Official X500 Owner's Lounge!

Well take Q830, replace GTS 250M with GTS 360M, 320GB hard drive with 500GB Hard drive and you will get Q870.

Similarly take Q850, replace GTS 250M with GTS 360M, 320GB secondary hard drive with 500GB secondary Hard drive and you will get Q880.

Basically the difference is:
4 GB -VS- 6 GB ram
500GB -VS- 564 (500 + 64) GB hard drive
720p (1680x945) -VS- 1080p (1920x1080) resolution.

 

Has someone out there tried to upgrade the cpu? At least 820, but I would spring for the 920 if I were sure that it works (bios?) - still cheaper than buying say a Dell M6500 (which I would love, but even putting in drives and memory myself, I would end up in the 7-8K range ...)

 

If you would want to upgrade anything with this laptop, it would be GPU, not CPU.

 

Since I do little gaming (apart from a little Warcraft with my kids, for which the standard GPU works just fine , I do not need a GPU upgrade.

I need the faster CPU for work - should be 30% faster under load (2.26GHz/1.73GH) - I would probably save an hour a day based on server restarts and compiles especially when using not only windows 7 but also the xp virtual machine concurrently ...

 

Nod, Nod, Nod

 

is X505-Q850 or Q880 a dual lamp or single lamp laptop? how about NITS??

 

Full HD screen dual CCFL, but ~150 cd/m² only. Gamut is impressive, about 90% NTSC. Contrast is about 700-800.

HD+ screen is visually brighter, but less contrast (don't know exact values), about 50% NTSC gamut

 

Full HD refers for 1080p

HD+: 480p. 720p

LCD's with dual lamps produces more brightness as compared to LCD's with single lamp so in this case full HD gets you Sharp Contrast, Crisp Image quality compare to single lamp.

Nits is a small unit of brightness I think, i dont about angles and pixel brightness.

X505-Q850 or Q880 no idea

I own a Q830

 

In theory.
In practice, single lamp 1680x945 on X505 is brighter than dual lamp 1920x1080. Because dual lamp full hd screen sacrifices brightness for richer colours.

 

I really do not know much about other parameters.

I ordered this laptop considering it is going to be brighter and sharper.

I thought more NITS more brighter. so 90% NTSC and contrast 700-800 make the system brighter and sharper??

 

90% NTSC make colours more vibrant.
Contrast 700 makes black more "black"

Brightness has nothing to do with both of these. Full HD screen is less bright than non-full HD one.

 

WoW... I am really curious to know how much better the GTS 360m is on running 3DMark06 as compared to the the GTS 250m.. Does anyone here have the GTS 360m version that they can run 3DMark06?

*10,691 for the older GTS 250m (with a slight overclock to factory specs) is not bad at all;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFu8B2cmg5Y

I think the GTS 360m may be good for 11,000 to 12,000? Too bad no DirectX 11 support.. I wish they would throw dual video cards back in like the the older Qosimo's had.. I remember walking into my local Best Buy and seeing the words "Battle Ready" on the palm rest of a dual sli 8700m Qosmio and thinking how cool it looked!

 

the 250m is alot nicer than what I had before, but I'd LOVE to have SLI. Wife had it in her desktop and it smokes! Of course, all her games have SLi profiles too.

 

I feel like selling mine, i need the money and i want the asus g73jh its a lot better than the so so GTS 250M, and the ATI 5870 is awesome and so much better.

 

has anyone else noticed fairly loud electrical interference when using headphones in the the audio jack?

 

Not that I know off.

 

I get it all the time its very loud electronic interference.

 

its maybe your headset, Never had any problems with my Bose or Audio Techinca. Shrug

 

i've tried multiple headsets and then tried the same headsets on my other laptop, such a pain, otherwise this laptop is great D;

 

I have klipsch pro media 2.1 and creative bookshelf speakers, i have klipsch earphones and denon headphones no way in the world it is my headset i have three different machines and it always happens with this machine no other ones. Also i really dislike this screen so much!

