Finished in what Toshiba describes as ‘precious black’ with some tasteful red accents the Qosmio X500-11G makes a very strong style statement.

Moving beyond its finish the machine makes no apologies for what it is; with a weight of 4.86kg the X500-11G is a desktop replacement in every sense. It is 800g heavier that the second heaviest machine in this grouptest (HP’s Pavilion dv8-1190ee), so unless you’re built like a tank, forget about lugging this machine around for extended periods of time.

Once you get past the Toshiba’s size and weight however there’s plenty to celebrate. The X500 packs a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a nVidia GeForce GTS 360M GPU with 1GB of memory. These impressive parts give the machine serious punch.

Running our Street Fighter IV and World in Conflict benchmarks at the LCD’s native 1920 x 1080 pixels the machine spat out framerates of 90fps and 30fps respectively. These scores make the Toshiba the only desktop replacement notebook here to manage playable framerates in both of our benchmarks without reducing graphics quality.

Specifications:

Display adapter	nVidia GeForce GTS 360M
Display screen	18.4-inch
Internal storage	500GB x2
Memory	8GB DDR3
Motherboard	Intel PM55
Optical drives	Blu-ray writer
OS	Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Price	$2479
Processor	1.6GHz Intel Core i7 Q720
Warranty	Three-year
Weight	4.86kg