The HP Spectre X2 is packing a 3-cell 42WHr Lithium-ion battery that's rated for up to 10 hours of battery life. The Battery Eater test is significantly more strenuous than most workloads used to come up with these ratings, however, as it stresses the CPU, GPU, memory and even the storage subsystem. It's truly a worst-case test that is meant to see how long a device will last under much heavier workloads.
 | | Battery Eater Pro Test | | Heavy-Duty Workloads, Worst-Case System Battery Test |
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In this test we set screen brightness to 50% and leave WiFi enabled while the test is running. Power is then removed from the system and in addition to the test script, we monitor the device for a final uptime score measured in minutes.
The HP Spectre X2 finished just behind the Yoga 900, which features more powerful processor, but also a much larger battery. This tests doesn't allow the processor to enter low-power states, however, which doesn't mirror the typical day-to-day computing tasks most users of a device like this are likely to put the machine through.
In our standard web browser-based test, which refreshes a site web page every few minutes with screen brightness set at 50%, the HP Spectre X2 mustered 8.7 hours of battery life. That's an impressive feat for a passively-cooled, ultralight device of this type that also doesn't pack in a very large battery.
