We’ve recently taken delivery of a Toshiba Qosmio X300-13W, which has waded into the Labs and stomped all over practically every other notebook we’ve got in at the moment. While X300-13W isn’t a name that gives much away, a quick glance at the picture on the left will tell you, instantly, that this isn’t a shy, retiring business laptop or a cheap netbook.

Not so. Instead, it’s the loudest, shoutiest and most enthusiastic desktop replacement that we’ve ever seen.

It begins with the lid, which is covered with metallic red flames that shimmer behind the familiar Qosmio logo, and the design, if you can call it that, carries on inside. The 17in screen is surrounded with dark magenta, and all four of the harmon/kardon speakers are covered with mini hub-caps that look as if they should be on a car skidding around a supermarket forecourt.

Turn the machine on, and there are more bells and whistles. The mesh around the two speakers below the monitor lights up, as does a strip of red light above the trackpad, and a row of touch-sensitive media buttons above the keyboard – like those seen on most Dell notebooks these days – glow an angry shade of red, too.

Its physical dimensions are more Rik Waller than Rick Astley, as it’s over 6cm thick at its most portly point, and the battery pack weighs 1.4kg – in other words, more than most netbooks on the market as well as the Apple MacBook Air.

It’s a bit of a beast, then, and a glance at the specifications reveals that it could also do the business in our benchmark tests.

Under the hood is an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 processor – the only quad-core Extreme mobile CPU that Intel produces. With a clock speed of 2.53GHz and a massive 12MB of L2 cache, which is more than most desktop parts, there should be enough power to handle applications that many desktops wouldn’t be able to touch.

Gamers should be happy, too, because of the Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTS graphics chip. It might not be one of the upcoming mobile GTX parts, but with 1GB of GDDR3 RAM and a core clock speed of 600MHz, it should be one of the fastest mobile graphics chips available at the moment. We can’t see our three Crysis benchmarks, for instance, lasting very long in the face of such a chip.

Elsewhere, there’s 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 650GB hard disk as well as draft-n wireless and those harmon/kardon speakers which, traditionally, have proved superb on Toshiba laptops.

Our first impressions aren’t universally positive, though. For all of its flame-covered design, the lid feels a little weak and flexed a tad too much for our liking, and the wrist-rest felt squashy. The general build quality doesn’t look to be on the same level as Dell’s XPS M1730, for instance, with plastic being the order of the day here.

On a more practical level, the chassis does seem to include every conceivable port and socket. HDMI, DisplayPort and eSATA sit alongside all of the usual suspects.

The keyboard includes a full-size number key, separate number-pad and a sensible layout but, again, we’re not yet convinced. The typing action, again, can’t match up to that of the Dell behemoth, with the keys feeling too light and clicky for our tastes; not at all satisfying and comfortable enough for long typing sessions.

Gamers may not be too keen on the ergonomic layout, either: the trackpad sits towards the left-hand side of the Qosmio, making the traditional gaming ‘WASD’ position difficult to attain. It strikes us as an odd decision, considering the target market of this machine.

Another oversized attribute is the price. Toshiba want £1,949 inc. VAT for this machine – a huge amount for a desktop replacement, considering the quality of PC you could get for that sort of cash.

Despite this, could the Qosmio win us over with its XL-sized portion of power and ludicrous, OTT style? We’ll be giving the X300 a proper going over in an upcoming Labs test, so look out for it in an issue of PC Pro near you soon.

In the meantime, I’m keen to hear your stories about garish kit like this: have you seen anything worse, or is this as bad as it gets?