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?

While we have seen a trickle of Centrino 2 laptops arriving in the PC Pro Labs of late – the Sony VAIO FGN-FW11ZU and Advent 5511 are two of the more recent examples – the new Toshiba Qosmio F50-10Z has to be one of the most exciting, at least based on first impressions.

The keyboard, for instance, is surrounded by a chrome border which extends to the pair of unusually-shaped mouse buttons, and the panel of touch-sensitive controls above the keyboard glow white, rather than the more reserved blue we’ve seen from Dell’s XPS laptops.

Audio is provided by a pair of harmon/kardon speakers – similar to those in the Toshiba Satellite P300 – and volume is altered by a circular control just below the keyboard. Predictably, it’s chrome-covered and bordered with bright white light. There’s also a huge Qosmio logo that arches its way across the lid, as if you didn’t know that this extroverted notebook had been designed, from the ground up, to entertain.

A peek under the hood reveals a list of specifications that are just as exciting as the garish chassis. A trio of Centrino 2 components – a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 processor, Intel 5100 WLAN chip and PM45 chipset – get the Qosmio off to a good start, and an Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT mobile graphics chip certainly provides a bit of a 3D boost. There’s also draft-n wireless and a DVT-T TV tuner.

The most intriguing component in this new Qosmio, though, is the Quad Core HD chip that, in theory, should vastly improve watching standard-definition DVDs, making detail sharper and colours punchier – like a half-way house between DVD and HD, then. The technology also claims to use gesture control, in conjunction with the built-in 1.3mp webcam, to let you control movies – so pausing, fast-forwarding and rewinding films without having to use a remote control or the touch-sensitive panel that sits above the keyboard.

So, will the Quad Core HD and its upscaling really make a difference when we’re watching DVDs? And will gesture control actually work – instead of leaving us flapping around in front of a laptop looking extremely silly? We’ll be giving the Qosmio a full evaluation in the Labs to see if this really is one of the finest – and best-featured – entertainment notebooks we’ve ever seen, so check back soon for our full review.