That allows the Dell XPS 13 and its slightly less powerful Core i5-7200U processor to dominate-Dell opts to run its laptop’s fans harder instead of lowering the processor’s speed, and the traditional clamshell design means the system can run a little warmer, too. The Spectre, on the other hand, is a convertible, and nobody wants to hang onto a scorching-hot tablet. We use it to hammer on the CPU and see what happens next: Will the notebook start blasting its fans? Will it instead begin throttling performance to keep it cooler? If a system does lower the CPU’s clock speed, it’ll of course complete the encode at a slower rate.įor the Spectre x360, HP favors keeping the system cool. On these thin-and-light notebooks, Handbrake is a torture test. When we ran our Handbrake encoding test, which involves transcoding a 30GB MKV file into a smaller MP4 file using the Android Tablet preset, the 4K Spectre x360 held steady with the 2016 model. Switching over to tests that focus solely on CPU performance paints a more expected picture. Any gaming you’d do on this ultraportable laptop is already limited to less taxing games like League of Legends and Minecraft, and you’d be playing them at lower resolutions and lower image quality to boot. In practice, it’s not a matter of concern. When we dropped the resolution to 1920×1080, that disappeared. Here, the performance delta isn’t quite as dramatic as with PCMark 8, but you can still see about a 9 percent decline when compared to the 2016 Spectre x360. When we loaded Sky Diver to see how the GPU would handle itself, we again saw a gap in performance between the 4K Spectre x360 and other Kaby Lake processors with the same integrated graphics core. We ran into a similar story when we fired up 3DMark’s synthetic graphics benchmark. Any score over 2,000 in Work Conventional means a system will feel responsive during low-intensity tasks. That said, this difference won’t really affect the experience of using a 4K Spectre x360 for writing email or updating a spreadsheet. These days, PCMark 8’s scores haven’t been overly affected by differences in resolution, so there may be a driver issue in play. That brought us within the expected range, but it’s not an expected result. So we ran the test again with the notebook’s resolution set to 1920×1080. Performance dropped by 18.7 percent-a gap that’s startlingly large, and definitely outside a margin of error. The load on a system isn’t particularly heavy, and because this 4K version of the Spectre has the same processor, RAM, and type of storage as our 2016 review unit, we were expecting the benchmark results to be similar. We use PCMark 8’s Work Conventional benchmark to measure performance during the kind of everyday tasks we office drudges do most often-this test simulates activities like web browsing, video chatting, and document editing. For people who want to live in a 4K world, the sacrifice is one that can be easily lived with. The actual runtime, however, isn’t bad by any means: Seven hours is almost a full workday, and it’s definitely longer than a direct cross-country flight. Overall, the panel is crisp and fairly bright, with a max output of 340 nits. So many pixels on a 13.3-inch screen may seem like overkill, but it’s hard not to like all the detail you can see in photos and 4K video if you work with (or view) them often. (Nor my gluttonous appetite.)Īs for the 4K display, it’s gorgeous. Alaina Yee/IDGĭon’t blame the Spectre x360 for my terrible penmanship. Palm rejection did fail me on occasion, but I could tie it to hesitant placement of my hand on the screen. It feels natural, and the results look crisp. But I can say that the Spectre x360 works well for taking notes and sketching out rough diagrams. I’m going to jump straight to what I assume everyone wants to know first: What it’s like to use the pen and the 4K touchscreen.Īs a disclaimer, I’m no artist (as you can see by my penmanship alone), so I’m unable to comment in depth on how well the Spectre handles sensitivity when doing inking, shading, and the like. What sets it apart is that 4K IPS touchscreen with active pen support. The specs of our current $1,600 review unit largely mirror that of the previous Spectre x360 that we reviewed: a Kaby Lake Intel Core i7-7500U processor, 16GB of LPDDR3/1866 RAM, a 512GB Samsung PM961 PCI-NVMe SSD, Thunderbolt 3, and a Windows Hello–compatible camera.
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