a headache, which was nice. The 3D on this laptop is worthy of the £1700 price point and you should not be disappointed.
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Onboard Sound

Moving on to the sound, with the X870 we get 4 Harmon/Kardon stereo speakers (including tweeters) which uses Toshiba's 'Slip Stream Technology' (no, we have no idea what that is either) and the 'SRS Premium Sound 3D™'. Toshiba claim this offers a 'rich, high quality stereo' and a 'life-like audio experience'. Whilst we wouldn't go that far, the sound quality is excellent and far exceeds what you would expect from the size of the speakers. The sound is clear and rich and has none of that tinny noise that plagues normal laptops. Sadly, for some reason the subwoofer that set the X770 apart in the audio stakes has been removed in this model, you also don't get Dolby Advanced Audio. Due to this, you will notice a lack of bass, and it lacks the punchy audio found on the X770. We would imagine most people will be using headphones with this laptop if they are in public or don't want to disturb other people but, if you are using the onboard audio, apart from the disappointment regarding the subwoofer the sound should hopefully be in line with what you would expect from a £1700 laptop.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Pre-installed Software

Unlike a desktop PC, laptop manufacturers seem to think their users require a whole set of additional software to be installed to enable them to get the most out of their computer, often resulting in a large amount of programs that you won't ever use and just take up space. In fact most of them are the manufacturers own versions of programs that are included in Windows anyway. Normally that is fine, but when you have an SSD with a much smaller capacity than your usual HDD, it starts to become an issue. Toshiba is no different and there is a whole array of software pre-installed including many of their own utilities (which I will come to shortly) and the likes of Skype, Google Chrome, McAfee Anti-Virus and BBC iPlayer desktops along with shortcuts for popular websites and Toshibas Places which is their online music, video and game download store.

Via the pre-installed WildTangent Games Console you get access to a web based system which includes 11 games already on the laptop (but waiting to be extracted and installed) and many more that you can purchase and download to play. From the devilishly addictive Plants Vs Zombies, to the likes of Bejewelled 3 these are on the laptop and free to play, but do contain adverts. The ad free version of Bejewelled 3 for example is £4.99. Most of these games are the sort of thing you would play on your iPad or Android tablet so are nothing special but they do look good with 3D activated. Also, should your internet connection go down they will all still work.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Moving on to the Toshiba software, you will find many different applications relating to all aspects of the laptop. To be fair to Toshiba they have toned it down from the plethora of software that came with the previous X770 model and you aren't constantly bombarded with messages any more. When you do get a message you can just tick a box and it won't ever appear again. For example when you move the laptop the Toshiba HDD Protection software will pop up a message that tells you it's moved the hard drive head to a safe position, this message can easily be turned off. Other applications such as the Toshiba Tempro which notifies you of any alerts related to the system, such as health issues, software and bios updates and the Toshiba Service Station. This is basically Toshiba's own version of Windows Update and will alert you if a new update is available to any installed Toshiba software.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Other Toshiba software pre-installed for example is their Blu-ray player, web camera app, PC Health monitor and Hi-Speed start up. This last one creates Toshiba's own pseudo sleep/hibernation mode when you shut down the PC so that it will start up quicker. There are many more applications than can be mentioned here, but the last one worthy of a mention is the HW Setup. This is a quick access to various hardware settings such as changing the function keys back to a traditional keyboard setup so that pressing F1 is actually F1! It also controls adding a password or changing the boot priority for example. As mentioned before most of these applications are Toshiba's own versions of ones that are probably already installed with Windows and if you're an intermediate or experienced PC user you probably wouldn't want any of them but a few of them do have their uses. However, since this is a 'gaming' laptop and you want to get the most juice out of it, it might be wise to remove whatever you won't use; they can easily be uninstalled if needs be.

Gaming Tests

The Qosmio X870 is equipped with an Nvidia GTX 670M graphics adaptor with 3GB of Video RAM with up to 10GB of Video RAM thanks to the 16GB of RAM. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is an equivalent to the desktop PC GTX670 graphics card as it clearly isn’t. The GTX670M chip is equivalent in desktop terms to an Nvidia GTX4600. Given the £1700 price tag and to stand out from the crowd, Toshiba should really have fitted something better such as the 680M.

