Ultimate Notebook Reviews

Recently released early summer of this year are the Toshiba Qosmio G40 series of notebooks, priced at around $3000 to $4000 a piece. The folks over at Toshiba have really outdone themselves this time, packing the G40 series with all the necessities and one-uppers you would expect if you were dishing out over $3000. At the heart of these notebooks are Intel Core2 Duo processors with a 2.4GHz clock speed and 800MHz front-side bus. And of course with such an ultimate notebook, you know it’s running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Coming standard with the G40-108 is an impressive 2GB of DDR2 RAM (expandable to 4GB), with an unheard of 400GB of storage from two 200GB hard drives combined.

There is stunning picture clarity with a full HD Toshiba TruBrite WUXGA TFT display supporting 1080p/1080i signal format, in a widescreen 1920 x 1200 resolution. You will be glad to know that such a nice display has not gone to waste, since the G40-108 boasts an NVIDIA® GeForce 8600M GT graphics card. That’s right, this notebook has an unprecedented 512MB of dedicated VRAM, with up to 2303 MB total available graphics memory using TurboCache technology.

Now the real video gurus are probably realizing that this graphics card can easily handle more than 1920 x 1200, and they’re absolutely right. This brand new Qosmio has a maximum external video resolution of 2048 x 1536, and a maximum refresh rate of 100Hz. And to help make use of a 512MB graphics card are a plethora of video outputs, including outputs for RJ-11, RJ-45, S-Video, and HDMI. The G40-108 also comes with a nifty little TV antenna for watching some local stations! Complimenting the visual delights is the built-in Harman Kardon stereo speaker system with two bass reflection speakers, two tweeter speakers and one subwoofer (yes, on a notebook).

You can easily integrate the new Qosmio with any network, as it fully complies with Wi-Fi standards, has Bluetooth technology, and is ready for Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/ and the new WAN Draft-N.

Overall, I would give the Toshiba Qosmio G40-108 a 9.5/10 for being all-around top-notch. The only possible improvements I would suggest are a faster processor and longer battery-life. Nonetheless, this is a remarkable notebook, and the most impressive one I’ve seen in a long time.