2024 HP Spectre x360 16" REVIEW - DOES BIGGER MEAN BETTER?

about a month ago I did my review of the HP Spectre X 360 a 14-in 2in1 convertible that took the World by storm it's probably one of the best laptops I've used to date here for 2024 and by far the best meteor Lake laptop that I've been using so that is saying a lot here well I always had my eye on its bigger sibling the 16-in version of the X X360 and I got to tell you I've been using it for the past few weeks and I have my conclusions here now it's not going to all be great although I think the overall takeaway is it's a really nice twoin one but for some reason the performance didn't match up to that of the 14in which doesn't have a discret GPU by the way this one does and we're going to get into the numbers here and why I think it's still a good 2001 convertible I think there was some performance left on the table that maybe can be upgraded via firmware and biosoft update to make it even better we're going to get into that and more in this review hey everybody this is Andrew and this is my review of the HP Spectre X 360 the 16-in 2in1 convertible brand new for 2024 coming up now before we get to the unit itself I just want to let everyone know in the interest of transparency and full disclosure I'm not being paid by HP I'm not being sponsored by HP all the opinions you're about to hear are my own HP is not getting copy approval that means they're seeing this video for the first time just like you now this unit is on loan from HP and once this review is done I'll be sending it back now you can pick this up over at Best Buy for $21.99 that Nets you the core Ultra 7 processor 32 GB of RAM Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 discret GPU in the Nightfall black color and that gorgeous 2.8k OED display now if you head on over to a hp's website it comes in at $22.99 and that one gets you 2 terab of storage as opposed to the 1 tbyte but this comes in 16 GB of RAM as opposed to the 32 so I will leave links for everything in the description below if you're interested in of course this is one of the better twoin one convertibles out there although there are some issues here we're going to get into it now without further Ado you know the drill folks let's get this out of the box hope I didn't cut myself this is a sharp knife okay so we got some pretty nice packaging once again says HP there Spectre branding on the side sides couple of sides there okay so it looks pretty good right off the bat we get our pen I think it's going to be the same pen that we saw on the 14-in one here it's the same pen I don't think it's any different than the 14in here's the extra pen tips I do appreciate that I do like that touch there well now a little disappointing news when we found out that Best Buy model on that 14-in didn't come with the pen or any of the dongles so I was a little disappointed in that let's take a look at the charger this is what I'm always curious about and it's a USBC charger so it's one of the larger ones and it's 140 Watts 140 W USBC charger not too bad it does have a little bit of heft and again I do appreciate that it is USB typee C so uh much appreciated in that regard and then of course you get your power cord here got some documentation here it should be some warranty information maybe a setup guide and so forth yeah it gives you a diagram and so forth so uh you know standard stuff here and then of course the unit itself well look here we got the slate blue which I'm very happy about does have a little bit of heft in fact we should probably do a measurement before we open up anything with just the unit alone 1. n94 kg or 4 lb 6.3 oz so it's got a little bit of heft here but it is packing a punch a little punch under the hood so power cord here power charger you're looking at 2507 kg or that's 5 lb 8.5 oz so it's a little bit of weight to take with you on the go there's no doubt about it looks gorgeous okay let's check out the port selection in the gem cut corner is a 3.5 mm microphone headphone combo Jack next to that is a USB type a port good to see a legacy Port now moving over to the right side is a USB type-c Thunderbolt four port that is full function next to that is an HDMI 2.1 Port something you don't get on the 14-in model by the way and in that corner is a second USB type-c Thunderbolt full port I would say it's a okay Port selection one thing missing here is the no SD card slot I would like to see that on a 16-inch laptop especially when you're going to do content creation so you don't get it here that's a bit disappointing now HP makes it pretty easy to get inside this laptop just remove the four T5 torque screws pop off the bottom plate with a spudger or Pride tool or even a guitar pick and once you do that you're in now you'll notice the two fans for cooling we'll get into the thermal performance later on in this review and you'll notice that 83w hour battery will get into the battery life later on in this review as well and like most laptops in 2024 the ram is soldered into the motherboard not upgradeable by the user I'm not a big fan of that as you know but the Silver Lining is because it is soldered in it can run at a faster rate and the good news is as you can see here it's running at 7467 