Toshiba Satellite X200

The gaming notebook niche is fast expanding – David Hollingworth sees if Toshiba’s latest is a worthy addition.

Once upon a time the mere suggestion that there was such a thing as a gaming laptop would be greeted with chortles and guffaws of incredulity from the suggestees, leaving the suggester reduced to a mere sham of a computing pundit. These days, it’s a crowded segment, with computing stalwarts like Dell, ASUS and now Toshiba all laying claim to the market.

They’re all doing a good job, too, and the neat thing is that they are all approaching the problem of how to fit a desktop’s worth of power into a mobile laptop form factor from slightly different angles.

One thing all vendors seem to understand is that a gaming machine has to look the part, and Toshiba’s Satellite X-200 is no exception.

The screen’s fascia is a very pretty black and red (Toshiba calls it Carmine – fancy!) swirly design that is subtle, yet still enough to brand the X200 as something more than just some so-called ‘road warrior’s’ PowerPoint enabler. The unit is studded with a variety of ports and connectivity options: four USB 2.0 ports, a network port and a DVD multi-drive on the right-hand edge; two more USB ports on the left along with eSATA, phone jack and more on the left, and a host of audio out options on the leading edge.

The full-size keyboard and its surrounding rest is a silvery plastic that looks like it will really show up stains (a badge of honour, for some users), and the keys themselves are nicely responsive, if a little plastic feeling.

The red (sorry, Carmine) theme continues with the a range of red LED indicators for power, drive activity an so on, as well as red-lit speakers for the remarkably impressive 5.1 harman/kardon speakers. And yes, we mean that – 5.1. Above the keyboard you’ve got four in-set speakers, and a slim sub sits under the leading edge. Performance-wise it’s a far cry from a proper surround system, but its still just about the best sounding speaker set up we’ve seen on a laptop, and would put many lesser desktop set ups to shame.

But of course, the big question – can it cut the gaming mustard? We put the X200 into a small room with 3DMark06, the Crysis demo and a single rusty switchblade, then closed the door. After an hour or so of snarling, screaming and desperate sobbing we opened the door. It was not a pretty sight... The Satellite X200 was still standing, but it was battered and bruised, staggering about in a pool of its own blood. It was proud, though; even though it had to use some dirty tricks, and taken a few hits, it was still standing.

To be honest, though, it’s just not that much of a powerhouse. The X200 managed a rather slow 6744 3DMarks, which is nearly 2000 less than the Dell XPS M1730 we recently looked at. Crysis, set to our standard 1280 x 1024 with all the flashy bits turned on nearly killed the poor thing – the best fps it could manage was a dawdling 6.31, and it even stuttered down to zero fps at one stage.

But as we often point out, if you’re looking for maximum performance, you’re not going to be buying a laptop. Out of curiosity we had a bit of a play with Crysis’ settings to see if it were possible to get it running in any state. Just dropping all settings down to medium saw the demo return a more solid average frame rate of just over 15fps. After dropping the resolution down to a quaint and old fashioned 1024 x 768 the average ended up topping a respectable – and more playable – 21fps.

That’s the trick, really, when it comes to gaming on the move – compromise. It might sound impressive to say that a laptop like the X200 is running a 2-way SLI set up with 8600M GTs, but without proper driver support – the constant bugbear of laptop gaming – you’re simply never going to get top performance.

That said, there’s a lot to like about the Satellite X200. The screen is crystal clear, the sound excellent, and it’s both lighter and far cheaper than Dell’s gaming beast while boasting features like a finger-print scanner and card reader slot. For four grand, we think that’s a pretty good deal.