Battlefield 3 - 1920 x 1080 resolution Released in late October 2011, Battlefield 3 was the long awaited sequel to the hugely popular Battlefield 2. Building on the original Frostbite engine used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Frostbite 2.0 aims to test PC hardware to the maximum. Since the i7-3610QM processor, even in turbo mode, only goes up to 3.3 Ghz, the Nvidia GTX670M in this system struggled. On high settings the game is almost unplayable giving an FPS of just 21 in non 3D mode.

Once you set it to medium, you start to get a frame rate that is at least playable. With a frame rate of 34 in medium and an even better 50 in low settings, you at least can find a mode that allows you to keep the 1920x1080 resolution and still enjoy a reasonably smooth level of gameplay. The results here are not a big improvement over the previous model and in fact, in 3D mode on the game was not playable, giving just 15 FPS, even in low mode. Would you expect to pay £1700 for a gaming laptop and only be able to play a game such as Battlefield 3 on low or just about on medium settings and not at all in 3D? We didn't think so...

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - 1920 x 1080 resolution

Released shortly after Battlefield 3 in November 2011, Modern Warfare 3 is the latest annual release from the Call of Duty franchise. This is not a demanding game at all and like most of the Call of Duty games will run quite nicely on most machines. Disappointingly there was barely any improvement in the FPS on this game than was seen in the previous X770 model. With everything on high (as high as MW3 will allow anyway) an FPS of 74 is seen which is excellent and perfectly playable but it still struggles in 3D mode giving an FPS of just 32. Even with a game as undemanding as this it really highlights that you shouldn't expect to play a modern game in 3D with this laptop if you want anything other than very low settings and a very poor frame rate.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Max Payne 3 - 1920 x 1080 resolution

Released on the PC in June 2012 and complete with the excellent bullet time feature, this is another critically acclaimed first person shooter that this system should at least take a stab at. Of the three games we tested on the system this one gave it the hardest workout. Unfortunately it was a workout too far. In 3D it is unplayable on any setting at the 1920 x 1080 resolution and with every single setting on low only a FPS of 27 was reported which is borderline in the playability stakes. Lowering the resolution will of course raise the frame rate, but obviously the game starts to look progressively worse as you do so. In fact in 3D mode we didn't get any kind of playable frame rate until the 800 x 600 resolution was used, not really something you should entertain on a £1700 laptop.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Ignoring Max Payne 3 as it was not even playable for testing and coping with the low frame rate on BF3 in 3D mode, both games looked impressive and the 3D worked well with real depth to it and no loss of clarity or quality. Our only minor issue was with on screen icons not working well when in 3D. But 3D in a first person shooter game is probably not something you would do for long sessions because whilst it's great to look at, it can become headache inducing over long periods. The Nvidia 3D Vision system works well, without any issues, and it’s easy to enable and disable via the quick access button above the keyboard.

Temperatures and Noise

The HWMonitor screenshot below shows the maximum temperatures the various system components reached during a testing session of the various benchmarks. The CPU maximum temperature reached 84Deg C but it is within the operating parameters and the TJMax (the maximum safe temperature for each CPU core) of 100Deg C. A CPU temperature in a desktop PC of this level would be of concern but a laptop's cooling is obviously different, although you should definitely bear this in mind if you plan on overclocking the CPU or the graphics. The laptop suffered no other issues or crashes during any testing or gaming sessions and as previously mentioned with the heat exhausting from the side this shouldn't create any problems if you actually want to use it as a 'lap' top.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Noise can be an issue with this laptop. For general use and idling, once you ignore the annoying whining from the power supply, you just get a barely noticeable whirring of the system fan and almost no noise from the HDD thanks to Windows being installed on the SSD. But for Blu-ray playback the system noise is a lot louder with the fan noise noticeable during quiet scenes, which is quite disappointing given that the previous model the X770 was very quiet in this department. It's not a deal breaker by any means but once you notice it, you will always hear it. Likewise with gaming due to the increased work the system is doing the noise does increase, but with the audio from the game itself, we doubt you will find this too much of an issue.

