Toshiba Qosmio G30

Specifications: Here are the quick spes on the G35-AV650 under review: Intel Core Duo T2500 2.00GHz processor Nvidia Go 7600 graphics card 1GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM 200GB hard drive HD-DVD/DVD/CD-ROM optical drive 17" widescreen display Intel's Core Duo T2500 CPU running at 2.00 GHz and a 667 FSB handles the 'thinking' in the G30. I would prefer to see the T2700 2.33 GHz CPU in a top of the line PC, but other than bragging rights and slightly higher benchmark scores the T2500 offers all features of the faster chip such as dual core, Virtualization Technology, Enhanced Speed Step, and Execute Disable. The G30 completed the SuperPi CPU benchmark (calculating Pi to two million places) in 1 minute 16 seconds. This is a couple of seconds faster than I usually get from a T2500. This is about twice as fast as the comparable offering from AMD. Memory 1 GB of DDR2 667 MHz in dual-channel mode matches the CPU's front side bus speed and avoids bottlenecks. I have noticed mid-level notebooks starting to appear on store shelves with 2 GB of RAM. A top of the line model like the G30 should also have that much RAM. A large chassis affords the G30 enough space to include two 2.5 inch hard drives (HDD) with some underutilized (at least on the test unit) RAID capability. The operating system sees two drives. The boot drive has slightly less capacity than the second drive because of the thin media Operating System installed on the Qosmio that allows you to view TV and DVDs without booting into Windows. Hard Drive Toshiba's simple RAID Console utility manages Intel's Matrix Storage RAID feature. Data from one drive can be mirrored to the other using the utility. That means that you have a perfect clone of your HDD in case something happens, but it also means that you have effectively half the storage space. None the less, this is a nice feature to insure that your data is always safe. Although Toshiba lists that it is supported in the specifications, there does not seem to be a RAID striping option ?this is a high performance form of RAID that can greatly increase I/O performance of HDDs. There is a risk of losing data if a RAID array goes awry and that probably explains its omission (advanced users can configure it themselves). The drives in question are 100 GB models from Toshiba. If you are not familiar with these drives they each sport 5400 rpm rotation speeds, SATA interface, and Native Command Queuing. This later feature allows the drive to accept more than one read/write command at once. The hard drive then uses knowledge of its own access time and spin rate to decide which command to complete first. Mobile Hard Drives with 200 GB capacities are on the horizon, and 120 or 160 GB models are appearing on many notebooks. Because of this, the G30's bragging rights at 200 GB total capacity will be temporary at best. Maybe a 400 GB version of the Qosmio is in store for us some day. Optical Drive and HD-DVD The other noteworthy storage technology making its debut on the G30 is an HD-DVD optical drive . This is one of the competing next-gen disc formats along with Blu-Ray. There is a good chance that this battle is going to be a winner take all proposition much like VHS vs. Beta was twenty years ago. I would hate to have to pick a winner this early in the war, but with solid backing from Microsoft and almost all the major electronics manufacturers other than Sony, I would bet on Toshiba's standard if I had to choose.