megahertz that is pretty fast and that's faster than you'd get if you had sodum slots here so that is the Silver Lining at least I still prefer to have upgradable Ram but if we're not going to have upgradable Ram at least give us just a faster RAM and that's what we have here but the SSD is user upgradeable and as you can see really good reads and wrs although the RS could be a little faster for a pcie Gen 4 although certainly fast enough for what you need this laptop to do there's no doubt about it now when it comes to the wireless something a little bit disappointing here we're not getting Wi-Fi 7 like we saw on the HP Spectre X360 14-in version here it's Wi-Fi 6E and it's also paired with a Bluetooth 5.3 Wireless card it is upgradeable by the user it's slotted in but not having Wi-Fi 7 means it's not as future proof as I'd like it the good news is because it is slotted in you could add it in yourself later on so that I guess is a silver lining but overall I'd like to see Wi-Fi 7 right off the bat right out of the box now when it comes to the display there are two options IPS with the 2.5k resolution and we have the OED display that's the one we have here let's talk about it right now it's a 2.8k old LED display 16 in 2880 by 1800 that's the same resolution as its 14-in counterpart that we looked at it's still gorgeous here although you do get a little bit more screen real estate and it does have the multi-touch enabled edge to edge glass microedge low blue light filter and it is an HDR 500 display so so far looking really good although it is an OLED display and you might see the screen door effect if you looked really really close you might see it although not an issue for me this is a stunning display all said and done and as you get with an OLED display the really deep blacks the super vibrant colors the really high contrast it's all there excellent coverage here of the color gamut this is a very color accurate display so if you're going to do content Creation in Lightroom Photoshop video editing D Vinci resolve Premiere Pro this is an excellent panel for those tasks and when it comes to pwm or screen flickering really not an issue below 20% you might notice it wasn't much of an issue for me and since this is a multi-touch enabled display navigating the OS with your finger pinch to zoom all worked very well and having that high refresh rate here 120 HZ makes it even smoother even more fluid experience than before so I think it's really great that you went with a high-res display here as with the 14-in you get it here on the 16in as well now use with the pen in tablet mode or the stand mode or even in the laptop mode has been fine the pressure sensitivity was good taking notes sketching on artwork it all worked well even I was ble to use this outdoors although in direct sunlight you might have some issues it is a glossy display not terrible but just something to keep in mind but it's bright enough for indoor use that's for certain getting over 400 nits of brightness so I think the overall takeaway is this is an excellent display and since it's an HDR display watching High dynamic range content has been excellent as well good job overall and if you do get this I do recommend going with this higher-end OED display so this is the HP enhanced camera here the 9 megapixel front-facing camera here that is capable of what you're seeing here 2160p or 4K video now to get inside this you go to the my HP app go to the video control you have the auto framing you could do the portrait or the obviously if it keeps you always in frame if I go back here there it goes um you can do the tight shot a little bit more closer or the standard wide shot is what you have here it's the HP wide view uh you can also do gallery view if you have more than one person now you also have the enhancements the backlight adjustment the low light adjustment the natural tone the eye contact and the appearance filters and then of course you have the background blur which is what you see here then the office you could do the another office here Cafe living room Outdoors uh a lot of features here you could also put your own so a lot of things you can do at your users fingertips and I think HP does a really good job and of course with the windows app I think you're capped out at uh 2K resolution or 1440p but this you can go up to the full 4K so let me know what you think about it in the comment section below I think they did a pretty good job here so the npu as you can see as I'm using these AI effects or The Studio Effects it's actually working okay let's talk performance and as you can see both the single and multi-core performance is very similar to the 14-in version we took a look at and it's running the same exact CPU the core Ultra 7 155h so very similar results although slightly better on the 14in as you notice here the other thing you'll notice if we look at the cinebench R23 single and multicore performance here the 14inch actually had a better multicore performance than this one this one did 10,553 that one did 12,681 so I think there's some performance left on the table here I think they've tempered the performance a little too much on the 16-in version now where you are going to see an improvement is in the