HP Spectre x360

Been a light day on my x360 today, but I got roughly 9.5 hours of light usage. Charged it to 100%, spent last hour on youtube, and expected 8 hours left. Not bad for an i7. As stated earlier post of mine, battery is good 8-9 hours, except when I throw some heavy use. Even then I sit at 5-7 hours, but that's not an entire work day. So hope skylark i5 will net me 10 hours, and at least 8 hours of a few heavy application time throughout the day. Tomarrow is my expected shipment for round 2 of the skylark attempt.. Hope it works, as re-setting up a new laptop takes forever (yes I'm looking at you Microsoft office and autocad)

 

Do you work on 125% or 150%?

 

Any opinions on whether I should go for the QHD or the Full HD screen? Just about to pull the trigger.

 

I love 3k for the added real estate. But on a 13", you can change windows scaling on 1080p to give you that added realestate. And the brightness and colar accuracy on the 1080p is great, not sure on 3k version. I do know that you "should" get at least 2 hours better battery on 1080p vs 3k. And its cheaper.

 

Depends, Most times its 100% with text/icons at 125%, sometimes I'll switch it to 125/125. I'm used to 3k windows 7 on my lenovos that I use all day everyday. So, 1080p at 'normal' is way to freak'n big and doesn't show enough for me.

 

Hmm - sounds like the FHD will be better for me, and probably easier for the machine to drive- shame its with the i5 and only 256 SSD rather than i7 and 512.
Thanks.

 

If battery life is a concern, I would stay away from Chrome. While it has gotten better starting with version 43, it is known to be a battery hog.

 

I am very pleased with FHD on my Spectre x360. Photoshop works well and looks great, and I am not bothered by any problems with pixilation. The extra battery life is a real bonus.

 

Performance difference a lot bigger than many were expecting. This review contains first laptop skylake benchmarks I have seen from final retail devise. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2992...-skylake-speed-and-a-spectacular-display.html
Huge increase in 3D with a thousand point jump on 3D mark and also substantial jump in processor performance.
I have a grey/copper skylake Spectre on pre order and these benchmarks just made the wait for it even more unbearable!

 

Exciting! It's a beautiful looking machine. Where have you preordered from? I'm in Canada and haven't found anyone accepting preorders yet. I've read that it should be available November 8th... but I'm stalking websites while I wait!

 

I am in UK and pre-ordered from very.com. They say 28th October for my i5 model but they say the i7 is in stock already. Can't wait, the colour just looks amazing

 

I've had my i5 6200u version for 2 days now. Haven't noticed any difference in power, but also haven't done anything heavy yet. I have noticed, that battery life on the i5 is about 5-6 hours, where my i7 5500u would give me 8-9 hours?????? Same exact settings, same exact usage? Thought that by day 2 all background crap would've been done, but I'll give it another day and hope for the best. Sad that more unefficient and powerful chip gives better battery.

 

With wich screen? And Both the same?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Yea sorry about that. Both 1080p, I was going for battery life with switch from i7 to i5, and keeping at 1080p for that as well.

I'll post back end of day with next battery rundown time.

 

Does skylake has a better HD graphics than the intel 5500?

 

Yes, a lot better:
Edit: for ref, gt 840m scores about 5300

 

Wow, with these results, I'm sadly depressed I went with the i5 6200u. I 'was' going for battery life, but as it stands now i7 5500u is beating my i5 6200u. Wonder what the i7 vs i5 skylark differences are.

 

Well, if the 5500u has better battery life than 6200u I'm guessing the gap against 5200u would be even greater. I'm guessing CPU performance of Broadwell vs Skylake is actually on par, while GPU has significant gains as posted above. It would then be worth going for Skylake if the extra GPU performance really matters but if this battery trade-off is real then very slim performance/watt gains.

 

I am looking into the i7/8GB/512GBHD with QHD display primarily for photo editing. I am concerned about only 8GB of RAM though and that it's not something I can upgrade at a later date, as well as the fact that it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card.

