HP Spectre x360 13 (Late 2019; Ice Lake) Owner's Thread

Firstly, thank you, Ikjadoon, for taking the initiative & setting up this thread, which, among other things, allows us Spectre Ice Lake owners to vent, enthuse and gain important info about our devices.

It was here that I first learned about the dreaded "screen door" effect, though my laptop was already on its way (it arrived Dec. 29). At least I knew what to expect, so I wasn't particularly fazed, especially after experiencing myself how mild the effect is. I nonetheless toyed with the idea of returning it, but then Skylake casually dropped the bomb that the digitizer grid is apparent on the Yoga C940 as well, and so it evidently isn't a manufacturing defect, and for me it's no contest between the two, if only because the Spectre is smaller and thus more portable (and has a micro sd slot, et al). What also won me over was watching the Costa Rica 4K video on Youtube, with this laptop's display it was like being on safari- it was hard not to recoil from the snakes...

Otherwise, I'm finding this PC to be a beast that can handle just about anything better than (non gaming) devices twice its size, and am looking forward to reading the impressions of other owners.

 

Hey guys,

I noticed that when i open up 5% grey image in fullscreen mode, there is something like the left side of the screen is more brighter than the right side of screen, like this :



Is this normal? Is this what people call it vertical banding or?

Should I return this laptop? Thanks

 

What about fan noise? Last gen was horrible.

 

Apologies for the delay in following up here!

It's for heat: the other laptops are much hotter on load and somewhat warmer on idle. I wrote about it here: http://forum.tabletpcreview.com/threads/13-spectre-on-ice.75231/page-18#post-542806

Dell & Lenovo not doing anything special: it's just higher power draw + more heat -> better heavy-load benchmark scores. The CPUs & cooling systems are quite close: dual-fan, dual-heat-pipe.

The XPS 13 2-in-1 is the worst offender of Ice Lake thermals-gone-wild: the XPS 13 2-in-1 palmrest at idle is warmer than the Spectre x360 palmrest at load. Where your hands touch the laptop, the Dell is warmer at idle than the x360 at load. Crazy...

Once I uninstalled McAfee and relaxed the HP Support Assistant services, this is essentially a 100% fanless device. However, I do just webdev + Spotify + Slack + a few other applications, plus your typical cloud syncing in the background (LAN to NAS via Synology Drive, GDrive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.).

 

All these reviewers keep talking about this but none of them ever mention that you can change the laptop's stance in the HP Command Center. If you put it on Performance, yeah it runs the fans more, and they're pretty loud when they're full blast, but they only do that for a few minutes at a time, then they're quiet again for quite a while, and the performance is at least nearly on par with Dell and Lenovo.

I saw ONE review (forget where) that points out the Command Center options, and that when plugged in and on Performance Mode, the Spectre rendered a 30 minute 4K video FASTER than the XPS 2 in 1.

 

I play Grim Dawn at Intel's recommended settings for the cpu. Gameplay is smooth, and the fans perform flawlessly, turning themselves on and off as needed. Yeah, you hear them when they operate, it's their way of letting you know they exist, but they sound healthy and are never crazy loud. And the laptop itself maintains a reasonable temperature even after lengthy play. Not bad for a tiny 2-in-1.

I'm not throwing away my ROG rig, though. Cyberpunk 2077, y'know...

 

Has anyone seen or heard about availability of the sure view configuration for the late 2019 model? When it launched in fall, they said Sureview would come in January. I’ve checked every couple of weeks, and I haven’t seen it — and then I chatted with hp and the person I talked to couldn’t say if or when it would become available

 

I would not get the sureview model... a couple of reviews mentioned that even on the latest version (gen3), you see uneven lighting looking at it even slightly off-center, even with the privacy guard off. Unfortunately on the HP Canada website, you can only get sureview screens or OLED screens.

 

Has anyone noticed that gradients are not smooth on the 4k model? When I open up Microsoft Paint, for example, on the grey background you can see quite noticeable banding.

Was about to pull the trigger on this laptop but noticed this issue and... Pulled back lol

 

Are you referring to the slightly pinkish horizontal bands? I think that's just the color, my other monitor displays the same thing. Where else do you see banding?

 

Hi. Long, long time member, not active for a while. I recently picked up the "bargain" sale at $799 for the Ice Lake i7, 8GB, 512GB (Optane-ycch!) version of this for a measly $799. I was hesitant due both to the 8GB RAM and the Optane SSD. Nonetheless, I thought the price was so low and I do not have performance demands for this machine (mostly travel) and all of the oft-praised goodness of the device could be mine for a song.

As you respond - thanks! - consider: I still have 12 days to return to BB for full refund, or, am sure I could find many (perhaps one of you) who would be grateful to buy it from me for my cost.

