my first impressions on the Qosmio X305-Q706 and the issue of SLI

hello guys

I've been reading this forum for along time and i haven't participated yet in it although i benefited alot from it so any way i just wanted to give my first impressions on the Toshiba X305-Q706:

like many members on NBR i ordered the device first from toshibadirect simply because it was cheaper but ended up buying it from newegg because of their horrible phone service and the fact that they didn't tell me the device was backorderd but in the end i only paid 20$ more because i used live.com cashback on newegg and got around 50$ back so, lets move to the impressions:

the laptop looks better than you might think in the red flames i mean i expected it to look ugly but its really nice looking and not just me even my friends were impressed with the colors the only realy bad thing was the keyboard its glossy and cheap looking and the keys looks fragile as if they're going to come off "I'll have to be careful with them", the sound is pretty impressive for a laptop as is the cooling system which relatively silent but does a good job , the device comes bloated with crap ware and the resource hog Norton , I'm just gonna do a fresh recovery in a couple of days and remove all of them and replace Norton with something lighter

-it seems that the laptop has Wireless USB and i see it on the system tray and device manger but i have no way of verifying if the actual hardware is there but that would be a nice surprise.

-the drivers are a mess and not just the graphic card i mean on the device manager as many here has already remarked it shows me that the processor is the qx9300 "i mean i wish Toshiba made that kind of expensive mistake with me but it was too good to be true" , I've also had some issues with disappperaing USB ports and sometimes the wireless card itself disappeared from the device manager.

the sli driver are not good "they do work actually but not with all games especially the new ones , now how did i now if they worked or not: i used a simple but rough method i simply ran HWMonitor before every game an then looked at the max temps after i close the game so if one of the cards gave me 83 C max and the other stayed almost the same at 57 c that means only one card worked but if it gave me max 80 c on both cards that means both of them ran in SLI, now after running some games and benchmarks here are the findings:

-i got 9500ish points on 3Dmark 06 and i know this seems low but i guess its a driver issue

- i got P4549 on 3Dmark Vantage and the graphic sub component was 5940 which i think is relatively good because its quiet higher than the number I've seen for 9800m gtx which means that vantage utilized SLI albeit not efficiently but then again i blame the driver.

- now moving to games the newer games like ( COD 5 WAW, Red Alert 3, Tomb raider underground, Prince of Persia, fallout 3, Devil may Cry4, spore) couldn't utilize SLI "coz once again when running them one card maxed at 83 c and the other stayed idle at 57 c" but they ran smoothly any way at 1680*1050 maxed out out everything and no AA and they rarely hit below 30 fps "except for Prince of Persia" .

-the only instances in which SLI actually worked it was somehow useless because in half life 2 it worked but for this game one gts would be enough to max it out and the other was Crysis warhead in which even with Sli the game was unplayable when maxed out at 1680*1050 you could get 20 fps avrage if you played at 1440*900 and gamer settings but once again i blame the driver because when running Crysis both cards maxed at 73 c which meant that Sli was running but the cards were not utilized efficiently coz they should hit 83 c which means that there is a room for improvement in Crysis

- the one exception was Race Driver GRID this game utilized both cards "they both hit 83 c" and ran very smoothly at 1680*1050 maxed out with 4xMSAA and almost never went under 40fps "40 to 60 fps average depending on the race track" which is very good for such a demanding game

now i realize that using GPU temps is not the most accurate way of measuring performance but i think it gives you a good idea about sli and gpu load

i first thought of buying this laptop because it's a darn good deal i mean it should give me a performance of 2000+ gaming laptop with a sub 2000$ price tag if it wasn't for the driver issues , i just wish that nVidia releases the new driver soon because i still believe there's alot of power to harness from this laptop that i think it could take not one but two driver releases to appreciate its full power"one for running Sli in new games and the second to optimize it"

i hope this was helpful for someone

thanks guys for this great forum

 

I have exactly the same experience as yours with Toshibadirect backorder issue and QX9300 device manager 9880 3dmark06 but you can OC the processor to 2.7ghz with nvidia system tools and get those scores to 11600. I am going to try driver sweeper and laptopvideo2go drivers next.