Does anyone have experience to share? How does it perform with large photo files with lots of layers, batch processing large numbers of file etc.? I am currently running Photoshop CS5 but will likely update to CC when I get a new computer. Photo files are ~25 Mb.

Also has anyone had any difficulty calibrating the QHD monitor? Anything to watch out for? I use a Datacolor Spyder5 now.

Thanks so much in advance! I've spent the last few days reading this thread and this seems like a great community.

 

I use my thinkpad w550s for photo editing, 3k screen with color calibrate thing built in. As for doing it myself, I havent on any computer.
Thinkpad has 32gb but barely ever uses more than 4gb, so 8gb on the spectre would be fine.
For crunching pictures, idk. 25mb sounds like your using raw, I'm sure spectre would do it just fine, just not as quick as something with a quad core. With pictures its only the length of time it'll take. With editing video (especially 3-4k with high bit rate) that you have to worry about. If your cpu/gpu cant render fast enough, you end up with glitch final movie. Fast/slow, screen blinks, etc.

 

To follow up with the 1080p i5 6200u battery life. I just got 4.5 hours of 50% brightness, one note, groove music (locally saved music), mail app, 2 browsers, and team viewer session 1/2 the time.

Something I would've gotten 7-8 hours with the i7-5500u version.

 

I know you're puzzled but after a few months of ownership it doesn't surprise me too much. While it's true that I run Chrome with lots of tabs -- thanks to some good advice I'm now running The Great Suspender which caches the bulk of my tabs. Even so I'm still hovering around 6:30 for my daily battery estimates (I use the built-in Windows powercfg utility to check). I'm convinced at this point that I'm just not going to see 7-8 (let alone 9) hours per charge. Oh, and I'm down now to something like 30% brightness on the screen.

Assuming we can chalk it up to intrinsic variation in the hardware process, it kinda makes sense. I'd say that's what explains the unexpected better battery life on your older i7 vs. the newer i5.

-Matt

 

There should not be any reason that i5-5200U would be more power efficient than i5-6200U (or same with i7 versions). I assume there are some background tasks running and thus keeping the CPU at work. Did you have the same systems on both machines? There may be some issues with Win10.

 

Same settings I use on all my laptops. Its been like 4 days now, and indexing is also off. I'm now at 0% brightness, with only web browsing max 3 tabs at a time, and mail open. Esitmated 5.5 hours of runtime. I'm using battery bar (which has always been pretty accurate)

I do for whatever reason keep getting a system time error. I noticed yesterday that time was right, but date was for the next day. Un slide the auto set time/date bar (after checking time zones etc) and switched date out for the correct date. But before and after that the system time error comes up, in the message notification section, and if/when I try and download apps.

 

Maybe your skylake laptop have one defect battery because its absolutely impossible to have less battery with the skylake cpu. You should contact hp and ask to change it.


Envoyé de mon iPad en utilisant Tapatalk

 

I'm going to order a skylake spectre soon, but I need some thoughts from people who own one.

I currently own a 1366x768 16-inch laptop (and my desktop monitor is 1400x900 17 inch), and I can't go much smaller than that in terms of proportions because my eyes are pretty bad. I'm very iffy about 125/150% scaling on the FHD because blurry pixels of any kind really, really bother me and I notice that a lot of high-res laptop screens nowadays are either too dense or have blurry pixels. Would it be a viable option to go for the QHD and scale 200% to treat it as a 1280x720? I won't mind the lower battery life, since I only need 6 hours to get through a day of use.

BTW, I'm thinking of the B&O edition, which is $1300 for i7-6600U/8GB/256GB/QHD. If I counted it right, does that mean the coloring costs $50 (as opposed to the silver variant at ~$1250)?

 

I ran HP's battery checker/scanner thing, then it asked to run again with charger, so ran home and got charger. Then re-ran, to which everything came back battery is good. Got another roughly 4.5 hour runtime, except laptop was almost idle the whole time. Brightness at 0%, and only mail app open, with a handful of reply's thrown in there. Something is definitely amiss here.

