Toshiba KIRAbook High Resolution Ultrabook

Name: Toshiba KIRAbook High Resolution Ultrabook
Brand: Toshiba

by Joshua Gulick — Thursday, June 27, 2013, 11:45 AM EDT

The lack of a replaceable or upgradable battery on the KIRAbook makes its battery life all the more important. Testing battery performance is always a little tricky. The way you use the ultrabook is bound to affect its battery life, but you can ballpark it based on our results.

Battery Eater Pro

Battery Life Testing

The KIRAbook’s performance here was fairly impressive, though under load the machine can chew through a battery charge quickly. As we’ve mentioned earlier, the system’s price demands serious performance, and Battery Eater Pro ate up the KIRAbook in a mere 112 minutes. Battery Eater Pro puts the ultrabook’s resources to work (the KIRAbook’s fan was noticeable the entire time), but plenty of systems offer more than two hours of battery life in the BEP test. Then again, those systems likely don't offer the performance of the KIRAbook either.

When we ran our Web test, however, we saw the best results we’ve seen from an ultrabook so far. The KIRAbook refreshed a webpage for a total of 7 hours and 28 minutes – beating out HP’s Envy ultrabook, by three minutes. If your usage patterns are fairly light, the KIRAbook will see you through long excursions. If you find yourself needing extra CPU cycles for multimedia work or other things like image processing be prepared to tether back up to the wall. In reality, performance when you need it and battery life when you don't could be considered the best of both worlds, again, depending on you usage model.

Tags: Toshiba, Ivy Bridge, Ultrabook, KIRAbook, (NASDAQ: TOSBF) Core i7

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.