Toshiba Qosmio PX30t-A-11C review

The Qosmio PX30t-A-11C is one of Toshiba’s brand new all-in-one PCs. It’s not quite as slim as other models we’ve seen this year, but this is to be expected when all its components are housed just behind the screen. Its stylish combination of a smart black bezel and matt silver stand look great, though, and its 23in touchscreen display as a generous amount of screen tilt to help you find the best working angle.

Most of its ports are located on the side of the chassis, including two USB3 ports, an SD card reader, separate headphone and microphone jacks, a DVD rewriter and a row of media buttons including volume and brightness controls.

There are also another two USB3 and two USB2 ports round the back of the chassis, along with a Gigabit Ethernet port and an HDMI input so you can use the PX30t like a monitor when the power’s off. This is particularly handy if you want to connect another device like a games console to the PX30t, and it helps broaden the PX30t’s uses beyond a mere home PC. It won’t automatically switch to the HDMI input, so you’ll need to use the source input switch on the side of the screen to enable this.

Its integrated speakers are provided by Harman/Kardon. These had a great level of bass in our test tracks and plenty of volume for all-in-one speakers, but a dedicated set of speakers will give you better results.

SPECIFICATION

As one of the higher range models of the PX30t, this model comes with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i5-3230M processor that can Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz to improve performance when there’s enough thermal headroom, and 8GB of RAM. Since it’s one of Intel’s mobile processors, we weren’t expecting the PX30t to blow us away with its processing power, but it still managed a respectable 54 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. For reference, a 3.4GHz Intel Core i5-3570K processor scores 100, so it’s roughly half as powerful as a Core i5 desktop processor. This means it’s still capable of complex tasks like photo and video editing, but it will take a little longer to load while multi-tasking if you’re using lots of demanding media programs that require multi-threading.

The Qosmio’s not particularly well equipped for playing games, as the PX30t doesn’t have a dedicated graphics chip. Instead, it relies on the processor’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip. This is fine for playing 2D Flash games from the Windows 8 Store, but you’ll need to tailor the settings quite significantly if you want to play modern 3D titles. It only just scraped through the laptop version of our Dirt Showdown test with 17fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution, let alone pass the PC version which uses Ultra quality at a 1,920×1,080 resolution, so you’ll need to keep both the resolution and the graphics settings very low indeed to play games at a reasonable speed.