Performance

The fundamental comeback to the HP Spectre x360 is the upgrade to new 8th gen Kaby Lake Refresh CPUs. What you gain is pretty pregnant: a shift from 2 cores and four threads, to four cores and eight threads. This is the offset time in a long while that Intel is giving ultraportables more than than a 10% performance boost generation on generation.

While you lot can get Spectre x360 models with both Core i5 and Cadre i7 CPUs inside, my review unit of measurement was loaded with the Cadre i7-8550U, a highly pop CPU in modern ultraportables, and 16GB of RAM. Its four cores accept a base clock of ane.8 GHz and heave betwixt 3.7 and 4.0 GHz depending on how many cores are utilized. Like previous 7th gen parts, it's a 15W CPU built on a 14nm process. It also has UHD 620 graphics with 24 execution units clocked up to 1150 MHz.

It's not a new feature, but 1 of the cardinal aspects to Kaby Lake-R is its configurable TDP, and then while the fries are generally rated for 15W, OEMs tin choose a TDP between 10 and 25W depending on their ability and cooling subsystems.

If you lot saw my Dell XPS xiii review a couple of months back, that's a laptop that uses the maximum 25W TDP when connected to the charger for maximum operation.

The Spectre x360 isn't one of those systems. Information technology uses the stock 15W TDP, and fifty-fifty and so, it struggles under the power of the Core i7-8550U. It doesn't run loud – the cooler isn't super tranquillity just it doesn't land a small-scale passenger jet on your desk-bound either – but it does run hot.

During the initial burst of a workload where the CPU hits its peak clock speed, the 8550U speedily hits around 100C and dials back to its low sustained clock very quickly; much quicker than other Kaby Lake Refresh laptops I've tested.

When combined with the apply of the stock 15W TDP, the Spectre x360 suffers in both curt and long workloads. In Cinebench, for example, the Spectre is 20 percentage slower than the Dell XPS thirteen in the multi-threaded workload; and six percentage behind the more pocket-sized Inspiron xiii 7000 2-in-1. All three of these laptops apply the same CPU but with unlike coolers and capabilities.

These results are carried over into many other tests. When encoding x264 videos, the Spectre x360 is 22 percent slower than the XPS 13, and 15 percent behind the Inspiron. In Handbrake encoding x265 videos, nosotros're looking at like performance deficits, and this carried over into Blender every bit well.

In shorter workloads like Excel, the Spectre x360 ended up 4 percent behind the XPS 13 and 13 percent behind the Inspiron. In MATLAB we're looking at 2 and 12 percent deficits compared to the XPS and Inspiron laptops respectively. Even in WinRAR, the just test where the Spectre x360 got shut to the XPS 13, it was still soundly beaten by the quick and high firing Inspiron.

In the more all-circular tests of PCMark, it's still not not bad news for the Spectre x360, falling 5 percent behind in the Home and Piece of work tests while performing around the same mark in Artistic, compared to the XPS 13. The Inspiron laptop outperformed HP's offering in all three tests, and in PCMark 10 as well, which didn't piece of work on the XPS 13 for whatever reason.

Like margins are carried into 3DMark too, and then unfortunately it seems every attribute of the Cadre i7-8550U's operation has been hampered past the cooling solution compared to the Dell XPS xiii, one of the Spectre x360's primary laptop competitors.

Of course information technology's non all bad news for the new Spectre x360. Compared to the previous model, which used a Cadre i7-7500U, we are seeing significant gains in a number of tests: it'due south 57 percent faster in Cinebench, twoscore percent faster in x264 encodes, 14 percent faster in MATLAB, 20 percent faster in the CPU-limited Deject Gate 3DMark test, and much faster in pinch and decompression.

The chief thing to note here is that anyone upgrading from a 7thursday-gen or older system volition see pretty huge gains in CPU functioning moving to the 8thursday-gen Spectre x360. Nonetheless, this system could have achieved better gains had the cooler been upward to the task, every bit it's soundly beaten past the otherwise similar Dell XPS 13 with the very same i7-8550U.

On the other paw, storage functioning is excellent from the Samsung PM961 512GB SSD in my review unit. This drive has great sequential operation and delivers very solid random speeds, putting it in the upper echelon of laptop drives. It does cost a pretty penny for the college-capacity Spectre x360 models only at least HP is giving you ultra fast storage for the price.