 

The screen is very bright, much better than my previous laptops.;

JIm

 

Yeah the screen.. i wish they could have made it just a bit brighter atleast, i just hope it doesn't adversely affect my illustration work

 

Yeah it kills me a lot, it has such low contrast its really terrible i have never seen such a awful CCFL. The colors are washed out sometimes.i need the money anyway so eventually after i fix up the blu ray situation i am selling it i want a better machine, the Asus G73JH seems to be a good option for the best money you can get for the price, an 18.4 is just too large.

 

Ok i reinstaled factory refresh of windows 7 64 bit, due to the blu ray drive issue. Everything works fine but man it takes forever to install, man i hate these oems so used to dell. Anyway the drive works fine now with the program toshiba provides, after tweaking of the screen with the provided software its much better, but my next problem is that whenever i try to update the mobile drivers from Nvidia it says that it can't find any hardware for this machine, now when i did the install of desktop drivers with the moded nf file that is when i started to have my blu ray problems, maybe its the graphics card idk. Can i get some help here?

 

It deff will be and i was just looking at the m17x i do like to see a rgb led in a asus i even asked the question to the g73jh forum and no one answered me, blu ray tray loading drives are more reliant anyway. Yeah i really am excited by this new machine, i will order it eventually or get it from best buy or something. Stupid nvidia and intel are bickering over the cor i7 and sli and the proper graphics card with i7 so thats why i am going with ati, and that design of that machine looks awesome!I kinda need money for books while i am looking for a job too.

 

I hate when I use google chrome surfing the net, bam the whole x500 become so slow and dosent respond. I had to hold the button to reset. Its just me issnt it? Works fine on 32bit windows 7. Any comments?

 

Does this happen when you are on Battery powered?

There are throttling issues with Core i7 CPUs discussed in Dell, HP and Sony areas

 

Its plug, now i am going to restore to factory default

 

ok ,this is what I did. I had lock up, too ,while using firefox and some other times. Once it locked up when I went to access the wonderfully named ECOutility(screw U Gore!)well,2+2=....UNINSTALL ECO UTILITY!!!!Not one lock up since. Why cant I get a top 'o line comp without any crappola?! Ive also got rid of other stuff...the beast is slowly morphing into a lean machine

 

My Q850 would powerup when i touched the "media buttons" (not the power button).

Does this happen to you too?

Its annoying. How do u fix this?

 

Yes it does its normal.

 

Thanks for the tip, I will remove ECOUTILITY once i restore to factory default

Cheers

 

Now that sux...

if thats the case, they should not put the power switch button anymore..

this is like having a locked door that can be opened without keys..

 

I usually put a tag there so I wont press it by accident

 

How is the 360 GTS in the TOSHIBA Qosmio X505-Q870, I currently have a laptop witha 260GTX what do you think is the 260GTX better?

 

Looks like Toshiba pulled 1.40 bios from the website now.

Wonder what that means to those of us who installed it....

 

Hey guys, I got a A500-6986 toshiba laptop with win7 installed tweaked and optimized and most newest drivers and bios installed, of course just like most laptops with win7 and nvidia graphics I am getting DPC latency, now of course it isn't major but its causing random audio robot noise in games like crysis as well when i install software while listening to streaming music in winamp it cuts out every now and then! I tried everything I could following tips in the alienware forums and dell forums but it dont go away.

I am wondering if any of you are experiencing this with the better X500 systems? can anyone test it out for me? I usually run dpc latency ver 1.2 when idle at desktop with no background services or software going(that i know of) and cpus of course throttled down to idle mode and gpu clocks at level 1 idle mode. Its mostly in the green accept every5-10 secounds jumps to yellow or up high into the red. Just like in the alienware and dell forums, also with ibm lenovos got dpc latency.

For comparison I got good ole windows xp sp3 on a gigabyte EP45-UD3R motherboard with a quad core q9400 overclocked to 3.2ghz(no cpu downclocking) a nividia 9800gtx+ (does downclock) realtek 889 audio, 4 gigs of ddr2, 3 hard drives and so forth and the highest dpc latency on my desktop in windows xp is 4

On the toshiba laptop the good ones are in 100-400 range but theres alot in the red up to 2500 or so and yellow. At this point I would say its just how Windows 7 works and it sucks!

