HP Spectre X360 Ultrabook Review: Sleek, Sexy, Convertible

Name: HP Spectre X360 Ultrabook: Sleek, Sexy, Convertible
Brand: HP

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, March 01, 2015, 02:00 PM EDT

We began our testing the Dell XPS 13 with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2015 the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Physical Disks and Memory Bandwidth).

SiSoft SANDRA 2015

System Level Synthetic Benchmark Testing

SANDRA CPU, Multimedia

Memory and Physical Disk Tests

If you look through the various SiSoft SANDRA tests we ran, you'll see that the HP Spectre X360's processor, multi-media, and memory performance are as expected. The machine's Core i5-5200U processor and dual-channel memory configuration put up numbers right in line with other Broadwell-U based systems, like the Dell XPS 13. The Samsung M.2 SSD in the X360, however, topped out at over 758MB/s. That's far better than any standard SATA-based SSD.

SunSpider

Javascript Processing Test (CPU)

The Webkit Open Source Project suggest the following about the SunSpider Javascript benchmark...

Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval).

Considering how similar they are in terms of their internal hardware, it's no surprise to see the HP Spectre X360 performing right in-line with the Dell XPS 13, which is to say it performed very well here.

Tags: Notebook, Mobile, HP, laptop, Hewlett-Packard, x360, Ultrabook, Broadwell, spectre

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com