Dynabook Portege X30L Review – With 870 grams the lightest 13.3″-er

So the X30L is light and even if you know you’re dealing with a light laptop, you’ll be surprised the first time you pick up the Dynabook X30L. At first it seems as if you are standing with a dummy in your hand or with a very realistic toy instead of a laptop of at least 1500 euros. Dynabook has achieved that low weight by making the housing from a magnesium alloy. The manufacturer uses this more often, for example with the regular X30. Only, somehow that magnesium doesn’t feel like metal, but like plastic. This is partly due to the low weight and perhaps also because the thin magnesium conducts heat less well than a thick aluminum housing does.

Be that as it may, we think one of the most important things about the laptop case is that it packs the hardware tightly and at that point you notice that low weight comes at the expense of sturdiness. You notice that especially in the screen construction, which feels very weak. If you grab the corners of the screen, you can easily twist it and that does not give a nice feeling on a laptop of 1500 euros. We would therefore like to see a sturdier screen construction, but that naturally entails extra weight. Dynabook has managed to make the base, in which the hardware is packaged, solid. You can let the housing compress a bit by pressing the center, but for that you have to apply so much force that we don’t see that happening in practice.

Keyboard, touchpad and connections

Officially, the Portégé X30L is a business laptop and it comes standard with Windows 10 Pro. Another ‘business’ feature is the gigabit Ethernet connection on the right side of the housing. The Ethernet connection is omitted from the vast majority of (consumer) laptops, but in situations where WiFi is not available or not secure enough, you can fall back on Ethernet with the Portégé. In addition to the Ethernet connection, there are two conventional USB connections that work at a maximum of 5Gbit/s. On the left side are a microSD card reader, a headphone jack and an HDMI 1.4 connection. We would have expected HDMI 2.0 for a laptop in this price range, but that is not available and you will therefore have to use the USB-C connection for a 4k60 image. It does not support Thunderbolt, which is quite a disappointment, because docking stations with Thunderbolt are often used in business environments. Moreover, the regular X30 does have that connection.

Another thing that we did encounter on the regular X30 and ‘miss’ on the X30L is the trackpoint. We put ‘miss’ in quotes, because we suspect that the joystick in the middle of the keyboard is not really popular anymore. However, it is typical of most Portégé laptops. Instead, as with the vast majority of laptops, you will have to make do with a regular touchpad. We find that touchpad on the small side and it is also not fully usable because the top left corner is occupied by the fingerprint scanner. The plastic surface of the touchpad feels quite rough, which gives a good sense of precision, and multi-touch gestures are also well tracked. The touchpad feels very cheap when you click on it, because of the short click it gives.

The Dynabook’s keyboard has keys that don’t go all the way to the edge, as we sometimes see on other 13.3″ laptops, which results in relatively small buttons. The keys have a very subtle dimple, which allows your finger to reach the the middle of the key slides. As mentioned, the base of the laptop is a lot firmer than the screen, so the keyboard hardly bounces during typing. The travel is small, but not much different than with an average thin laptop.

benchmarking

Dynabook equips the X30L with tenth generation Intel processors and has opted for Comet Lake processors. Unlike Ice Lake CPUs, they are still made at 14nm, but they do have a higher maximum clock speed. For example, the Core i7-10510U in our review sample has a maximum clock speed of 4.9GHz, which is no less than a gigahertz higher than the widely used Core i7-1065G7, of the Ice Lake generation.

Unfortunately, we don’t see much of that high clock speed in benchmarks and that appears to be because Dynabook has adjusted the consumption quite conservatively. In benchmarks, the processor’s consumption shoots up to 40 watts, but after about 5 seconds it drops to 15 watts, which is the processor’s tdp specified by Intel. With many other manufacturers we see that more can be consumed for much longer. The consumption of the CPU in the Dell XPS 13 9300 does not fall below 25 watts during Cinebench, for example. A high energy budget means that the clock speeds are higher and that the laptop is therefore faster. Dynabook probably let the laptop consume little to keep the heat development in the small housing within limits. The Dynabook is only fast again in single-core applications,

We then also look at the degree of throttling that takes place when we let the laptop render in Blender for half an hour. Because the laptop quickly limits the power consumption of the CPU, there is little throttling, but the processor is not exactly fast at best. If we then render a video in DaVinci, it also appears that the laptop is significantly slower than other Core i7 laptops.