Toshiba Qosmio G30-163 review

Features
And then it all goes wrong. You could be forgiven for thinking the £2,199 G30 is crammed to the hilt with the latest components, but apart from the HD DVD-ROM drive, it's shockingly under-equipped by modern standards. Core 2 Duo processor? Nope. Super-whizzy graphics card? Not really. Inordinate amount of hard drive space? Sort of.

You get an Core Duo processor running at 2GHz, 1GB of DDR2 memory, a mid-range Nvidia GeForce 7600 Go graphics adaptor -- all of which smacks of "yawn", or "aargh!" if you thought your two grand was getting you the latest in laptop technology. The only strong positive here is the pair of 120GB hard drives, which you can choose to 'mirror' (where one drive automatically backs itself up with the contents of the other) when you first switch on the laptop, though you'll halve your storage if you choose this option.

The HD DVD-ROM drive is Toshiba's own TS-L802A, which you can use to play and read HD DVD discs, but not to make HD DVD file backups. You'll still be able to burn ordinary DVD+RW discs at up to 4x, or dual-layer DVDs at 2x, but the fact you can't write HD DVDs paint the Qosmio G30 as an overblown movie player stapled to a mid-range laptop.

Annoyingly, HD DVD movies won't play in the Media Center portion of Windows XP -- you'll need to launch the WinDVD HD software instead, which is a bit of a pain. What's even more irritating is the fact that, when pumping HD DVD movies to an external display via the HDMI port, you'll need to have a TV that supports HDCP encryption.

Seeing as most of us don't have one of these, you'll either need to dig into your wallet for a new TV, or watch HD DVD movies on the laptop's 17-inch display. This isn't so bad, particularly as it has a huge 1,920x1,200-pixel resolution which is just fine for 1080-line progressive scan. The only drawback is that text can look far too small, but you can switch to a more readable resolution by hitting the Fn key and space bar simultaneously. As good as the screen is, you really should use an external display or you won't appreciate the beauty of HD movies.

We had further gripes when we stumbled across a document in the box with a few bizarre disclaimers. It says for "uninterrupted enjoyment of HD DVD" you need to connect the laptop to the Internet at unspecified intervals in order to renew the digital AACS key, which is used by the HD DVD format to prevent unlawful copying. The leaflet also says: "Frame dropping, audio skipping or out of sync audio and video may occur during playback of some HD DVD Video titles". Extremely reassuring to know after you've parted with £2,199.

Gaming is quite possible on the G30. It uses an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 video card -- a mid-range product that can handle most 3D titles. The downside is that you won't be able to crank up the detail levels on demanding titles without frame rates dropping to frustrating levels.

The G30 comes with a high-end SigmaTel Audio chip that is Dolby Home Theater-certified. One of the shortcut buttons above the keyboard launches a Dolby Home Theater interface, from which you can activate Pro Logic II, Dolby Virtual Speaker and Dolby Headphone, which gives you funky spatialisation effects. Many of the audio features will make no discernible difference to the untrained ear, but it's nice to have the option, and the Harmon/Kardon speakers sound good either way.

The Harmon/Kardon speakers look good and sound even better

Performance
You'd expect any laptop that offers the latest in optical drive technology to feature some pretty spanking components elsewhere. That's not the case with the G30. Its Core Duo chip helped it achieve a good, if unremarkable PCMark 2005 score of 4,025.

This indicates it's perfectly adequate for running everyday tasks and multimedia applications, but you may struggle with video encoding or anything similarly demanding.

The GeForce Go 7600 graphics chip is similarly mediocre. It racked up a 3DMark 2006 score of 2065, which is nowhere near the Alienware m9700's 3DMark 2006 score of 5,434.

Thankfully, in our experience with the G30, we didn't see any of the "Frame dropping, audio skipping or out of sync audio and video" that we were warned about in the accompanying documentation.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield