HP Specter 13 x360 SE Review – Skylake-Spectre with a golden edge
HP’s Specter 13 x360 is a convertible with a screen that not only rotates 360 degrees, but also has good viewing angles and is well calibrated. The aluminum casing is sturdy, but susceptible to scratches, especially when using the laptop’s convertible modes. The Skylake processor is slightly faster than its predecessor and about as economical. That provides a good battery life of about nine hours. At almost 1500 grams, the weight is slightly above that of an average ultrabook.
Pros
- Good screen
- Long battery life
- Sturdy housing
Cons
- Slightly heavier than competitors
- Screen difficult to open
- Scratch sensitive in convertible mode
When we reviewed HP’s Specter x360 last summer, that laptop pleasantly surprised us. The laptop turned out to do almost everything well and only have a few minor drawbacks. HP has since replaced the Broadwell processor in the Specter with Skylake and left the rest of the laptop unchanged. That gives us a good opportunity to compare Intel’s new ‘U-processor’, the Core i7-6500U, with its predecessors.
Appearance: special
We said the laptop remains unchanged, but from the outside the new Specter looks different from the silver-gray model HP previously sold. Although most Specters remain just silver gray, HP sent us the Special Edition, with a black and gold color scheme.
You have to love the black and gold. As far as we’re concerned, black looks good on the laptop, but we think the gold is a bit exaggerated, although there will be people who think the gold edge is a nice addition. Apart from the color, the appearance of the Specter has remained almost unchanged. The housing is still made of sturdy and beautifully finished aluminum and the large touchpad, which neatly supports all gestures in Windows 10, has also remained. The keyboard ticks fine for a laptop of this small thickness. The slightly too narrow opening, which makes it difficult to open the screen, has unfortunately also remained
Although we have no complaints about the exterior of the Spectre, we expected to find a USB-C connection on the new Spectre, but it turned out not to be present. In the meantime, HP has adjusted the product pages on which the USB-C connection was stated, so the new Specter, just like the old one, simply has three USB 3.0 connections, HDMI, mini displayport and an SD card reader.
The latest change on the outside is the mention of audio brand Bang & Olufsen, just above the delete key. HP supplied its laptops with Beats audio for a time, but announced a partnership with B&O in March 2015 . The result of that collaboration is limited to the supplied equalizer software and of course the mention of the audio brand on the outside of the laptop. We have of course opened the laptop, but found the same speakers on the inside as with the previous Specter x360 we tested.
Skylake: the benchmarks
HP’s Specter x360 is available with a Core i5-6200U or an i7-6500U processor, referred to by Intel as U-series processors. The i7 has a higher clock speed and 4MB cache, compared to 3MB for the Core i5. The tdp of both processors is 15 watts, but there are also U processors with a tdp of 28 watts that have an Iris GPU.
The GPU on board the i7-6500U is an HD 520, which has 24 execution units, the same number as the HD 5500 and 5600 GPUs of the Broadwell generation. With Skylake, however, the clock speed has been increased, which means that the HD520 should be faster.
benchmarking
When we compared Skylake against Haswell on the desktop , we concluded that Skylake is about seven percent faster than the Haswell architecture introduced in 2013. We did not make a comparison with Broadwell at the time, because Intel only released two Broadwell processors on the desktop, which were then followed by Skylake within two months. However, Broadwell has been available and used for longer in laptops, which allows us to make a nice comparison between the different architectures. To see how the speed of the processors has evolved over the years, we also include laptops with Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Haswell refresh processors in the comparison.
Skylake’s gains are apparent in Cinebench’s multi- and OpenGL test, but when loading one core there appears to be hardly any difference with the Dell XPS 13, which has a Core i7-5500U.
Also in 3DMark, Lightroom and Handbrake, the Skylake-Spectre, as you would expect, proves to be faster than an XPS 13 with a Broadwell processor. The difference in the above benchmarks is an average of eleven percent. That’s about as much as the percentage speed gain between Haswell and Ivy Bridge, and Broadwell and Haswell.
If we translate the performance of i7 laptops in the above benchmarks into an index figure, it is nice to see how the speed of Intel processors has developed in recent years. Because we only compared one laptop per CPU and the laptops differ in terms of cooling and power management, we cannot make a one-to-one comparison, but the graph does give a good indication of the performance gain over the years.
Screen
The first generation Specter x360 shipped with screen resolutions of 1920×1080 and 2560×1440 pixels on a 13.3″ screen. We therefore expected HP to opt for at least the 2560×1440 screen of the special edition of the new Specter, but that turned out not to be the case. We just found a full-HD panel in the new x360. That is not a very strange choice, because a somewhat lower resolution requires less of the backlight and GPU, which in turn results in a longer battery life. sacrificing battery life for a sharper image, HP sells the Specter x360 13-4190nd , with a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels and a 512GB SSD.
With the Skylake-Spectre we are dealing with exactly the same panel as with the previously tested version with Broadwell processor. The 8-bit ips panel has a glossy finish, but fortunately it is laminated, so the reflections are not too bad. The screen has an excellent contrast of just over 1000:1 and a pleasantly high maximum brightness of 400cd/m².
Battery life
The above benchmarks have already shown that Skylake is faster than Broadwell, but is the new architecture just as economical or perhaps more economical? We ran three battery tests to see how efficient Skylake is with energy. Like almost all parts, the battery has also remained the same compared to the first-generation Specter x360. To make a fair comparison, we retested our Broadwell Specter with Windows 10.
During browsing, Skylake does not appear to be more economical and this Specter has approximately the same battery life as the Broadwell Specter with Windows 10. It is striking that the combination of ‘old’ hardware and software, namely the Broadwell Specter with Windows 8.1, the longest-lasting.
While watching 1080p video, the difference is not great either, but if we load the laptops even more heavily with PCMark, Skylake appears to last longer on a battery charge. This is not only because an i7 processor completes a task faster than an i5 processor and therefore enters energy-saving mode earlier, but because the PCMark score is also higher with Skylake.
Conclusion
HP’s Specter x360 is the first laptop with Skylake-U that we tested and, except for that processor, does not differ from the Broadwell-Spectre. We can actually take over the pros and cons of the Broadwell-Spectre; the battery life is still fine, just like the screen and the sturdy, beautifully finished housing.
Skylake then yields no significant changes. The i7-6500U is about 11 percent faster in our benchmarks than an i7-5500U in an XPS 13, which is an expected speed improvement. The battery life does not improve, except under a load that is somewhat heavier than browsing or watching video. So Skylake won’t make sure we put all our Broadwell laptops on Supply & Demand and switch to Skylake in a hurry, but if you’re planning to buy an ultrabook soon, the speed of Intel’s new architecture is a nice bonus .