 

hello sgilmore52
i just would like to know how exactly did you do the OC and did notice the wireless usb thing and please tell me about your experience with the laptopvideo2go once you do it.

thank you in advance

 

Download Nvidia system tools http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.02.html

You will get an icon labeled performance [/URL][/IMG]

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Not having any problems so far with wireless hub.

 

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just move the slider--2.73 is exhibiting some instability, didn't have any probs with 2.7 downloaded 180.48 from laptopvideo2go but not readily seeing any performance increase.

 

thanx man I'm downloading nvidia tools right now
by the way did you notice if the new driver at least made Sli work in more games.

 

No, I haven't bought any games yet--can you recommend some? I've been busy OC'n and benchmark testing since I got mine on Monday. BTW, from my research, mostly from reading blogs, there aren't many games/ applications that are optimized to take advantage of sli. right now, tou get more bang for the buck buying the best single card you can find.

 

Dooooooooode........ Dat suxors for SLI in 3D Mark 06. I got 9600+ with my 7811 and thats with a mild vid card OC. How about some game benchmarks to go with that? Do you think you got what you paid for in terms of performance? I mean are you happy for the dollar amount that you shelled out?

 

OK well i bought a lot of games in anticipation of this laptop so i can recommend some:
FPS: the orange box " old, but if you haven't played that yet you should" , then i would recommend COD 5 WAW "COD 4 was even better" , bioshock and fallout 3 are very good too,
RTS: the new Red alert 3 is not that good C&C 3 was much better especially kane's wrath expansion
other games like tomb raider underworld , devil may cry 4 and prince of Persia are pretty much more of the same so i wouldn't recommend them unless you are a die hard fan of these franchises
Racing : GRID is very good and better than the new need for speed if you are into racing games
i have far cry 2 and crysis but i haven't tried them yet but i think far cry 2 is very good and it should run smoothly on the q706 "i tried it for a couple of minutes"
I've been having second thoughts about my q706 when i saw the new MSI GT725 : its cheaper and has the new radeon 4850 which should be more powerful than the 9800m gtx but i still think this laptop should achieve more.

 

i still blame the driver and by the way how much did you get in 3d mark Vantage " the graphics sub components specifically " coz i think its more Representative of the newer cards , I'm going to do some gaming benchmarks soon after i do a fresh recovery but i gave some idea in my original post
.

 

I haven't loaded vantage yet but that reminds me, so I will load her up soon enough and let you know. I am interested too.

 

[/URL][/IMG]thanks, gonna buy some tomorrow. 2.73 was too much i think--was getting over 100 fps several times in 3dmark06 but froze up frame 1950 of deep freeze. went back to 2.7

 

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whats the fps like running games like crysis ?

Thanks

Falling Cat - keeps falling along ...

 

your graphic score seems kinda low "including the 2 demos fps " unlike your cpu score which is higher than mine "but i think its because of the OC" check the attachment.

 

this one was factory default

 

your cpu score is way higher than mine in here was it oc'ed in here

 

No running at 2.26 ghz. I dont get those test results--I ran it yesterday with the processor at 2.73 with 180.48 drivers and some oc on the graphics cards and the frame rates were clearly much higher than previous testing but when I clicked submit results only got 11400 mark06. I was getting +100 fps in the canyon one often. In the opening test It started out at 84fps. I don't get it.

 

Could be that partway through the test the GPUs throttled back due to heat. The 7811s will do this too iffin ya OC them to far.

 

I did all the bm's outside(40 deg's F) and HW monitor didn't show anything off the hook?

 

GPU will always throttle back when it hits 95f. thats what is set in the BIOS.
Too much overclock will reach that temp quicker.