Review of Toshiba Portégé Z30t-A-10X Ultrabook

Display:

The 13.3-inch display shows a constant resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels (166 ppi). The resulting improved sharpness and additional work space are features one does not want to miss after short time. Admittedly, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon impresses with 2,560 x 1,440 pixels (221 ppi). However, this high resolution has rather limited practical use - also because button icons of many programs cannot be scaled easily anymore.

The second innovation, the capacitive touchscreen,  should be considered more skeptically. On the one hand, one can ask whether a touchscreen is really necessary for a business laptop. That is an individual decision everyone has to make. On the other hand, the touchscreen function asks for compromises concerning the display: the screen which Toshiba calls "anti-glare" is rather a combination of normal glare and anti-glare display. Besides, sliding properties of the slightly shining coating are not really convincing. These negative aspects are however not entirely due to Toshiba, but rather a general problem of such displays.

 

 With that in mind, the Toshiba Portege Z30t that we are focusing on today is not entirely new: already at the end of 2013 we tested the compact business ultrabook, back then called Portege Z30. The new model with the "t" is based on the same chassis, but offers a full HD display with touchscreen function. In comparison with the basic version, both weight and thickness are therefore slightly increased, which is unfortunately also the case for the price: our test device with a Core i7-4500U, 8 GB RAM, 256-GB-SSD and LTE module costs around 1,550€, corresponding to around 100€ extra charge. 

Performance:  
 The Intel Core i7-4500U of the Portege Z30t is the same dual Core CPU that has already been used in the Z30. Unfortunately, Toshiba does not implement the slightly higher clocked successor i7-4510U. At the same time, the 1.8 - 3.0 GHz  4500U allows for respectable performance values, which are next to the high (turbo-)clock speed mainly due to the pro-MHz performance of the Haswell architecture. Power intake of the ULV chips is rated with only 15 Watt TDP, which is meant to reduce noise generation and temperature increase.

Processor:  
In order for the Core i7-4500U to provide the expected performance, the available Turbo Boost (1 core: 3.0 GHz, 2 cores: 2.7 GHz) has to be optimally used. While this works in an exemplary manner for the Portege Z30, the Z30t shows surprising weak points: the single-thread test of the Cinebench R11.5 is perfromed with only 2.8 GHz, the multi-thread benchmark only with 2.2 GHz. Accordingly, scores are rather bad - other notebooks with identical processor work up to 20% faster. The change between different energy profiles or the way power is supplied (battery/grid operation) does not influence clock speeds or benchmark results.