Toshiba Portege X30-D Review - Review 2022

Toshiba's Portege X30-D (starts at $i,179.99; $2,109 as tested) is an extremely low-cal ultraportable that withal manages to pack an Intel Core i7 processor, a total Hard disk touch screen, and all-day (if not class-leading) battery life. There are a few pocket-sized downsides, though—including a rather bland design and a price that's high compared with similarly equipped laptops—that keep the X30-D from unseating our Editors' Choice for best ultraportables, the Dell XPS 13 Touch.

Sleek and Business Like

From the outside and with its lid closed, the X30-D looks similar any other sleek blackness business organisation laptop. At that place's piffling to mar the expanse of blackness magnesium alloy other than a Toshiba logo etched in i corner of the chapeau, and 2 silverish hinges located at each rear border. It measures 0.63 past 12.4 past eight.nine inches (HWD), which is your kickoff indication that Toshiba isn't kidding around with the laptop'southward portability. The 0.60-inch thickness mark is what modern ultraportables strive for, and although sure competitors go fifty-fifty thinner (including the 0.52-inch Razer Blade Stealth), you certainly won't be lament about the X30-D'due south dimensions. Nor will you be moaning about its heft: the laptop weighs but two.three pounds, even lighter than the ultra-thin HP Spectre 13 (two.45 pounds), although not quite as plumage-like every bit the LG gram 14 (2 pounds).

The 13.iii-inch display is a full HD affect screen, with a resolution of i,920 past 1,080. Its colors are specially vivid for a matte screen, although this matte screen is really more of a sleeky-matte hybrid that I wish more laptops would offer. It's a bit more than reflective than the brandish on the HP ZBook Studio G4, just non and then much that fluorescent lights create a distracting reflection, as they occasionally do on the Apple tree MacBook. Toshiba'due south display likewise offers far more than vibrant colors than most matte displays practice, including the one on the Lenovo ThinkPad T470.

The X30-D's port selection is far from generous, but it still offers more than options than the single USB-C port you'll observe on the Apple MacBook ($934.00 at Amazon) or the Asus ZenBook 3. Along the left edge, you'll notice a traditional USB 3.0 port, a Kensington lock slot, and a headphone jack. The correct edge offers not i but two USB-C ports, each of which support Thunderbolt three and charge the laptop, since in that location's no defended charging port. The correct edge besides sports an HDMI port and a microSD card slot, which comes in handy since more and more cameras are adopting the microSD standard. In a higher place the screen, you'll find a webcam and the requisite sensors to enable Windows Hello face recognition login, which worked flawlessly in my testing, fifty-fifty when the display was tilted slightly abroad from my face. The Harman Kardon speakers deliver much meliorate sound than what you'd expect from an ultra-thin laptop. You won't take trouble watching YouTube videos or having Skype sessions, and I even experienced surprisingly robust bass during testing at maximum volume from the two front end-facing speakers, which are uniquely positioned forth the front edge of the chassis.

Toshiba sent usa a nearly maxed-out review unit, complete with an Intel Core i7-7600U processor, 16GB of retentivity, and a 256GB SSD that uses the 1000.2 interface instead of the older, slower SATA interface. My just complaint with the specs is the relatively stingy SSD. For a laptop that costs more than $2,000, I would like to come across at least 512GB of solid-state storage. The Dell XPS 13 can be configured with a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD for $2,000, slightly less than the cost of this X30-D review unit. Wireless connectivity options include Bluetooth and dual-ring Wi-Fi.

Busy Keys

The backlit, chiclet-mode keyboard is a pleasance to type on. Its keys are even more stable than the ones on the ThinkPad T470 ($881.ten at Lenovo) , which is my all-time favorite laptop keyboard. The fundamental travel is shallower than Lenovo's, however, and the keys themselves are flat and square, as opposed to the ThinkPad's, which are slightly scalloped. The face of most of the keys are also very busy, filled with symbols that are often hard to decipher. The control for the keyboard lighting, for instance, is a combination of the Fn and Southward keys, and the gray logos that guide you to this shortcut aren't backlit. The glass touchpad is comfy, although it's a fleck small. Its left and right buttons are located higher up the pad, rather than below, in order to exercise double duty equally the clicking options for both the pad and the ThinkPad-manner pointing stick. Unfortunately, the stick itself is as well close to the G and H keys, and I institute myself oftentimes typing Gs and Hs by accident equally I moused around.

