HP Spectre x360 Review

The HP Spectre x360 is a thin and light 2-in-1 laptop with some nice specs and excellent battery life, in this detailed review you’ll find out everything you need to know to decide if it’s a laptop you should consider.

Starting with the specs my unit has an 8th gen Intel Whiskey Lake i7-8565U quad core CPU, 16gb of memory running in dual channel, 512gb of storage space from the Intel H10 Optane module, and 13.3” 1080p 60Hz touch screen with no discrete graphics, just the Intel UHD 620 graphics built into the CPU. There are a few different configurations available, including 4K screen for instance, you can find examples along with updated prices linked in the description. For network connectivity it’s got 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5, it’s too thin for an ethernet port so you’ll need an adapter if you want to use that. I’ve got the dark ash colour, which is sort of this brown purple colour with gold trims and accenting.

The weight is listed at 1.32kg and I found mine a little under this, then with the small 65w power brick and cables for charging the total weight rises to just under 1.6kg. It’s quite a portable machine, at just 1.47cm thick, 31cm in width and 22cm in depth. This small footprint gives us 8mm thin screen bezels on the sides, though it was thicker up the top and down the bottom, however this does still provide adequate space for the camera to remain above the display.

The webcam looks about average and the microphone sounds ok, which is a bit surprising considering it's a 1080p camera, so I guess resolution isn't everything. The keyboard has no backlighting, something I instantly missed while typing in a darker room. Otherwise I liked typing on the keyboard, the only thing I didn’t personally like was the small arrow keys. Here’s how it sounds to give you an idea of what to expect. There’s a fingerprint reader on the right hand side below the keyboard, it worked alright, though was a little slower compared to what I’m used to. There was some keyboard flex while pushing down hard, however it wasn’t too bad considering the metal build and that the machine is on the thinner side. The lid was also quite sturdy without much flex, and it the hinge mechanism felt solid.

The touchpad uses Synaptics drivers, it was very smooth to the touch and worked ok, just not as good a precision touchpad. As for the touch screen, I’ve measured colour gamut with the Spyder 5, and got 99% of sRGB, 70% of NTSC, and 76% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I measured 359 nits in the center with a 1120:1 contrast ratio, so overall well above average compared to most laptops I’ve recently covered.

Backlight bleed doesn’t look great in this photo, however I couldn’t actually notice these imperfections while viewing darker content. It comes with a pen and required AAAA battery which you can use for drawing on the screen in tablet fashion. This is further aided by the fact that the screen bends the entire way back like a tablet, making it a 2-in-1 device. When you flip the screen back Windows enters tablet mode and you can draw on the screen. I’m by no means an expert when it comes to tablets, but it seemed to work pretty well for me. On the left there’s the power button right on the back corner, then single USB 3 Type-A port.

On the right there’s a Micro SD card slot, a switch to physically disable the camera, USB Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support, 3.5mm audio combo jack, and a second USB Type-C port on the back corner, again with Thunderbolt 3 support. The speakers actually sound pretty good for a laptop, there are two located on the bottom front sides, and another two above the keyboard. At maximum volume it got surprisingly loud for a smaller machine, and the Latencymon results looked good. There’s nothing on the back, just more of that gold trim and the hinges, while the front is more of the same, just gold trim. Underneath is pretty standard, just some air intake vents towards the back and rubber feet which did a good job of preventing movement while in use. It wasn’t too difficult to open up, but you need to first take off both the front and rear rubber feet. There are four Phillips head screws under the back foot and two under the front. Once inside we’ve got the battery down the bottom, while the motherboard only gives us access to the single M.2 drive, which has our Intel H10 Optane module installed, more on that soon.

Memory is soldered to the motherboard, so make sure you get enough RAM when buying. It’s got a 61 watt hour battery, and with the screen brightness at 50% and background apps disabled, I was able to stream YouTube video for 11 hours and 41 minutes, an extremely impressive result, easily making this the best laptop I’ve ever tested in terms of battery life in this test. It also charges using the Type-C ports, and either of the two ports work for this. Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius. At idle down the bottom it was quite cool, then the other two results are just from running the Aida64 CPU stress test with just CPU only checked. In this case undervolting by -0.1v with Throttlestop lowered the temperatures a little, however thermal throttling was still taking place in both tests. These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown, we’re able to boost CPU clock speed by around 300MHz with the undervolt. While under these CPU only loads we’re also hitting the 20 watt power limit, which along with thermals was another limitation, though realistically these speeds aren’t too bad for such a thin machine.

