HP Spectre x360 (2017) Review: A Beautiful And Impressively Quiet Convertible
HP Spectre x360 (2017) Benchmarks: ATTO Disk, SunSpider, PCMark 8, and Cinebench
To get a sense of how the Spectre x360 storage components perform, we fired-up ATTO for a quick sanity check on sequential disk transfer speeds across various file sizes.
ATTO Disk Benchmark, Testing NVMe Solid State Storage
We were giddy when laptop makers started ditching mechanical hard drives in favor of solid state drives, and we're getting those same feelings as OEMs make another transition, this time to NVMe drives that utilize the PCIe bus. In this case, the 256GB NVMe SSD (Liteon CA1-8D256) hits a blazing fast read speed of just above 2.4 GB/s (2,483 MB/s), with writes approaching 1 GB/s (9,966 MB/s) at peak. So long, SATA, don't let the door hit you on the way out!
Sun Spider And Cinebench
We kicked off our general purpose benchmarks with SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark, and then ran Cinebench, a test that works both CPU and GPU engines of the processor in the machine. Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software employed in professional 3D rendering and animation. We use both of Cinebench’s integrated tests for CPU and GPU.
The Spectre x360 falls a few pegs in both Cinebench R11.5 and Cinebench R15, on the CPU portion of the test. It's not that the scores are bad by any stretch, they are just lower than might be expected. Why? This is the price for having an extremely thin and light laptop that is also exceptionally quiet. We suspected there might be some throttling going on, and a visit to the Task Manager and its CPU graph confirmed this. The cooler your environment, the longer the CPU can run full bore before dialing back the frequency to keep temps in check.
PCMark 8 Benchmarks
We selected three tests from the PCMark 8 benchmark suite: Home, Storage and Work. Futuremark recently improved all three tests with PCMark 8 version 2 that offers a nice swath of mixed-media workloads, from document editing, to video conferencing and video editing. We selected the Open CL "Accelerated" options for both the Home and Work modules, which let's the benchmark take advantage of current generation integrate CPU/GPU engines to accelerate some aspects of processing.
Things evened out a bit in PCMark 8, where the Spectre x360 was able to place near the top. Its fast PCIe SSD combined with a quad-core Core i7-8550U processor that can ramp up to 4GHz is a potent combination for productivity chores.