So, my unit says the touchpad has Synaptics drivers (device mgr), but in the Windows Settings panel it says that it is a "Windows Precision Touchpad." My experience is that it is jerky, nothing like the other two recent WPD touchpads I own. It seems at least some with the late 2019 Spectre Ice Lake update devices did ship with Synaptics drivers - see this thread . I can't figure out how to correct this - update driver only produced a newer Synaptics driver - and didn't see any mention about it on this thread here or in TabletPCReview.com. May I request: can owners check and see if they also show Synaptics mouse drivers in Device Manager and, if so, any problems with responsiveness of the touchpad?

As for the Intel Optane, I have read nothing but bad news about this hybrid drive w/QLC NAND. Though Notebookcheck.net got over 1,000mb/s sequential write speeds, mine benchmarks at 300 mb/s seq. write. For about $400 more I can get a version with 16GB RAM, the TLC SSD and, presumably, the right touchpad drivers. And add another $200 on top of that, and I can get LTE. Not sure what to do. Thoughts?

 

Caches like Optane, like SSHD's, run out and when they do the very slow native speeds show up, and I've found over time it's not worth it - mostly because the OS already uses it's spare memory to build a disk cache of often used storage, and that's why RAM disks have a use but for general usage the OS takes care of it just fine.

If you need LTE then get it, I usually have a separate device that I can move between laptops, check out from work as needed for project coverage when I am traveling. I try to not incur monthly charges unless I absolutely need them, and that varies so much - laptops changing in between - that an external device I find works best for it's flexibility.

Plus if it's for on call support on a project I expect the client to provide the device and service for us rather than expect us to use personal network services - it's not secure to do that anyway - the client would want their own network service security and support to manage it.

It could help to fill out the usual laptop recommendation form - fill in what you can quickly, don't spend a lot of time on it. And then we know what you want and are looking for:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/what-should-i-buy-form-must-read-before-posting.29271/

Here's Jarrod going over a Spectre model with Optane:

HP Spectre x360 Review - Intel Optane Speed Boost?

 

Just purchased the i7, 16GB Ram, 512GB SSD, 1080p Panel, 13.3" Spectre for market price, about a week ago--around President's Day sale

Should be here by end of the month (around March 25th, HP says). We'll see if it takes that long.

It's been a while since I bought a new PC. I'm currently using a second hand Lenovo Thinkpad T440s I got last year off of Ebay for $175. Works perfectly fine for my uses, and I don't game either. It has 4th Gen i5 CPU, 12GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, 1080p with touchscreen, fingerprint reader.

Laptop Purchase History!

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It started with a Dell Inspiron 6000 1.73GHz Pentium M from 2005 (replaced within warranty to a Inspiron 6400). I then sold the Inspiron 6400 off of Craigslist to a college student. After that, I got in the netbook craze with the MSI Wind (black version)...some 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of ram, and a 1024x600 screen (the single limiting factor, IMO). Sold it to a friend for $200, 2 years later, and got an Averatec n3440 (not many reviews of this laptop online)...this was in early 2010. After that was a Surface Pro 3 with i5, 4GB Ram, I sold on Craigslist (to another happy college student) last year for $360. Would have kept it, but the fans were always on, 4GB of ram was very limiting, and I wanted something faster.

Later on around 2017, I bought a Macbook Air Early 2014 with i5, 8GB Ram for ~$250, that I gave to a family member, last year. Macbook Airs sure do keep their resale values. The one I had still goes for more than what I paid 3 years ago!

------

As you can see, I'm glad to get this new HP Spectre 13 laptop, and can't wait. I've read all the reviews I can on this and don't really use pen input much on any device (even my iPad Pro/Mini, or when I had the pen on the Surface Pro 3), so I doubt I'll be using it at all.

 

HP Spectre X360 Discord Chat (For Those Interested!)


I created a Discord chat, to make the community more active if you have direct questions to ask, and just to hang out and Chat about all things HP and Spectre!

https://discord.gg/a5wXdtG

 

New BIOS firmware ver 13 rev A came out March 9th I believe. Anyone try it yet?

I really don't want to try it first myself for fear of losing my CPU tuning with Throttlestop. It's running decent and I regularly pull 40w from it. However the notes about improved thermals make me want to try it. Currently the fans do not run enough and start far too late.

 

I just got my oled X360, is this a defect in the screen? It looks like a bubble. Also I have read about the screen matix thing but it seems excessive on mine. On a white screen I see a bunch of dots.

 

That bubble does look like a defect, I'm afraid. I would ask if it goes away by pushing on the glass, but I'm a little afraid if that would make it worse.

Gosh, I'm sorry. This is a bummer.

