(Display upgrades include a brighter model and one with a privacy screen.) The model I used had an FHD 1920-by-1080 display with 300 nits of brightness. HP offers an optional pen with USB charging, and you can use pen and touch simultaneously. It's a x360, meaning it's a 2-in-1 that includes a touch screen so you could theoretically turn the screen over and use it as a tablet, or put it in a 'tent' mode for presentation. It's not HP's highest-end line-that would be the Spectre x360 family-but it does include all of the features you would want. On PCMark 10's 'Modern Office' battery test, I got 13 hours of battery life using the 'recommended' setting, one of the best scores I've seen.īottom line: For just about any consumer, AMD has now bridged the gap, enabling machines that can compare favorably on performance or battery life with Intel-based machines.Īs far as the rest of the machine goes, it's quite nice. The last generation of AMD Ryzen mobile chips had decent performance but didn't match Intel on battery life. But in the recommended mode, the machine seemed quiet enough, only rarely turning on the fan. There's a good reason that most people won't run in 'Performance mode'-it's incredibly noisy. Using the more standard Recommended mode, the numbers were about 10 percent less, and in 'quiet' mode (which shuts off the fan), about 20 percent less. I used the performance mode, and as I said the numbers looked quite good. One interesting part of the system is a function key that directly pulls up a Command Center screen (above) that lets you quickly switch among modes. (Note that the AMD processor required an updated version of MatLab to run.)īut it does depend on how you use the machine. But the Ryzen was faster than the Ice Lake system. On an internal test that uses MatLab, the Ryzen took 63 minutes compared with 46 minutes on the Comet Lake system and about 50 minutes on most of last year's Whiskey Lake-based systems. One major difference: The Ryzen system did much better on Cinebench R20. On most benchmarks tests, the results were close, sometimes with the Ryzen winning, sometimes one of the Intel ones. Other models are available with a Ryzen 3-4300U or a Ryzen 7-4700U, with the U signifying a 15-watt processor TDP, similar to the power envelope used in most thin laptops today.Ĭompared with recent consumer machines with the latest Intel 10th Generation mobile processors, such as the four-core/eight-thread Ice Lake-based Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 or the six-core/twelve-thread Comet Lake-based Dell XPS 13, the Ryzen 4500-based Envy x360 13 did quite well. It also has Radeon Graphics with 6 cores at 1500MHz. This does not offer SMT (Simultaneous multithreading), so you have 6 threads as well. The unit I tried had a Ryzen 5-4500U, with 6 cores and a base speed of 2.3 GHz, but with a boost clock of 4.0 GHz. Of course, the real story is performance.

Hp envy x360 keyboard not working