Home Cinema Features

As with all modern PCs these days, you just connect your HDMI cable to your system and away you go. Windows 7 has made it very easy, the laptop automatically clones the display to the TV via the HDMI cable and the sound automatically goes with it without any settings to change whatsoever. Using the pre-installed Toshiba Blu-ray disc player, there were no issues with video playback and it all ran without any stuttering or other issues. The only problem came with the audio. Unfortunately with the Toshiba software there are no options to tell it to output a HD signal, which resulted in a disappointing PCM signal being detected by my amplifier. A fix for this was to download a trial version of Power DVD 12 and after a quick change of the audio settings my amplifier was reporting True HD and DTS-HD MA in all its glory.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

With a laptop based Blu-ray player and software such as Power DVD 12 or even the Toshiba Blu-ray player software, you get the benefits of much faster loading times and the resume play feature. Whilst disc dependent, when available it works perfectly, even if you have taken the disc out and shut the laptop down. Testing with our usual Transformers, Thor and Star Trek movies the Blu-ray discs all played without issue at 1080P 24FPS. The images were crisp and clear with no stuttering, slowdowns or system freezes. As previously mentioned the noise level from the system increased, but that was more noticeable when you had it on your lap or close by. Presumably if you are using this as part of your home cinema it would be some distance from you and therefore the noise would be less of an issue. Connected to my homegroup with Windows 7, streaming audio or video files was effortless and using Windows Media Centre, video files, pictures or anything that you desire can be played back with no effort at all.

Benchmark Tests

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

The above screenshots are from freeware programs CPU-Z and GPU-Z, showing the CPU clock speeds and voltages together with memory and other system information. Note the Turbo Mode 3295MHz (3.3Ghz) speed, this drops to under 1200MHz when idle to save power (which this laptop most definitely requires).

Time to Desktop – 25 seconds


Bootracer 3.1 is another free program that allows for an accurate test of the time it takes to get to the desktop, saving you from using a stopwatch to work it out for yourself! With Windows 7 installed and the Sandisk X100 SSD you get a healthy 25 second boot up time. We'd expect it to be slightly quicker with an SSD but given the amount of Toshiba programs that are running, this gives a fair result. As a test, disabling everything via msconfig reduces this time to just 17 seconds, which is an excellent time.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Bootracer will keep a history of boot up times, allowing you to check should the time suddenly change for the worse (or better) following the installation of a new program or piece of hardware. As previously mentioned, it is also affected by programs that load on start up such as Steam, Origin, Anti Virus etc and we also noticed a decrease if you make sure nothing is in the DVD drive.

Super Pi – 1 million decimal points – 11.450 seconds


Super Pi (again, another free program) calculates Pi to a specified number of digits. It is used to test the CPU power and is a favourite among overclockers to test their speeds against the World Record times and the stability of their computer following an overclock. Super Pi is not optimised for dual or quad core processors and is purely a test of a CPU's single threaded capability. We used the 1.5 mod version as it shows more detailed timings.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

11.450 seconds is the result from the 1M test run, which is a reasonable time based on the 'up to' 3.3Ghz clock speed in turbo mode from the Intel Quad core i7-3610QM processor. This falls short when compared to the 9.032 seconds of the i5-2500K @ 4.2Ghz overclocked CPU in the 3XS Nanu Gamer we reviewed previously and also our own i5-2500K @ 4.5Ghz score of 8.3 seconds, but is still a good result for this i7 CPU.
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Windows Experience Index


A standard test included in Windows 7, it gives a quick performance score of the current system. It is a simple test and is not favoured as a benchmarking tool, but is a quick and easy way to see how your computer fares. The result here is 7.4. The majority of the system scores from 7.4 for the graphics right up to 7.8 for the 16GB DDR 1600 memory. The graphics lets it down here with a 7.4 score. The overall rating is determined by the lowest scoring component, rather than a weighted average score that you get in programs such as the Passmark Performance Test.