 

with a screen so small, I don't honestly think 3k vs 1080p will make much of a difference when your scaling that high. I do know that brightness on the 1080p version (according to several reviews) is brighter than the 3k. But either way, difference will be negligible. I do really like the new color option, and I think its like a $70 difference on the low end, but builds up to $200 premium on the i7 3k 512gb version. In my eyes, still worth it. The grey is definitely a better performance/$, but even with the premium for the ash, the price is still comparable with other laptops/ultrabooks of similar specs.

 

I almost bought the 360 a few months back but held off to see what the new Surface brought. I have owned all surface models and am annoyed at the sudden Apple style price hikes the new one got. Soon as I payed eyes on that new Ash and Copper colour along with Skylake I pre ordered immediately. I went for 1080p i5 256gb for £799 which is a much better deal than other premium ultras. I can't wait to get it and give it a full test out. The colour alone gives me goosebumps

 

Thanks for your thoughts! I do shoot RAW as you thought. My current laptop (5years old) has 8 GB RAM and handles my files... and I'm sure the read/write speeds of the SSD will help too! I just get a little antsy about future proofing when a component can't be updated later.

Now I'm just waiting for the skylake models to get to Canada.

 

Regarding scaling and eyesighnt - I would probably choose some QHD+ laptop (3200 x 1800) at 200 % or the QHD at 200 % (if it doesnt bother you to have only 720pixels vertically). 1080p looks pretty good with 125%. But go and see it yourself in some shops, that is better than any advise...

Low battery life with Skylake - try to run Hwinfo64 at both systems if possible. Check the battery discharge rates and CPU % at both with same settings. There will be a difference - the Skylake will probably have higher CPU % and higher battery discharge (battery drain) rate.

 

Hey everyone, my first post in here as I am now a lucky owner of a brand new Spectre x360 (upgraded from a 2012 MacBook Air.) with Skylake i7 6500U, 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. QHD screen. Also got the gorgeous ash and copper colour
The keyboard is similar yet different layout to my Mac so going to take some getting used to! (UK spec keyboard but only single height enter/ return key)
I can also confirm that battery life is definitely nowhere near 12.5 hours, although I haven't been able to test it accurately yet.
Having issues with graphics issues on Adobe Lightroom, I expect some graphics driver bugs need sorting.

 

Congratulations! It looks beautiful! Do you mind sharing what issues you're having in Lightroom? Once you get them sorted out I'd also like to hear how you resolve them!

 

Thanks Tigerlilyphoto. I have added onto the end of this forum post at Adobe detailing my issue. Basically when GPU acceleration is enabled, the develop module becomes unusable. I do not know if it is a Spectre issue or an overall 6th Gen Intel Graphics issue.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1981769

 

That definitely sounds frustrating! I hope you can get a good answer and resolve this. I'll be following your thread with Adobe. Their suggestion to disable the use of the graphics processor sounds curious to me...

 

What is the model id and where was this price from?
If its the 4108na its £899 on HP....or have they added a £100 recently?!

 

Hello! I too have the same model you have (purchased from Best Buy). I had gone through several Broadwell x360's before returning the last one and getting the skylake model. The Ash Silver, really is amazing in all of it's various color moods as I call it.

The problem you have, sounds like the problem I had when I decided to try Fire Fox after a user on the HP forum, told me he was getting 9 hours on his Broadwell x360. After installing and setting up FF, it began crashing once or twice per hour. The screen would go black with a thick white bar and the message would say that the Intel Display driver (or something like that), has stopped working. I was told to turn off Use Hardware Acceleration in FF and that did work but I decided to go back to the battery thirsty Chrome.

 

I've had the Ash Silver for about a week now and I can't say enough, just how amazing it looks. It is the most beautiful looking laptop I have seen in a long while. I can't think of anything that looks as nice right now. Keep in mind that the pictures online are not what it really looks like. The color of the body, depends on what type of lighting is shining down on it at any given moment. In my bright bathroom lights, it looks like an almost champagne color. The copper, often looks like gold to me. Either way, this machine is a work of art. I've never had so many people, ask me about a laptop before.

 

How is the new model for fan noise?