Here’s what we’re looking at in terms of CPU performance with Cinebench. The single core clock speeds are actually pretty good, not too different from an i7 H series chip, though the multicore speeds are about half as much given this is a quad core CPU with a lower power limit.

Here’s what the fan noise sounded like while running these tests. At idle the fan wasn’t running at all, it was completely silent. Even while under full on worst case CPU load with the internals in the mid 90 degrees Celsius range it’s still fairly quiet when compared against the more powerful machines I usually test. Here’s what we’re looking at in terms of external temperatures where you’ll actually be touching. At idle it was a little warm in the center towards the back. Interestingly while under stress test it’s only getting a few degrees warmer on the keyboard, right at the back is pretty hot now but you shouldn’t be touching there anyway.

As we’ve only got Intel UHD 620 graphics we’re not expecting great gaming performance, however I was able to run some less demanding titles at 720p. Dota 2 actually still ran perfectly fine, which makes sense given it seems to depend more on CPU power than graphics, while Overwatch was sort of playable but it did feel a bit choppy even at minimum settings. As it’s got Thunderbolt 3 available technically it should be possible to attach an external GPU enclosure to improve gaming performance. Let’s talk about the storage for a bit, as this laptop is making use of Intel’s latest H10 Optane module. In the past Intel Optane was used as a cache in front of a much slower hard drive, it would store frequently accessed files on the faster Optane module to improve performance.

In my previous video on Optane, I found that it was only really going to be useful in some niche scenarios, as for the most part you could buy a cheaper and larger SSD instead.

The new H10 Optane modules combine the fast Optane memory with NAND storage, so basically a single M.2 stick which acts as both your typical SSD for storing your files, but also has a layer of Optane cache on the same piece of hardware.

You can get the module with different storage sizes, and my HP Spectre has the 32gb of cache plus 512gb of storage option, so basically think of it as a 512gb drive with some dedicated cache for storing frequently accessed files. Basically you don’t need to do anything, the system should handle this automatically, however you can manually pin specific files or programs to the Optane cache to ensure they’re faster.

I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the speed of the SSD component only before enabling the Optane cache, so this should just be the speed of the 512gb drive. Likewise I could also test the 32gb Optane memory by itself, as it before enabling it it shows up as a separate drive. Finally here are the results after enabling Optane through the Intel Optane memory and storage management software. It’s this software that lets you manage Optane, it’ll likely already be installed, for me it wasn’t and I had to grab it through the Windows store.

As for some practical differences on how this helps we’ll start off with system boot time, so the time it takes from the system to be completely powered off to logged in at the Windows desktop. In this case with Optane enabled it was booting up 9% faster, a fair improvement in terms of percentage, though only around two seconds different, not really enough to make a noticeable difference.

Otherwise I also tried opening some different games and apps but found no real difference in terms of speed, though the games in particular would be too big to really cache efficiently. For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.

At the time of recording in the US the HP Spectre x360 seems to go for under $1400 USD, however it doesn’t seem to be clear which are using Intel Optane.

So what did you think of the HP Spectre x360 13t? Overall I thought it was quite a nice machine for its purpose with good build quality. It worked well as a tablet, and despite the form factor there was decent levels of performance from the Intel i7-8565U CPU. The new Intel Optane H10 storage is a nice improvement over what Optane previously offered, however given modern SSDs already offer exceptional performance I don’t think you’ll notice too much of a speed boost practically, but hey it was still faster when compared to SSD only and I won’t say no to extra performance. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find price differences of this model with and without Optane to compare though.

As a thin and light 13 inch machine with tiny power brick it would be great for travelling with if you don’t need graphical power. Light gaming was possible, but don’t expect much from the Intel integrated graphics, however you could likely expand upon this with an external GPU enclosure as it has two Thunderbolt 3 ports. The option to charge with USB Type-C was great, and by far for me personally the most impressive factor was the near 12 hours of battery life during video playback, the best result I’ve ever gotten in this test in 100 plus laptop reviews. The speakers are able to get very loud for a smaller machine, the screen looked great and was above average. Using it in tablet mode and drawing with it worked well too.

I would have liked to have seen keyboard backlighting, as typing in a dark room wasn’t great, and this is from someone that normally uses a keyboard with blank keys. Otherwise the only other issue that comes to mind was that the fingerprint scanner seemed a little slow, though that’s not exactly the end of the world. The memory is soldered to the motherboard, but for machines this size I think we’re just going to have to start accepting that, so you’ll need to buy it with the memory configuration you need up front. Let me know what you thought about the HP Spectre x360 down in the comments.