Toshiba Folds Three GPUs into One Notebook

The company' latest Qosmio gaming notebooks carry three Nvidia GPUs for a mix of performance and efficiency.

One graphics processer in a notebook upgrades performance significantly. Two helps improve battery life by switching between them under different loads. Three… is downright excessive. Toshiba released the very first gaming notebooks to venture into this territory on Thursday with the Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 and X305-Q706.

The notebooks each get a triumvirate of Nvidia GPUS: one GeForce 9400M for sipping power and two GeForce 9800M GTS GPUs for gaming performance. Like dual-GPU machines, they will switch between running on the integrated chip or the dual discrete chips, to conserve battery when the force of dual nVidia monsters isn’t needed.

“The combination of the Nvidia GPUs and chipset allowed us to achieve a high level of performance, quality and flexibility that our customers are asking for,” said Rene Haas, general manager of Nvidia’s notebook business.

Triple-GPU versions of the Qosmio notebooks are available from Toshiba Direct starting at $2,000.