On the screen matrix, that's a good question. I actually don't have the OLED screen, but perhaps someone can check if it happens on white screens, too?

Ah, shucks. I don't use Throttlestop, but for normal use, the ver 13 rev A BIOS has kept my laptop cooler while the fans have stayed the same (mostly silent).

 

Still trying to find a good, reliable USB C hub/dock. I bought a $25 one, but it constantly disconnects/reconnects USB/HDMI ports when my laptop is in sleep mode. I thought maybe it was the device manager options with the device turning off to save power, or something, but it still happens. So I bought another USB C hub but this one doesn't have USB C PD passthrough charging through the hub. Haven't extensively tested it out, but given that it doesn't have Passthrough charging (so I don't have to use two TB3 ports at once), I won't be using that often.

Anyone have any ideas why this is happening?

This is the first one I got: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WPTG7NX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This is the second: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L9LZQS3/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Hi,

Just to share my experience and my fix for a new Spectre x360 aw0xxx (intel 10th gen, optane with 1tb and 16 gb)

The ultrabook was quite hot and with disastrous benchmarks results before the fix comparing to the results of the net reviewers (- 25-30% with Geekbench 4&5 and Cinebench R15&20). Of course i did the usual fixes (bios update, last windows updates and finally i full reset) without improvements (the units was quite laggy with lightroom at all HP command center profiles)

Finally i decided to repaste the cpu (with cryonaut) and voila +30% of performance & circa 1h30 of battery gain and base not quite as hot as before.



I am really disappointed with HP, they used a ton of cheap thermal paste and i am conviced now they send ONLY carrefully moded models to the reviewers to obtains the best results (vs the units for the masses)

Should anyone be interested below are the links for the procedure (AT YOUR OWN RISK of course but it was quite easy IMHO just please use the rights screwdrivers)

 

I've been having an absolute nightmare with this laptop.

Background, had an acxxxna 13inch I think it was. Was having issues transferring data from a usba drive to a usbc one when trying to move over my macrium images etc. It kept blue screening, contacted HP and they repaired it twice but still had the same issue. They have now sent me an aw0054na which was nice of them.

First one I had, seemed to be fine. Tested the usb c transfer and it was fine. Downloaded a fresh iso from microsoft and did a clean install of latest win 10. Started moving stuff over including my plex library. As I was unzipping the files, it froze up so had to hold the power button down. It never came back on, c drive was corrupted and I couldn't go anything with it, windows recovery environment couldn't do anything with it and neither could a windows PE disk.

Did a clean install again and started moving stuff over again. It would repeatedly get to a point where boot up took about 2 minutes, It would either stay on a black screen for about 2 minutes before showing me the login screen, OR it would get to the login screen in normal time but would sit there for 2 minutes spinning while it was logging in. Contacted HP and they told me to install the HP image. Wasn't really happy with that as a solution as there is no reason at all it should not work with a fresh win10 image. I tried that and it seemed to go ok except that the skype app would BSOD the device when in a call (oh btw on the fresh win 10 image I was getting BSODs left, right and centre).

HP agreed to send me another laptop (not really holding my breath as I doubt it was a hardware problem causing all these issues on a brand new laptop, a premium one supposedly at that)

I've now got the second aw0054na from HP and lo and behold, mega long boot up times. Again, copy my plex library over, unzip, reboot and now the boot up takes forever. Also the USB C ports on here are still garbage because when I read from the USBC drive plugged in to it, it disconnected itself and windows tell me it has malfunctioned. It's not the drive because I had amazon send me another one which does the same thing BUT it works perfectly fine when I use the supplied USBC to USBA adapter and plug it into the regular USB port.

How can this premium machine be such garbage? I genuinely don't understand this at all. It's absolute crap.

is anyone else or has anyone else heard of anyone having such issues with this device? I'm really stuck between a rock and a hard place now because my options seem to be

1) make do with this laptop even though it's crap ( initial £1500 + ~£210 for the support cost)
2) send this one back to them, keep the old one with faulty ports and just not use the drive in the USBC port
3) send both back and get a full refund and find something else
regarding point 3, the only device i can think of even in this ballpark is an xps13 which I went through hell with about 3 years back before I got the first spectre with them trying to fix the coil whine by sending me about 3 different machines and doing a system board replacement on one of them, they ended up saying tough titties and gave me my money back.

HP are not interested in fixing these problems either, they just offer to send a new one.

Here's a video of it booting up, at first it took about 10 seconds probably, if that. Now over a minute. Plus the fans going mental as soon as I power it on.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wb9PfHbSbOEgvuIOeE16-GAfg7c4bKdf/view?usp=sharing

£1800 laptop!! It's unfathomable.

