Living With the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K

For years, the enterprise PC market has been dominated by Dell, HP, and Lenovo with little room for anything else except the occasional Mac. Dynabook, the company that used to be Toshiba PC and is now owned by Sharp (which is in turn controlled by Foxconn), is now pushing to reenter this market, with a series of machines that meet all the enterprise requirements, including Intel vPro support.

I’ve been trying out the company’s Portégé X40L-K, the lightweight 14-inch notebook in the Dynabook family. Note the L stands for lightweight, as Dynabook makes a heavier 14-inch model; and the K designates the year, signifying in part that it is based on the 12th Generation Intel Core (Alder Lake) processor. I’ve found the machine to be very lightweight and portable, with a lot of features, but also a few shortcomings.

The basic design looks much like other Windows laptop, somewhat distinguished by a matte dark blue color. With a magnesium alloy case, it’s about the same size as other 14-inch enterprise laptops, just 0.63 inch thick. It weighs just 2.31 pounds by itself and 3.08 pounds with the included 65-watt charger, making it the lightest 14-inch enterprise notebook I’ve yet tested.

The Portégé has a much larger selection of ports than I’m used to in a machine this thin. The left-hand side has a Kensington lock, HDMI port, USB-A port and two US B-C/Thunderbolt ports (which are used for charging). The right-hand side has a microSD slot, a full-size Ethernet jack (with a cover that pulls down so it doesn’t impact the lines of the machine), another USB-A port, and a headphone/microphone jack. A fingerprint reader is built into the power button to the top right of the keyboard, and that worked fine with Windows Hello. While I could quibble about the placement of the USB-C ports (it would be somewhat more convenient if they were a bit further back on the left-hand side, or if there was one on either side), it’s still terrific to see all these options.

(Credit: Dynabook)

The model I had used the Core i7-1270P processor, along with 16GB of RAM and 512GB Samsung SSD. Like the Core i7-1260P, which I have 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 offering two threads each) and eight “efficient” cores, so 12 physical cores and 16 threads. It has a base power of 28 watts, with 18MB of cache and Intel’s Xe graphics. The difference is that the 1270P clocks in with a base speed of 2.2 GHz and a maximum speed of 4.8 GHz, each slightly higher than the 1260P.

This result shows up in benchmarks, with the biggest benefits showing up in tests that stressed the graphics. Compared with the X1 Carbon, PC Mark scores were similar, but the Portégé was 25% faster on Cinebench 23’s multi-threaded test, and 5% faster on its single-threaded test. On 3D Mark’s gaming tests, scores ranged from 10 to 20% faster. These are big improvements, though if I were a gamer, I'd still want discrete graphics, not the Xe integrated graphics.

I got good results on more real-world tests as well. A very large Excel model I've been using for years completed in 38 minutes compared with 41 minutes on the X1 Carbon and 39 on this year’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga. It doesn't appear that Excel takes much advantage of the extra cores compared with previous generations of processors, but the clock speed does matter, and this is the fastest score I’ve yet seen in a laptop on this test.

On some other tests, the results were quite impressive. Doing a very large video transcode with Handbrake took 1 hour and 32 minutes, vs. 1 hour and 55 on the X1 Carbon and 1 hour and 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 yet on a normal laptop. (I have seen faster times on much heavier machines with bigger, more powerful processors).

Unfortunately, I could not get a large MatLab portfolio simulation test to run properly, and I’m still not sure why. It’s somewhat troubling, but it could be the test more than the machine—everything else I tried worked fine.

The Portégé has a 65 watt-hour battery, and on PCMark’s Modern Office test, I got over 13 hours of battery life. In general, battery life seemed quite good for a thin and light laptop.

(Credit: Dynabook)

The unit I tested had a 14-inch IPS non-touch display with 1920-by-1200 resolution in the now common 16:10 ratio, with Eyesafe low blue light features. It looked fine, though it would be good to have more display options.

While the size and performance of the Portégé were great, there were a few things that didn’t seem quite up to par. The keyboard was a bit mushy, and the spacebar and direction keys a little small. While there’s a light on the function key to tell you when the microphone is muted, there isn’t a similar light on the mute function keys for the speakers.

Then there’s video conferencing. The Portégé has video conferencing hotkeys, dual microphones with AI noise reduction on top of the machine, along with two front facing speakers on either side of the keyboard, and two downward facing speakers with Dolby Atmos support. The webcam has a small physical privacy shutter. These are not exceptional but perfectly adequate. But the 720p webcam itself was a disappointment, it was dark and muddy. There is an online meeting assist application that lets you turn on and off background blur, lighting correction, and face framing, but none of these overcame the camera’s limitations.

Currently, a model like what 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 pros and cons to the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K. It’s thin and light, fast, and has a terrific assortment of ports, but I wish it had a better keyboard and webcam.