 

Fan noise seems to be about the same to me as the Broadwell i7 x360's that I had. So far, the skylake CPU doesn't seem to perform any better than the Broadwell. This unit, looks exactly like the older unit other than the colors (keyboard and touch pad are black on the Ash Silver). Even the Wireless card is the exact same Intel 7265 model as in the older units. Aside from the CPU and Intel 520 graphics, I really don't think much else is different on the inside. I had several x360's over a 2 month period and now this skylake for a week, installing all of the same apps (Office 2013, etc.) and all seems to be exactly the same (aside from the possibility that moving large files, does seem to be a bit faster). Battery life, does not seem to be much better and I have tested it several times now from 100% down to auto shutdown at 7%.

 

Having not owned any 360's before can you tell me how is the fan noise in general on these laptops? Thanks

 

I don't know what you own currently, but if it is a normal what I call standard laptop (15 inch, plastic, DVD drive, 35-45W CPU) then you will dramatically notice how much less heat and noise come out of the 15W parts of these processors.)
I came from a 2012 MacBook Air with a 15W TDP CPU and the fan noise on the new Spectre may be a tad noisier but not by much. So I will say negligible.

I don't know what you plan on doing with the laptop, but general web browsing will not cut the fan in or if it does, on its slower settings. Only if you do very substantial stuff does it get louder, but even then they aren't that loud.

The weird issue I have been having is the date keeps jumping ahead a few days. Mine today (22nd October) said it was in the furture on the 30th! I think it might be something to do with Windows Fast Boot, but not sure...

For Reference I own a new Ash/Copper x360 model 4109na with Core i7 6500U and 512GB SSD.

 

I can try to explain but the problem is that you may be used to a different level of noise than I am used to. Here is Southern California, the weather has cooled down in the past week and so now my new x360 is being used in a cooler environment. I sit at my desk wearing a sweater now. My point is that like all of my past PC's, the fan is not kicking in much at all in this cold weather and when it does, its at one of it's lower speeds. I can hardly hear it when it's doing it's low speed thing. Now on the older x360's I had, the weather was still very hot here and the fans did start up on high speed when I'd do things like run Chrome with 8 or more tabs open, iTunes and a few other open apps running.

The high speed noise to me is loud enough to notice but it didn't bother me at all (I just had to remember to not keep sitting my phone down right there on left side where the hot air was venting). Some people have complained that their 360 made a whistling sound when the fan was in high speed mode. I think they may have had a hardware issue because I have never heard any kind of annoying whistle sound on what is now my 7th or 8th x360. Hope this helps and feel free to ask anything you'd like to know. I feel like I've been testing the x360 for 2 months now and having done so with more than half a dozen of them.

 

I was just about to post about the time jumping issue. On all of my past Broadwell i7 x360's, I never had a time jump issue. Now on this Skylake x360, I have had this problem about a dozen times in the 1 1/2 weeks I've had it. I found what could be a fix. Let me see if I can find the link to the article I read.

 

This is the video I followed to fix the time jump issue. So far so good but it's only been a day:

 

Thanks guys, i have had an Acer Aspire AS3810TG for nearly 5 years now. Had to replace the screen in that time due to it failing and the mechanical hard drive for a 512GB SSD.
Its fans are inaudible when just surfing even with many Chrome tabs open (10-15) but will kick in slowly if doing anything like using Youtube.
Currently have the intergrated GFX disabled and just using the dedicated Radeon HD4330.
Seems to be very good in general noise wise! I guess the ULV Core2Duo SU9400 CPU helps.

 

View attachment 128620 View attachment 128620 View attachment 128619 View attachment 128619

BTW' the top left corner of the device, does get pretty hot (most of all when you're charging). That's not a problem because I don't need to touch that area (the top left frame area around the tab and esc keys). My heat problem is that when the unit does get hot for a while, that heat from the top left corner expands to include the left palm rest area. So far not too bad but I really dislike when palm rests on any laptops, get too warm or hot. Also having vents on the bottom of the unit, means that I seem to almost always have a wood board under my x360 when at home or in my office. I took a standard wood clipboard and with a tool, I cleanly, removed the metal clip part. The board is a perfect fit to sit under my x360. Also it allows me to sit my x360 on my desk and slide it around as smoothly as if it were on wheels.