graphics since this does have a discret GPU the rtx4 50 from Nvidia and as you can see the fire strike score is better the time spy score is better than the arc graphics which are good in their own right for an integrated solution but having a discret GPU certainly has its Advantage now when we look at it against some of the other 16-inch laptops in this category it didn't do that great in terms of the single core score that score of 2370 was on the bottom of the list and when we look at something like the XPS 16 that I just took a look at that did better in the single core performance and then if we look at the multi-core performance against some of the other 16-inch laptops yes it did okay better than last year's D xps15 better than the MacBook air5 but not much better or not better than the others in this category so when we looked at the open CL GPU score with the RTX 4050 here 73,000 is not nothing to sneeze at almost 74,000 but not quite as good as what we saw in the XPS 16 certainly not as good as the XPS 17 and that leads the category now when I ran the cinebench 2020 24 single core score here it got a score of 104 which again was the bottom of the list here and that was a little concerning again in line with other meteor Lake processors but then when we look at the multicore here it got a 701 less than what I got on the Dell XPS 16 that I just reviewed again that's running the same CPU but has a better GPU for those wondering again this one did 701 that one did 755 so you're getting the drift here and to illustrate the difference between the 14in and the 16 in version when it comes to the CPU score notice the 104 score on this one versus the 103 that's a single core again very similar to what we saw on the 14in there's no big difference here and then when it comes to the multicore that's where the 14-in actually did a little bit better than this one 749 to 701 so very interesting result here I was expecting to see better performance out of this I think they've tempered down the performance to keep it cool and quiet we'll talk about that so as you can see from these numbers between the 14in and the 16in the 14in actually pound-for-pound does better than the 16in for the most part now don't get me wrong the performance is still very good and when you're looking in real world everyday tasks this did very well in Microsoft Office email webbrowsing Snappy fluid no hiccups no slowdowns it did very well and when it comes to something for practical use like video editing in denture res alvo Premiere Pro it did very well so I rendered a 3-minute for K video indiv Vinci resolve it took a minute 15 seconds to render that video scrubbing through the timeline there was no hiccups no delays everything smooth and fluid all very good now to put it into perspective it took the Dell xps1 16 with its RTX 47 discret GPU 53 seconds to render that same video so you're going from 115 to 53 between the two so this has held its own it did very good in terms of video editing now with that 4050 GPU I wouldn't call this a Powerhouse gaming but if you lower some of the settings you can get playable frame rates on some of the more popular titles just be careful with the settings and go from there but 4050 certainly is a bump up over the Intel arc graphics again the discret GPU is certainly helpful here but it's not going to be as powerful as the 4070 we saw on the XPS 16 and good news when it comes to Thermal throttling when I ran the time spy stress test it got a passing score of 98% meaning it detected very little if any thermal throttling underload that's really good now when it comes to the surface temperatures underload never getting overly hot for the most part although there was a hot spot by the JK and L keys on the keyboard reaching around 43 44° Cel nothing overly hot but it did get a little bit warm to the touch there and on the underside underload reaching as high as 47° c not enough to burn your skin but definitely something to feel warm there and as far as fan noise is concerned also good news here never going above say 43 44 DB under maximum load when you're in the balance mode doing everyday tasks the fans were not an issue at all okay let's talk about battery life it's good not great when you compare it to the 14in which did a little bit better little bit surprising here this did 10 hours and 44 minutes on the PC Mark 10 modern office test that did 13 hours and 24 minutes 9 hours and 27 minutes versus 14 hours and 54 minutes so I think it did a little bit better obviously on the 14in this 16in even though this one has an 83w hour battery versus the 68w hour battery of the 14in so that's pretty interesting running the same display at the 120 HZ so if you run it at a lower refresh rate you'll definitely get more battery life now when you compare it to say something like the XPS 16 9640 that I just reviewed this also fell short in that area that has a 99.5 wat hour battery this has an 83w hour battery that also runs at 90 HZ maximum this at 120 so you can see the difference here not quite as good as that XPS 16 which had really excellent battery life overall now I would expect even more battery life out of the IPS version with that QHD plus resolution because OLED tends to use more battery than