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Toshiba Portege Z830 (Core i7) - A Business User's Best Friend

By Leo Boon Yeow - 22 Dec 2011
Launch SRP: S$2599

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Life and Portability Index

As machines touted to be ultra portable, we deem battery life to be extremely crucial. That’s because a machine that is thin-and-light, won’t be much use to you when the battery runs flat soon after it's brought out. Ultrabooks are also supposed to help the PC industry compete against the tablet onslaught, where the devices can be used for hours on end without recharge.

Also, there’s not much of a point in a thin-and-light device if you also have to lug a power brick around everywhere you go, right? To help gauge the Z830’s battery performance, we enlisted the help of the Z830’s older sibling, the Toshiba Portege R830, which also performed admirably well in its battery test. We also got the help of another new Ultrabook, the ASUS Zenbook UX31, whose full review will be coming shortly.

Specifications/Notebook Toshiba Portege Z830 Asus Zenbook UX31

Toshiba Portege R830

Processor Intel Core i7-2677M (1.8GHz) Intel Core i7-2677M (1.8GHz) Intel Core i7-2620M Processor (2.7GHz)
Chipset Intel QM67 Intel QS67 Intel HM65
Memory 6GB DDR3 4GB DDR3 4GB DDR3
HDD 128GB SSD 256GB SSD 500GB HDD (7200RPM)
Video Intel HD 3000 Intel HD 3000 Intel HD 3000
Battery 47Whr 50Whr 66Whr
Dimensions 325 x 227 x 8 - 16mm 325 x 223 x 3 - 17mm 316 x 227 x 18.3 - 26.6mm
Weight 1.12kg 1.3kg 1.4kg

 

Battery Life

When it comes to battery life, we’re very pleased to announce that the Z830 carries on with the Portege tradition of very long battery life. Our test involves playing a HD video in loop until the battery goes flat. The Portege Z830 managed to survive for a very impressive 285 minutes away from the wall socket - that’s nearly five hours and , which also translates to several movies.

If you were doing something less intensive, you could possibly stretch that a couple more hours. In short, the battery life is great, thanks to excellent internal optimization of hardware and software. Ultimately, it means that you could bring your Z830 out for an external meeting, and just chuck the charger at the office without worries. For those curious how the Lenovo U300s Ultrabook fared, it ranked on par with the Z830.

 

Power Consumption

If you’ve been keeping up with Ultrabook news, you’d know that these new notebooks generally run on an Intel mobile processor that requires much less power than conventional mobile processors. However the downside is that you may have to relinquish some processing power, but what you get in return is smaller batteries, which in turn means thinner profile and a lighter body.

The power consumption of the Z830 may be much less than the R830, but it runs for the same amount of time as the R830, even when its battery capacity is greater than that found on the Z830. In fact, it's the best we've seen so far from an Ultrabook. You can compare the Lenovo U300s and the Acer Aspire S3 on this page for further affirmation. As for the Asus Zenbook UX31, even though it's running on similar specs, differences in hardware and software optimization means that it can’t keep up in terms of power consumption, and hence battery life as well.

 

Portability Index

The HardwareZone Portability Index is unique to our website, and is a mathematical formula that simply figures out if it’s worth your time to lug your machine around. The lower the scores, the more it should just stay at home, and on your desk where it belongs. Out of all the machines we tested, the trend is that machines with discrete graphics and those that are heavy (more than three kilograms) have no business being out and about, especially with a power brick in tow.

Here, the world’s lightest Ultrabook, the Z830 managed to score extremely well here. In fact judging from the chart, recent history may have just been re-written with its phenomenal 4.9 portability ratio. Factors that led to this are the Z830’s incredibly light weight of 1.12kg, and of course its very good battery life. With scores like these, we can safely recommend that you get one of these machines today and start working at your local cafe without any worries about the machine dying on you prematurely.

For the record, the real all-time high chart topper for our Portability Index is the Sony Vaio X netbook at just 780 grams. For a full fledged notebook, the Toshiba Z830 comes really close to bumping off the Samsung Q30 Centrino notebook.

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9.0
  • Design 8
  • Features 9.5
  • Performance 9
  • Value 8.5
  • Mobility 9.5
The Good
Superb battery life
Very thin and light
Premium materials
Business friendly features
The Bad
Flimsy feel
Shallow keyboard
No larrge clickable trackpad
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