HP Spectre x360 15t Review: A 4 Pound Convertible Beauty

Although ultrabooks don’t have the gaming muscle you can find in larger laptops, they’re usually capable of light gaming duties. We fired up some well-known 3D benchmarks to see how the Spectre x360 handles them.

Cinebench R11.5 3D Rendering on the CPU and GPU

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software, this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We ran the full CPU test, which uses all available cores, as well as the graphics-oriented benchmark.


The Spectre x360 proved to be tough competition for the Yoga 900 in this test, offering a slightly better OpenGL score. Still, the Core i7-65000U put the Yoga 900 ahead in the CPU test. Nothing could touch the Dell XPS 15 though, due to that machine's true, quad-core processor and discrete NVIDIA graphics.

3DMark Cloud Gate Synthetic DirectX Gaming and Graphics Testing

The 3DMark suite breaks its tests down by computer type. Fire Strike, for example, is aimed at high-end gaming desktops. Cloud Gate, on the other hand, is designed for mainstream notebooks. As with all 3DMark tests the GPU plays a large role in the results, which are measured in points. Higher is better.


The Spectre x360 shows that the Intel HD Graphics 520 is a nice step up over previous-gen integrated solutions, but no match for mid-level discrete GPUs like the GTX 960. The system couldn’t match the Lenovo Yoga 900, with its higher-end processor either.

Far Cry 2 DX10 Gaming Performance

When it comes to lush vegetation in a steaming, sinister jungle, no one pulls it off quite like Ubisoft does in its Far Cry series. Far Cry 2 uses high-quality textures, complex shaders, and dynamic lighting to create a realistic environment. The game’s built-in benchmark gives us a good look at a system’s performance with DirectX 10.


With a very playable framerate in Far Cry 2, the HP Spectre x360 showed that it’s perfectly capable of handling casual gaming, especially the Core i7-powered model.