Believe it or not, I am giving a little bit of consideration to the Lenovo Yoga 900. Why? Because I still have a few more days in which I can go and exchange this Skylake x360. Best Buy told me yesterday, that they have 3 Yoga 900's that should be in their store, within the next day or two. The Yoga 900 that I'm looking at, costs $100.00 less than this Ash Silver Skylake. The Yoga has 16GB of RAM, rather than the 8GB the x360 has. The Yoga, has a higher res display (though not a big deal since the x360 QHD is very nice). The Yoga has the newer model Intel Wireless card. The Yoga has UBS-C, which allows for charging/powering the laptop via USB connection, along with the faster speed. The Yoga, also comes with a USB-C to HDMI cable. The Yoga, also has it's vents intergrated into the watchband hinge so no bottoms vents to ever worry about keeping clear of blockage. And a huge one for me is that the Yoga is thinner and lighter. Why this matters to me is that even though I am a fit 6'1 guy; I do not like using the x360 in tablet mode because it is a bit too bulky/heavy for that. It just does not feel comfortable to me in tablet mode. At Best Buy last night, I picked up the Yoga Pro 3 and flipped it into tablet mode and I was amazed at just how different it feels than the x360. However, I understand that the Yoga 3, uses a M CPU and is a bit thinner and lighter than the Yoga 900 which I have yet to see in-person. But going by all the specs of these units, I can see that the Yoga 900 though a bit bigger than the Yoga Pro 3, is also smaller and lighter than the x360.

Looking at all of the specs, I can only say that the x360 beats the Yoga in one department; looks. The Yoga looks okay but the Spectre (most of all in Ash Silver) is the most beautiful laptop I've ever seen. Every inch of this thing is just beautiful. Went into Starbucks yesterday and about 5 different people asked me about it and made comments. The thing just looks stunning in-person. The pics online do not do it justice.

 

I bought the new HP Spectre X360 4196dx last Friday at Best Buy.

I had asked for the 4102dx with 512 GB SSD, and QHD Video. They came back and said all they had was the4195dx with 6500U processor and Bang & Olufson speakers. Instead of silver, it's a rich charcoal gray with copper trim.

I don't notice any problems with the fan. But, small laptops do run hotter than large ones.

It's lightning fast, boots up in 4-5 seconds. I can also hear the speakers without resorting to headphones.

This thread is filled with comments on the i7/QHD version having low battery time. After all night in sleep, then playing around for about an hour, I decided to time it. It went from 76? down to 21% in 11 hours. That probably means I'll get an honest 1hrs out of it.

I run the video at 150%, that's the equivalent of 1900 x 1080 with no enlargement. When my 68 year old eyes get tired, I bump it to 200%.

I think I'm gonna like it.

 

I bought the new HP Spectre X360 4196dx last Friday at Best Buy.

I had asked for the 4102dx with 512 GB SSD, and QHD Video. They came back and said all they had was the4195dx with 6500U processor and Bang & Olufson speakers. Instead of silver, it's a rich charcoal gray with copper trim.

I don't notice any problems with the fan. But, small laptops do run hotter than large ones.

It's lightning fast, boots up in 4-5 seconds. I can also hear the speakers without resorting to headphones.

This thread is filled with comments on the i7/QHD version having low battery time. After all night in sleep, then playing around for about an hour, I decided to time it. It went from 76? down to 21% in 11 hours. That probably means I'll get an honest 1hrs out of it.

I run the video at 150%, that's the equivalent of 1900 x 1080 with no enlargement. When my 68 year old eyes get tired, I bump it to 200%.

I think I'm gonna like it.

 

I too have the 4195dx. I have tested it from 100% battery, several times now and let it run all the way down to auto hibernate @ 7% battery left. I have never got more than 9 hours on this model or the former x360. Right now I stand at about 7 1/2 to 8 hours max with brightness manually turned down to zero on HP recommended profile. bluetooth and wifi both on and in use.