Toshiba Portege R830 (Core i7-2620M 2.7GHz) - It Just Keeps On Going

The One that Goes On and On

Remember the Toshiba Protege R600 that was introduced in 2008? It was one of the lightest notebooks we’ve ever laid our eyes on; and since then, it has topped our portability charts every single time. For the uninitiated, our portability score is derived using a mathematical formula, and it tells us if it’s worth our time to lug a machine around. The R600 had a very high score due to its super light weight (0.979kg!) and long battery life. While the latter has long since been overtaken by other notebooks, its portability score is still unbeatable, even till today.

And if you thought the R600 was good, the R700, introduced in 2010 was even better. It featured a bigger 13.3-inch screen, and beefed up specs (Core i3, i5 or i7 CPU). Today’s Toshiba R830 is almost the same, and it would be hard to discern any differences between then. But there's still plenty to like about this little machine, so let’s start with its exterior.

Our review unit has a bright red, matte piece of aluminum on the lid, and boy, are we enamored by it. It’s been forever since we saw something so bold on a true blue business machine, and we feel that Toshiba’s decision to allow users to choose something that represents their own style is a very good one. Machines that are sold in the market right now also come in a couple of other colors, namely blue and black.

In our hands, the R830 feels lighter than its 1.4kg spec suggests. It isn’t exactly the thinnest laptop we’ve seen this year, but somehow all that weight just seems to disappear when you are holding it, to the point that it sometimes felt hollow.

The hinges on the Portege R830 are also rock solid, and will keep your lid up no matter how many times you open or close it. Trust us, we tried. The rest of the machine is also covered in the same magnesium alloy, giving a really robust feel when you handle it. For power, it has a removable 6-cell lithium-ion battery.

But what’s really special about the Toshiba R830 is that unlike other ultra-thin and light machines, it actually has an optical drive built into it. Despite that, it still weighs only ever so slightly more than the 13.3-inch Apple MacBook Air (1.4kg versus 1.35kg).

Business Centric

When you eventually open up the lid, expect to be greeted by plenty of black; it isn’t a bad thing, it's just not terribly exciting. And because the interior is entirely black, sometimes you’d just find yourself staring at the two silver hinges that seems to stare right back at you. That's the small price to pay for extremely robust metal hinges.

The palmrest also seems to be made of the same magnesium alloy material covering the lid, with a slight texture to it. The area which you actually rest the balls of your palms are slightly rounded, so you can be sure that working on the R830 will be comfortable, even for a few hours.

And if you were to stare at the screen for a couple of hours, we’re pretty sure you wouldn’t mind either. The 13.3-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel screen doesn't go too bright, no matter how hard you press on the “increase brightness” button. On the plus side, this probably helps to save on battery life.

Performance and Benchmarking

Make no mistake; the Portege R830 is meant to be, and built to be a no-nonsense business machine. For spreadsheets and word processing tasks, the Portege R830 is more than capable of handling them. However, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. There may be times when you need to use the Portege R830 to handle other kinds of media, such as playing a DVD movie. So let’s see how the R830 fares against this year’s smallest notebook, the 1.17kg Sony Vaio Z.

At this point we’d like to remind you that the Sony Vaio Z sports the same processor, and integrated graphics, but employs a RAID 0 array of ultra-speedy SSDs (solid state drives). Another one of our best performing notebooks is the 2011 MacBook Air, which we picked because it has the best battery life among the business-centric notebooks we've tested this year. Some of the benchmark scores for the MacBook Air were done using Boot Camp, because the native OS X environment of the MacBook Air doesn’t support a few of our benchmark programs.

PCMark Vantage

The PCMark Vantage test gives us a gauge on how the machine being tested responds to various tasks that utilize what the machine packs. Before we start analyzing the scores, we’d like to remind you that the Portege R830 is strictly built for business. What it can do outside of a business environment, we’d see it as a nice little bonus. As you can see from the chart, the Portege R830 trails behind the Sony Vaio Z, as well as the Apple Macbook Air. The main factor here, is that the Portege is not running an SSD - which enhances read and write speeds exponentially - like the other two machines.

SSDs usually give notebooks inflated scores (or very good scores, depending on how you look at them), because some parts of the test like the “HDD” and “Productivity” test suites rely very heavily on the hard drive. So for a score of 7066, it is fair to say that the R830 has done admirably well for considering it comes with a traditional spinning hard disk. If you want cutting edge performance, you can always opt for a SSD packing variant, which we suspect will bring it’s overall performance to be on par or better than other SSD touting machines.

3DMark 06

In our 3D Mark 06 benchmark tests, the Portege R830 didn’t perform too badly with other similar machines we've tested. In fact, its scores are in the same region as those machines that use SSDs. The notebook that won by a large margin was the Sony Vaio Z, but that was only when the Vaio Z was benchmarked with its Power Media Dock plugged in (this gave a score of 9399). In short, with a score of 5041, the R830 wouldn’t enable you to play the latest Diablo 3 beta with maxed out settings, but it should play the odd Facebook game, Flash content and videos with aplomb. It can also be used for very casual photo-editing work, but we can’t guarantee it would be a positive experience.

Far Cry 2

For this real life gaming test, we used the benchmark capabilities of Far Cry 2. We don’t recommend that you get the Toshiba Portege R830 for gaming purposes (it's not branded as a gaming notebook for a reason), and you can easily see why via the Far Cry 2 scores. The Portege R830 features only the integrated graphics solution (Intel HD 3000) that isn’t exactly built to run high-end games. If you really need to play PC games (we don’t want to know why) on a business machine such as the R830, the integrated graphics are powerful enough to allow you to do so with settings set at the bare minimum. And even then, it might not be a very good idea.