IPS in general so I would expect a few more a couple of more hours maybe than what we're getting here although this isn't bad for an OLED display just keep that in mind okay for those wondering yes you can open the lid with one finger which is not something you normally do on a two in-one convertible that means the hinges are on really nice and tight and the other thing I noticed very little screen wobble when typing another pet peeve of mine and we normally see a lot of screen wobble on a 2inone convertible not the case here so all good on that front now let's talk keyboard I loved it on the 14 I love it here on the 16 the key travel the tactility the overall feedback is very good typing out long documents emails and the like is very comfortable it has a multi-stage backlight that allows you to get worked done in a dark room or a dimly lit environment that worked well and just like the 14-in version this has a haptic touchpad but this one is humongous folks very spacious and I thought scrolling and doing all the gestures worked very well I thought the tactility was very good I thought the responsiveness was very good the feedback in terms of the haptics are very good overall an excellent touchpad as far as I'm concerned especially with the haptic touchpad I thought it worked out really well and just like the 14-in version you can do the gesture controls that's within the my HP app you can control the brightness the volume those worked well now when it comes to the audio I think it's really good you got quad speakers here you got dtsx Ultra audio you've got HP audio boost now I'm going to compare it to the 14-in here let's see what you think about it let me know in the comment section below which one sounds better I think this sounds actually pretty good although the 14 certainly holds its own you let me know what you think in the comment section below now let's get give them a [Music] listen hello honey how you been I was been such a long time I can feel my heart [Music] jumping are you still mind no one never Mar know but I come close [Music] down hello honey how you been been such a long time I can feel my heart jumping are you still mine no one never made know okay let's bring it all home what do I think about the HP Spectre X360 16in 2in1 convertible here in 2024 I like its amazing 16-in 2.8k OED display variable refresh rate up to 120 htz really good I like the RTX 4050 option here that's giving you a little bit more Graphics boost I like the fact that you can get this up to a 32 GB of RAM although it is soldered HP wide vision 9 megapixel camera is really good it's got a camera shutter you got pretty decent battery life here although not the best when it comes to the 14in I think the 14-in outpaces that and it also is outpaced by the XPS 16 we just looked at it now has an mpu like other meteor Lake laptops that certainly helps out with the AI effects and The Studio Effects we saw at the camera it's got quad speakers were actually pretty powerful pretty good in its own right and the faster Ram now that it is soldered into the motherboard and speaking of the ram it's now soldered into the motherboard that means the user can't upgrade it down the road I don't like that and HP I think left some performance on the table especially when you compare it to other meteor Lake laptops we've seen it didn't do quite as well I think they tempered the performance a little too much maybe a firmware and bios update can fix that but right now it lags a little bit behind in terms of performance and it has a glossy display of course you'll notice the glare and Reflections depending on your lighting conditions and I'm not crazy about the fact that you do not get an SD card reader especially with a 16-in convertible laptop especially when you want to do content creation but those are the negatives and I don't think any of them are deal breakers but I think you need to go in with your eyes wide open with this I think it's a really good laptop it's a good twoin one convertible especially if you want a 16-in laptop with more screen real estate but my favorite is still that 14-in version which to me is one of the best laptops I've used to date especially here in 2024 it's the best meteor Lake laptop I think so far so let me know what you think in the comment section below but you can't go wrong if you want a 2in One 16-inch convertible this might be your ticket as well so please hit the like button please subscribe please share this video don't forget to leave a comment in that comment section below let me know how I'm doing let me know if there's a device or something out there you think I should review I'll do my best to try to make that happen don't forget to follow me on Instagram Facebook and X the platform formerly known as Twitter and don't forget to check out my website AMD Tech reviews.com so until next time this is Andrew and I'll see you in the next [Applause] [Music] [Applause] video

Channel: Andrew Marc David

Views: 26,170

Keywords: hp spectre x360, HP Spectre x360 14 (2024), 2024 HP Spectre x360, Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, hp spectre, hp, HP Spectre x360 16 Review, hp spectre x360 16

Id: wiV_8D8gh-E

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024