The fingerprint reader is embedded in the touchpad's upper left corner, and despite its modest size, it'due south a touch sensor rather than the junior swipe sensor that occasionally shows up in business laptops. Windows gave an mistake the offset time I tried to register my print, just after the 2nd effort, the sensor worked flawlessly each time I used information technology to log in.

The X30-D is mercifully complimentary of bloatware (unwanted trial software installed at the factory), although it does include Toshiba's surprisingly useful and well-designed Service Station app. Service Station gives you one-click admission to the system's ability consumption and temperature, and offers automatic testing tools for motherboard stability, cooling performance, storage monitoring, and USB ports. These tests are by and large laissez passer/neglect—they'll only tell you if the component is working correctly or not—but if you don't consider yourself a power user and you need to pinpoint an issue, they are a practiced first pace. If something is actually incorrect, Toshiba offers a standard three-twelvemonth warranty, which is much better than the one year that you'll get from Apple tree or about Dell and HP consumer PCs.

It'll Go You lot Through a Workday

The white-hot competition of the ultraportable market means that high-end machines have very similar specs, peculiarly when it comes to GPUs. Most of the the models that compete with the X30-D have integrated graphics, and except for the thirteen-inch Apple tree MacBook Pro , about of those integrated GPUs are the Intel HD Graphics 620, which offers dismal gaming performance. As such, the MacBook Pro, with its superior Intel Iris Plus graphics, was the only ane that was able to eke out more than than 30fps (frames per 2nd) on our gaming tests at medium quality settings, but I yet wouldn't play annihilation other than Minecraft or a game with similarly calorie-free demands on any of these systems.

As for general calculating power, the X30-D holds its own. Information technology posted a class-leading score of 3,335 points on the proprietary PCMark 8 criterion, which measures give-and-take processing, spreadsheet editing, videoconferencing, and other common tasks that PC users are likely to perform daily. The X30-D is also an acceptable video-encoding and image-editing machine, completing our Handbrake video-encoding examination in 2 minutes and 3 seconds, faster than everything I compared it with except the MacBook Pro. Its scores on the Cinebench exam (358) and the collection of Photoshop video-editing tasks (iii minutes and 45 seconds) are in the middle of the competition. Given these results, I wouldn't hesitate to employ the X30-D every bit an everyday computer and expect it to quickly chew through most of my usual workflow, which involves typing, spreadsheet editing, and image manipulation.

Come across How We Test Laptops

The X30-D's but glaring performance weakness is its battery life. It lasted 10 hours on our battery-rundown examination, which involves playing a looped video at 50 percentage screen brightness and with the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antennas turned off. That might get you through a workday, depending on how much you lot tax the processor, but it's several hours shorter than near ultraportables we've tested recently. The MacBook Pro, for instance, lasted sixteen hours and 26 minutes, and many others lasted for at least 14 hours.

So Who'southward Paying?

The Toshiba Portege X30-D has a lot going for it. It checks all the boxes expected from an ultraportable, and even manages to throw in a few unexpected niceties like a three-year warranty, robust speakers, and a Goldilocks display that expertly toes the line between sleeky and matte. Whether or not this is the ultraportable for yous, however, depends on your price sensitivity and your opinion of Toshiba. It's one matter to overpay for one of Apple's MacBook Pros, which are notoriously overpriced but boast a runway record of excellence and robust back up options from Apple. On the other hand, paying more than $two,000 for a notebook with the same specs as ones that cost a few hundred dollars less is a tough decision.

I consider $1,600 to be the ceiling for a high-end Windows laptop with an Intel Core i7 and sub-2.5 pound weight. That'southward how much the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon ($1,281.75 at Lenovo) costs, and at $1,500, the LG gram 14 ($1,069.99 at Amazon) is even cheaper. If my IT department issued me an X30-D, I would accept information technology in a heartbeat. If I had to pay for it myself, yet, I probably would buy the Lenovo, the LG, or even a MacBook Pro.

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/netbooks-products/17639/toshiba-portege-x30-d-review

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