3D Mark 11


The latest version of Futuremark’s popular benchmarking tool is freely available to download, although to unlock the full functionality of it, they ask you to part with £14.17. It is particularly GPU intensive and is one of the most common programs for PC gamers, in particular, to test their system and compare it against a wide range of scores widely available on the internet.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

The score here of 2916 3D Marks is very disappointing. Whilst an increase on the 2216 3D Marks in the previous Toshiba Qosmio gaming laptop we reviewed this is still a very low score. The GTX670M should not be confused with it's similarly named destop brother. It is more comparable to the Nvidia GTX460 which gives you more of an idea of how the system should fare in the gaming tests. The GTX670M only has a 598MHz GPU clock speed and 336 cores. The desktop GTX670 for example is a completely different beast with 1344 cores and a clock speed of 915MHz. If this laptop had some of this power in it you'd probably be quite happy to spend £1700. Whilst boasting 3GB of VRAM and 'up to' 11GB of available graphics memory, there isn't any point to it as the card can't cope with it anyway. For comparison the GTX560 and GTX660Ti in the recent Scan 3XS desktop reviews scored 5093 and 7884 3D Marks respectively. 3D Mark scoring is not entirely based on the power of the graphics card. Other factors such as the CPU power come into play, but as seen in the gaming scores it is very disappointing to see when you have parted with £1700 to get this laptop.
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Atto Disk Benchmark - SSD & HDD


The Sandisk X100 128GB SSD claims to offer up to 500 MB/s read and 355 MB/s for write with an IOPs of 74,000 read and 38,000 write. As you can see from the first image, the maximum read speed received was 389 MB/s and a write of 318 MB/s. The read in particular is quite significantly lower than the claimed speeds. Whilst you are very unlikely to get the speeds manufacturers quote, previous system tests have always given an ATTO benchmark result fairly close to the claimed speeds, but this one falls particularly short.

From the second image we can see the test for the Toshiba 1TB 5400RPM drive, which scores an average read/write speed of 110 MB/s. As with a few of the other benchmarks we have used in this review, they are useful to run every so often to keep an eye on how your system is performing. A sudden drop in a particular score could point to a possible issue, such as a hard drive failing or requiring de-fragmentation.

PassMark Performance Test 7.0


The next benchmark test gives an overall system performance following tests run on the CPU, GPU, Memory and disk drives. It is a weighted average score based on over 28 individual tests and therefore a low performing component will drag the score down. With a score of 2354.4, this is rather low although much improved on the 1600.2 tested in the previous Qosmio X770-136 laptop. The score is comparable to other user submitted results for comparable systems to the Qosmio X870-119 but is a low score, especially for the GTX670M graphics. For example, recent reviews have delivered scores of 3857.5 for the Scan i5-2500K/GTX660Ti system, 3087.90 for the Scan i5-2500K/GTX560Ti system and also 3355.3 scored by our own i5-2500K/GTX570 system.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Cinebench 11.5


Cinebench is another free benchmark program that is ideal to test CPU and GPU performances across different systems and platforms. The scores here being 44.84 fps for the OpenGL test and 6.12 pts for the CPU test. We have not included this test in our suite of benchmarks before so can not refer to any previous results, but by comparison a desktop system with a GTX460 scores 44 fps in the OpenGL test confirming the similarities (in performance at least) with the GTX670M in this system and similar results are seen with comparable CPUs.

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

PC Mark 7


The final benchmark test is another new addition to our suite - PC Mark 7 is designed for Windows 7 and combines more than 25 individual tests covering all aspects of the system such as storage, CPU, graphics, web browsing and gaming. The result with this system is 4709 PC Marks. As with the Cinebench test, since this is the first time it has been included in our suite of tests, we have no previous results to compare it to but as a comparison, a system with a 4.3GHz i5-2500K and a GTX 670 scores 6123 PC Marks. Scores from systems with the same CPU and graphics card as this laptop are upwards of 5000 which shows there is a bit more juice you can squeeze out of this system, providing you leave it plugged into the mains of course!

Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

System Summary

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Build Quality
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Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
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Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Features
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Specification
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Included Software
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Value for Money
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119
Toshiba Qosmio X870-119

Scores

Screen Quality

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.
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7

Sound Quality

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6

Processing Speed

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.
.
.
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5

Connectivity

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.
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.
.
5

Features

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.
.
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6

Build Quality

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.
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7

Value For Money

.
.
.
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4

Verdict

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6
6
AVForumsSCORE
OUT OF
10

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