For years, the business PC market was dominated by Dell, HP, and Lenovo with little room for anything but the occasional Mac. Dynabook, the company that used to be Toshiba PC and now owned by Sharp (which in turn is controlled by Foxconn), is now pushing to re-enter this market, with a range of machines that meet all business requirements, including Intel. vPro support .
I tried out the company’s Portégé X40L-K, the lightweight 14-inch notebook in the Dynabook family. Note that the L stands for lightweight, as Dynabook makes a heavier 14-inch model; and the K denotes the year, which in part means it is based on the 12th generation Intel Core (Alder Lake) processor. I have found the machine to be very light and portable, with many features, but also with a few shortcomings.
The basic design is very similar to other Windows laptops, somewhat distinguishable by a matte dark blue color. With a magnesium alloy body, it’s about the same size as other 14-inch business laptops, just 0.63 inches thick. It only weighs 2.31 pounds and 3.08 pounds with the included 65-watt charger, making it the lightest 14-inch business notebook I’ve tested so far.
The Portégé has a much larger selection of ports than I’m used to in a machine of this slim size. The left side has a Kensington lock, HDMI port, USB-A port and two US BC/Thunderbolt ports (used for charging). The right side has a microSD slot, a full-size Ethernet jack (with a cover that pulls down so it doesn’t affect the lines of the machine), another USB-A port, and a headphone/microphone jack. A fingerprint reader is built into the power button at the top right of the keyboard and that worked great with Windows Hello. While I could quibble over the placement of the USB-C ports (it would be a bit more convenient if they were a little further back on the left, or if there was one on each side), it’s still great to have everything see these options.
(Credit: Dynabook)
The model I had uses the Core i7-1270P processor, along with 16GB RAM and 512GB Samsung SSD. Like the Core i7-1260P, which I’ve tested on a number of machines so far, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, this processor has four “power” cores (each with hyper-threading, so with two threads each) and eight “efficient” cores, so 12 physical cores and 16 threads. It has a base power of 28 watts, with 18 MB cache and Intel’s Xe graphics. The difference is that the 1270P clocks in at a base speed of 2.2 GHz and a maximum speed of 4.8GHz, each slightly higher than the 1260P.
This result shows up in benchmarks, with the biggest advantages in tests that emphasized the graphics. Compared to the X1 Carbon, PC Mark scores were similar, but the Portégé was 25% faster on Cinebench’s multi-threaded test, 23 percent faster on the single-threaded test. On 3D Mark’s game tests, scores were 10 to 20% faster. These are big improvements, but if I were a gamer I’d still want discrete graphics, not the integrated Xe graphics.
I also got good results on more real-world tests. A very large Excel model I’ve used for years completed in 38 minutes compared to 41 minutes on the X1 Carbon and 39 on this year’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga. It seems that Excel doesn’t take much advantage of the extra cores compared to previous generations of processors, but the clock speed does matter, and this is the fastest score I’ve seen in a laptop so far in this test.
On some other tests, the results were quite impressive. Running a very large video transcode with Handbrake took 1 hour 32 minutes, versus 1 hour 55 on the X1 Carbon and 1 hour 38 minutes on the X1 Yoga. This test seems to vary considerably by how warm the processor gets. The Portege’s is the fastest I’ve seen on a regular laptop so far. (I’ve seen faster times on much heavier machines with bigger, more powerful processors).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t run a large MatLab portfolio simulation test properly, and I still don’t know why. It’s somewhat disturbing, but it could be more the test than the machine – everything else I tried worked fine.
The Portégé has a 65-watt-hour battery, and in PCMark’s Modern Office test, I got over 13 hours of battery life. Overall, battery life seemed pretty good for a thin and light laptop.
(Credit: Dynabook)
The device I tested had a 14-inch IPS touchscreen display with a resolution of 1920 x 1200 in the now-common 16:10 ratio, with Eyesafe low-blue light features. It looked good, although it would be good to have more display options.
While the Portégé’s size and performance were great, there were a few things that weren’t quite right. The keyboard was a bit mushy and the spacebar and direction keys a bit small. While there is a light on the function key to tell you when the microphone is muted, there is no comparable light on the mute function keys for the speakers.
Then there is video conference. The Portégé has video conferencing shortcuts, dual AI noise canceling microphones on top of the machine, along with two front-firing speakers on either side of the keyboard and two down-firing speakers with Dolby Atmos support. The webcam has a small physical privacy hatch. These are not exceptional, but perfectly adequate. But the 720p webcam itself was a disappointment, it was dark and muddy. There’s an online meeting assistant application that lets you toggle background blur, exposure compensation, and face framing, but none of it overcame the camera’s limitations.
Currently a model like I tested(Opens in a new window) is listed on the Dynabook website for $2,219.99, which seems a bit high in price.
In general, there are both advantages and disadvantages to the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K. It’s thin and light, fast and has a great range of ports, but I wish it had a better keyboard and webcam.
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