I would install xp on the toshiba but they do not have drivers (i can manually find them) and the utilities to control brightness and function buttons and what not toshiba dont have the xp software.

So is anyone expereincing this at all with their toshibas?

Thank you!

 

I bet it because of issue with S3 sleep ("sleep"). It resets instead of waking up in lot of cases on 1.40 - disk hibernation still works fine.

 

a) you can disable media buttons in the BIOS
b) try disabling keyboard wake up in the BIOS/Windows

 

90% of the time windows is the anal of all causes the other 10% is human error. Since I got my X500 all I get are windows error, other than that theres nothing wrong with my toshiba itself.

 

I have the x505-q875 and confirmed that the sata connnector was installed in the 2nd drive bay. I ordered a bracket for it and plan to put a bigger hard drive in. I have a p256 ssd in bay 1 and am looking at a 640gb hd in bay 2. Does it matter what hard drive bay the disks go in? Are they both sata II?

Also, any idea if I can put a 750gb or 1tb drive in? It says the normal drive is 9.5mm and the larger drives are 12mm. Not even sure where you measure? is that height, i assume?

Thanks

Jim

 

Jimlenz

You can get a 640 by WD to put in it, but remember, that is a 5400 rpm drive, the 750 and the 1TB WD drives are also 5400 rpm drives, but are surprisingly hard to find.

The biggest 7200RPM drive is 500GB which is what I use in my 2nd bay.

the height shouldn't be an issue for 12mm. Without opening it up, I seem to recall plenty of extra space in there for the bigger drive. That height (or think of it as thickness) should be ok in there. Open it up, look around. If you get one of the thicker but larger cap drives and it fits fine, be sure to tell us all here!!! BUT, make sure you buy from some place that has a great return policy in case it doesn't fit....

BTW, that's assuming they used the same case for yours as for the X505-q850.

 

Could you provide the part # or link to this bracket or HDD caddy?

I also would like to add a 2nd HDD to the x505-q875 but read on the Toshiba board that the connector was missing in the 2nd bay.

 

This is the one I ordered.

http://www.sparepartswarehouse.com/Toshiba,Laptop,Part,A000049220.aspx

Jim

 

Thanks for the information, I did check and it should fit the larger drive no problem. The question is speed. This will be a data drive but I will be using it for editing video, does it make a big difference, 5400 or 7200 speed? Right now I have 600gb on an external drive filled so the 500 may not be big enough.

Jim

 

Which 500gb drive do you have? I do a lot of video editing so am using external 7200 drives now. I looked at the seagate 500gb 7200 and the reviews are poor. I cant find a good 500gb at 7200. Any thoughts. Or should I just stick with the external drives connected via esata?

Jim

 

The seagate 500Gb/7200 rpm gets such poor reviews because their power saving/head parking firmware was terrible. It fought with MOST laptop's built in capabilities to do that (based on the controller) and wouldn't take the controller's override. About every 5 seconds, your machine would pause, hang, then go as the SATA controller and the drive fought with each other. Seagate fixed the firmware for Apple, but not for anyone else.

However, the Intel SATA controller in the X505 and the Seagate 500Gb do get along and the drive performs flawlessly!!!!

Is there a difference between the 5400 and 7200? Hell yes! It's quite noticeable. BUT.... What's more important? Speed or portable storage? If you can go "external" get a 2TB eSATA drive and plug it in. You get space and the speed but lose the portability factor.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't!!! LOL

 

This 500gb 7200 Hitachi is rated 5 eggs by 66 reviewers:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145275

 

I ended up buying the hitachi 500gb 7200rpm drive just because of all the bad comments on newegg and amazon. I am glad to see that seagate works well. Hopefully, I will be okay with the hitachi

 

Thank you for your reply but the problem is that there is no photo or description, as I live oversea, I can't return-it & the wait is about 3 weeks so I would like to make sure.

Maybe the owner of a q850 or q830 could post a photo of the bracket & connector from the second bay?