Toshiba launches laptop with three GPUs

Posted at: 3:53pm 7th November 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Qosimo X305-Q706 and X305-Q708 come with two GeForce 9800M GTS cards in SLI configuration, plus a GeForce 9400M for when you want some peace and quiet

Some people were surprised when Apple announced that its new MacBooks could come with two Nvidia GPUs, but that’s nothing compared to what Toshiba has just announced. The company’s latest Qosimo laptops come with three GPUs, and they’re set up in a sensible configuration too.

We’re not talking an extreme 3-way SLI laptop here. Instead, the laptops come with an integrated GeForce 9400M for quiet day-to-day work on battery power, and then have a pair of GeForce 9800M GTS cards in SLI mode that can kick in when you need fast 3D frame rates.

Apple was the first company to announce that it was using Nvidia’s new GeForce 9400M GPU when it launched its new MacBooks last month, and Nvidia has since announced a desktop motherboard chipset based on the technology. The GPU has just 16 stream processors clocked at 1.4GHz as standard, with a 580MHz GPU core clock. It might not be very powerful when it comes to running Crysis, but it has enough power to enable Aero glass effects in Windows Vista, and it hardly matters when you have an SLI setup waiting in the wings.

Meanwhile, the GeForce 9800M GTS features 64 stream processors, so it’s not as powerful as your average GeForce 9800 desktop GPU, but a pair of them should be able to make these laptops veritable gaming machines. It’s also interesting to see a high-profile company such as Toshiba taking a big interest in the gaming laptop industry, similarly to Dell and HP, to the point where it’s installing three GPUs. It's also worth noting that the three GPUs could also help to speed up the laptop when running GPGPU apps.

Toshiba’s vice president of product development for Toshiba’s US digital products division, Carl Pinto, explained that Toshiba ‘wanted to deliver an extreme-performance gaming machine that gives gamers a complete, non-compromising system in a laptop form factor.’ He added that ‘The combination of the NVIDIA GPUs and chipset allowed us to achieve a high level of performance, quality and flexibility that our customers are asking for, at a competitive starting price.’

The Qosimo X305-Q706 costs $1,999 US (£1,257) in the US, although we haven’t seen any UK pricing on the laptops yet. The system comes with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and 4GB of RAM, while the costlier X305-Q708 comes with a quad-core 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9300 CPU. Would you be interested in laptops such as these for a portable gaming machine, as well as general laptops, or would you rather stick with your desktop? Let us know your thoughts.