 

Hallo,
Does anybody know what other pens are compatible with the latest HP Spectres? I bought a Ciscle Pen which supposedly supports MPP2 and tilt-support but the Microsoft Whiteboard went crazy when I tried to draw. It seemed to continously switch from zoom to pan and back.
The HP tilt pen is costly and several videos on Youtube show dissappointing results. Open for any suggestions, Tosz.

 

I have the factory supplied HP image on this laptop and as part of some troubleshooting I uninstalled some software including hp command center. I have reinstalled it and now it doesn't work. This is what I see on the system information page and the thermal profiles do not work. I only have 3 and not 4. I partitioned the drive and installed a fresh copy of windows 10 from microsoft and followed the same steps to install this software and it works perfectly fine.



Is there a service or other piece of software which is required for this to work which I may need to install? I have uninstalled and installed multiple times

 

Does anyone else have insane throttling issues with this laptop?

My i7 4kOLED 16GB 512GB (non-optane) config for the past month or so has been randomly boosting at ~3GHz then suddenly dropping to 0.39GHz basically rendering the laptop close to unusable for 15-20 seconds then it shoots back up to 3GHz then back down.

This doesn't happen when plugged in and if I set things to performance mode, but this has been a seriously debilitating problem of late.

 

Hey you have a new link?

Seems like your invite has expired

 

https://discord.gg/uEJ6yqT

 

Update: I've had my Spectre 13" (Late 2019) for a little over 2.5 months, ordered Feb 23, and it arrived April 14th, and it's been great. No heat issues, no long boot times, no errors within windows. Only issue I have (which I made a post on the last page) was with the USB Disconnect/Connect while the computer is in sleep mode and connected to a USB C Dock/Hub. I haven't been able to figure why it's doing that, but learned to mute the speakers whenever I leave my desk so I don't have to hear the sounds. It doesn't make those sounds when just using the laptop without anything else connected.

Battery life has been great. I got the FHD/1 Watt display, no issues or dead pixels. I have a matte screen protector because I don't like glare on laptops. Colors/contrast have been good, keyboard and keys are fine--I put a silicon keyboard protector on top. It's been tough finding a good laptop sleeve, but went with this one:

The 11-12.3" size fits the 13" Spectre just fine.
https://amzn.to/2O659Gq

Keyboard cover:
https://amzn.to/3f95aoR

I put a skin on the lid and touchpad/wrist area from MightySkins so that'll help with scratches and wear. I take it to work with me (using it on downtime) and it's been great!

 

I have noticed this in the past month or so, especially waking up from sleep. Haven't had time to troubleshoot (it's pretty rare; ~1-2 a month), but exactly the same issue. I reboot and it fixes itself, but it is happening.

But, yours sounds perhaps worse / more frequent. If I notice anything unusual, I'll post. I want to say it's some power management feature gone awry...

 

Spectre x360 2-in-1 13.3" 4K OLED Ultra HD Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 16GB Memory - 1TB SSD + 32GB Optane. Purchased at Best Buy at $300 off Black Friday sale on Voting day.

My old Spectre stopped charging after 5 years. Not a battery issue, bad charging unit.
I looked at a Lenova Yoga, and liked it, but the Spectre was better, and $300 off.

I don't think mine is a "Late 2019". It's not only smaller in depth, but also in width.

The screen is noticeably better than my 2015 model. The first thing I did was turn the brightness down to 70% as it was very bright. I had to look close to see the dreaded "screen door" efect. I had to really concentrate. If I concentrated on any text or graphics, it faded away. It's just not an issue for me.

I copied 90 GB of files to it, it is indeed somewhat slower than my desktop. But, in normal use, it seems a bit faster. I'll live with it for a few months, then decide whether to replace the drive with a Samsung 970 or equivalent.

I wish it had 2 USB A ports, but it gives me a reason to use a hub. I bought a USB "C" to "A" hub for my desktop, but it kept getting errors and cutting out. It works fine on the Spectre.

I deleted McAffe, and over rode the trial Microsoft Office 364 with my own Office 365. I'll spend some time deciding on the other software installed.

In one of the reviews I read, the user complained about the keyboard light turning off after 5 minutes. Sure, but it comes right back on when you touch any key. No issue.

I was very concerned about it having Windows 10 Home. The tech assured me it is not the Windows 10S version, it's not. I was able to install all my other software.

It doesn't get very hot or loud. It has a CPU App, and the default is between cool & quiet and high performance.

I'm happy with my choice. However; I probably did pay more than was needed. I only use the laptop for trips, but that sometimes means two months at a time. A much cheaper laptop would do the job, but after working 50 years, I no longer wish to settle for "good enough".

Added: I just took time to listen to some music. The truth is, I didn't know a small laptop could sound that good. I wonder how they get so much left and right separation?