Toshiba Portégé Z830 Ultrabook Review

The whole system is designed to be speedy, and it lives up to mostly any situation. Obviously some modern applications that rely heavily on multi-threading as well as modern games shouldn’t be expected to run so smoothly on this setup given the dual-core (4 cores with Hyper-threading) and integrated Intel HD3000 graphics.

Nonetheless the Z830 packs a punch as the benchmarks below prove. For comparisons I have used the recently reviewed Acer Aspire S3 ultrabook (AED 3,599) and the reference AMD Llano notebook (AED 3,000+).

As you can see, the Toshiba is the most expensive of them all, but it also has the benefit of being the lightest and slimmest machine of them all. Over the Acer, the Toshiba has the advantage of a complete unibody design and a USB 3.0 port.

We all know that AMD’s APUs are far better performer than Intel’s offerings, and with a discrete graphics cards running in Crossfire (with the integrated GPU) the margin widens to nearly 70% performance increase when comparing the AMD machine to Intel’s integrated graphics.

However, the crown undoubtedly belongs to Intel, and specifically the Toshiba in every other benchmark thanks to the SSD which allows for faster data transfer and increased bandwidth.

Battery life is also impressive, with roughly 7 hours on ‘Balanced’ setting under the Windows 7 Power Options. I basically just browsed the net, watched probably 30 minutes of YouTube HD videos, and some general MS Office work while listening to some MP3s. On a full charge when I did all of the above, plus 2 hours of Unreal Tournament (99) and Quake 3, the battery life dropped to almost 4 hours 30 minutes.

Overall the Toshiba Portégé Z830 impressed me in every aspect of its design and performance. No matter where I went or who I showed it to, everybody wanted one. The price was the only factor that put down a lot of people. At nearly 4.5k the Toshiba Portégé Z830 is a good AED 850 more expensive than the Acer Aspire S3. That said, it’s still AED 1,150 cheaper than its nearest rival, the unibody and equally slim MacBook Pro 13 which has the same specs inside. So for those who want a true ultrabook experience, the Toshiba Portégé Z830 is a definite buy, despite the slightly high price tag.