Qosmio F40 (PQF46A-00C004)

If you've already eyed the Toshiba Qosmio G40 (PQG40A-00Y014), but your latest bank statement says "not going to happen", then consider the Toshiba Qosmio F40 (PQF46A-00C004).

The F40 still offers a HD-DVD-ROM, so you can still watch high-definition movies, but it is not a HD-DVD writable drive. Rather than a high-definition 17in screen, the F40 has a 15.4in screen with a native resolution of 1280x800. The Harmon Kardon speakers are still there, and in this case Toshiba has left the subwoofer in the package.

The Qosmio F40 uses Intel's latest Centrino platform, with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2GHz CPU with an 800MHz front side bus and a 4MB L2 cache. A total of 2GB of RAM is installed and an NVIDIA 8600M GT has been used to handle the graphics. Also installed is 1GB of Intel TurboMemory, another feature of the latest Centrino platform. TurboMemory is similar to Windows Vista's ReadyBoost technology; it uses flash memory as a cache for regularly used applications, speeding up application load times or resume times from when the system sleeps.

Built into the screen is a 1.3-megapixel camera and built into the main chassis are a number of useful controls, including volume, play controls and shortcuts for screen brightness, TV output and live TV. There's also a media control panel for navigating Windows Media Player.

A dual-hybrid digital TV tuner is installed, meaning you can plug in an aerial then watch live TV on the notebook. With the dual-tuner card you're able to watch two channels at once, record one while watching the other or record two channels at once. A 250GB hard drive is installed, which will give you a fair bit of recording time. As the F40 has a VGA output and an HDMI output you will also be able to output your TV or HD-DVD movies to either a larger monitor or TV without problems.

In our benchmarks the F40 performed quite well. It's not quite the powerhouse that the G40 is, but it does quite well for an underdog. In WorldBench 6 it scored a very healthy 76, meaning it's quite capable of everyday tasks like e-mail and Web surfing, but it will also handle some more taxing applications that involve photo editing and the like.

In games tests it also did reasonably well, scoring 3269 in 3DMark 2006 and 20,107 in 3DMark 2001 SE. In our battery test it did not do so well, lasting a meagre 50 minutes in our DVD rundown test.