Battery Life and Portability Index

Toshiba business machines have recently gotten themselves quite a reputation in terms of battery life. In terms of portability, 2008’s Portege R600 remains our top performer till this day, and so far none of the manufacturers, Toshiba included, have been able to bring it down from its mantle. However, the R830 has an even longer battery life, though it's also about 400 grams heavier than its predecessor. For comparison, we have chosen the MacBook Air - a thin and light notebook with extraordinary battery life (it even beats the R600 when running on OS X), and the Sony Vaio Z, the thinnest and lightest notebook we’ve had in our labs this year.

Battery Life

Our battery life tests consists of playing a DVD loop, with the screen and volume turned down to 50%. We’ve taken scores from the MacBook Air, running on both Windows and OS X Lion, to showcase just how great the Toshiba Portege R830’s battery life is. The Sony Vaio Z is there to show you that even though it is extremely thin, light, and portable, it might not necessarily translate into better battery life. The Portege R830 stayed alive for as long as 281 minutes, that’s just 19 minutes shy of 5 hours (4 hours and 41 minutes, to be exact). Now that is a long time, in the world of Windows notebooks. Even the super portable MacBook Air running on Windows 7 only managed 240 minutes. With that kind of battery life, we imagine that’s plenty of work you can finish unplugged, and out of the office.

Power Consumption

The crux of the Portege’s longevity is the mixture of potent batteries and very low power consumption. At 14.09 watts, it’s not the lowest, but it’s definitely one of the lowest scores we’ve seen. And if you cater for the fact that the Portege R830 runs a 35W Core i7 processor, and the fact that it has to power a DVD player, then we’d have to say that 14.09 watts of power consumption is pretty impressive. Other factors which contribute to the low power consumption are the screen and speakers; they aren't as bright and powerful as we’d like them to be.

We don’t really mind much about the relatively weak display and sound performances, because they don’t matter much for business machines. It’s also not using the trans-reflective type of LCD screen that the R600 had, which can even be used with the LCD backlight turned off.

Portability Index

Like we mentioned before, the reigning champion of the portability index is the Toshiba Portege R600. This is in late 2008, and early 2009, and up till now, its scores haven’t been encroached upon, even by the nasty little beasts we call netbooks. or by the latest Porteges. However, the R830 manages to come pretty close, and we imagine that in a couple of years, when Ultrabooks come to rule the industry, the throne on which the R600 sits on will finally be taken away from it.

Expensive All-Rounder

The Toshiba Portege R830 is a breed of laptops that is getting increasingly rarer by the day. Manufacturers are slowly getting rid of the optical drive, one way or the other to cut down on size and weight, giving us essentially what we call Ultrabooks. The R830 however, is not an Ultrabook. It doesn’t have many of the attributes that defines an Ultrabook, like a Low-Voltage-Processor, low cost, or even an SSD.

What it does have however, is something which should be seen more often in notebooks these days. And that's long battery life. In fact, quasi-Ultrabooks (only because of its cost) like the Samsung Series 9 don't have the power consumption, or battery-life numbers that are better than the Toshiba Portege R830. Even the superb MacBook Air has a battery life of 238 minutes (on Windows 7 via Boot Camp), which is about 40 minutes less than the Portege R830. As such, no one can touch the R830 in terms of battery life while on Windows.

The only machine that beats it is also the MacBook Air, when the latter is running on OS X Lion, at 345 minutes. Of course if you want to analyze the numbers deeper, it'd lead us into an OS debate, which we shall not get into today. Our point is simply this: the Toshiba Portege R830 has the longest battery life of any Windows machine we’ve come across to date, and its winning margins are pretty high, compared to other machines of similar class, even those without optical drives. The only other Windows notebook that manages to come close, is the HP Elitebook 2560p, at 256 minutes.

Of course, besides the Portege R830’s very impressive battery life, it has plenty of things going for it too. In the initial pages of this review, we mentioned that at 1.4kg, it is very light for a fully equipped business notebook. It weighs almost as much as a MacBook Air, but it is also a fair bit thicker. To nitpick, it can feel hollow and toy-like at times when you hold it.

It’s LED back-lit 13.3-inch screen is protected by a piece of colored magnesium alloy (three colors to choose from) that is both stiff and light. This means the screen doesn’t have any flex whatsoever. We found that the keyboard and palm rest areas do not have much flex either, thanks to the same magnesium alloy used to construct the lid. The very comfortable chiclet keys, which you would be using most of the time, are slightly shallow, with less travel than usual. But they are built to be fairly robust and can definitely handle typists who like to lay it down hard.

Performance-wise, the R830 doesn’t break any speed records, nor is it built to. It’s built to have a long lasting battery life, and that’s exactly what it gives you. When it comes to regular multimedia, surfing the web and other mundane office-related things, the Portege R830 definitely won’t let you down. Its Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics does its job admirably well (except high-end gaming, of course).

We like everything about the machine, except for its price. At S$2,599, it is simply too expensive for the average consumer. Then again, there are watered down Core i5 versions if you’re on a budget constraint (S$2,199) that won't present much of a performance hit. But in a nutshell, if you are shopping for a portable business-centric notebook and is not willing to sacrifice the optical drive, the Toshiba Portege R830 should be firmly in your sights.

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