Toshiba LX830

Toshiba has been showing off a bunch of new ultrabooks and a new tablet recently, but with the LX830 it's showing it's still got its eyes on the desktop world.

The LX830 offers a 23-inch screen with a Full HD resolution and can be specced up to include Intel Ivy Bridge processors, up to 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia graphics card. That model is likely to be rather pricey though.

The base model starts at the very reasonable price of £599 although Toshiba hasn't explained what specs you'll find inside that one. It'll be available sometime next month.

Design

Most all-in-ones tend to fall into two camps, design wise. They're usually either rather plasticky affairs like the Toshiba Qosmio DX730 with large shiny plastic bezels or they're more design-led things taking style tips from Apple's iMac. The LX830 however doesn't really fall into either group, which is nice -- the Dell XPS One 27 is so closely modelled on the iMac that it may as well have an Apple logo on it.

That's not to say it doesn't look good though. The 23-inch screen obviously dominates the whole front of the machine, set into a steel grey surround. I'm not entirely sure what the surround is made of; it could be metal or it could be a metal-effect matte plastic. Either way it looks pretty good and adds a certain premium element.

The grey surround slopes down at the bottom of the screen where you'll find two speaker grilles. Toshiba reckons that they pump out great sound so you might not need separate speakers. They're not huge and don't use a dedicated sub-woofer so I'd be surprised if you could totally dispense with your speaker set.

Around the back things become a bit more standard. It's entirely made from black plastic which has none of the attractive qualities of the metal-bodied iMacs so you might want to keep it with its back to the wall so people only see the more attractive front. On the back is also where you'll find the majority of the ports, with a few of them residing on the side for quick access.

In total you get four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports an Ethernet port, HDMI in (for hooking up a games console or similar) and a DVD or optional Blu-ray drive.

Screen

The 23-inch screen comes bearing a resolution of 1,920x1,080-pixels, meaning that it's full HD. That's pretty relieving as I would really be accepting nothing less on a screen of this size.

That means that it's fully capable of handling all the high definition content you could want so I'd highly suggest configuring it to include the Blu-ray player -- DVDs just won't look as good on this screen.

It seemed both bright and bold so whatever you decide to put on to watch should look pretty good. However, it's important to bear in mind that I was checking out the LX830 in a dimly lit bar in London's Soho district so any screen would seem brighter than a thousand suns down there. Toshiba put the trailer of Dark Knight Rises on for me to watch which seemed crisp and clear though so I've got high hopes for this guy as a media machine.

The model I had my sweaty hands on came with a touch-enabled screen so I could navigate around windows 7 with my hands rather than with the standard mouse. The touchscreen was about as accurate as most all-in-ones -- fine for big icons, awkward for small things. It'll be much more pleasant to use when Windows 8 and its touch-optimised Metro interface comes out.

Specifications

Toshiba was very light on details on exactly what will be loaded inside the LX830. What it did say however was that it will be available with the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, up to 16GB of RAM and a dedicated Nvidia graphics card which sounds like a seriously impressive lineup of specs.

Of course, such a configuration would likely be very pricey, so it'll be interesting to see what specs are found inside the base model for £599.

Even a mid-level machine should be easily up to the task of handling all office tasks and with the Intel Ivy Bridge chips -- which promise particular good built in graphics capabilities -- it might also be able to turn its hand to photo and video editing too. The top spec model with the specs listed above will be one seriously powerful machine so if you're a graphics professional looking for an editing machine for a small office, it might very well be the computer for you.

The LX830 also comes with a built in Freeview tuner, letting you watch all the Freeview channels you wish by plugging an aerial into the socket in the back. Toshiba's previous all-in-ones also allowed you to record programmes to the computer's memory so it's likely that you'll also be able to do this here, filling up the LX830's 2TB hard drive with constant repeats of Jeremy Kyle.

Outlook

The Toshiba LX830 offers good looks -- from the front at least -- and a full HD screen. The starting price is very affordable, so let's keep our fingers crossed that the base model packs enough power to keep ticking along and the top-end machine isn't too pricey. Stay tuned for a full review soon.