The HP Spectre Folio Review: Luxurious Leather Laptop
by Brett Howse on June 7, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- HP
- Spectre
- Amber Lake
- Spectre Folio
GPU Performance
Intel’s integrated graphics architecture has been somewhat stale for the last several generations, with small tweaks, and new media blocks, but no real performance increases or efficiency gains. The Intel UHD 615 in the HP Spectre Folio is further limited by an even more restrictive TDP.
Intel has been investing heavily in GPU recently though, and hopefully their next GPU architecture will address some of these shortcomings. But today we’ll see how the UHD 615 stacks up. Some laptops, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad A285, offer integrated AMD Vega graphics, and the Huawei MateBook X Pro features a low-powered NVIDIA GPU in the MX150, with the latest Huawei bumping that to the MX250.
3DMark
UL’s 3DMark offers different tasks with varying levels of complexity. Fire Strike is the most difficult we run on our laptop workloads, then Sky Diver, Cloud Gate, and Ice Storm Unlimited, the latter of which can also be run on tablets and smartphones. With just a 5-Watt TDP, the UHD 615 just can’t compete against the higher-powered laptops in our database.
GFXBench
Our second synthetic test is the latest from Kishonti and the latest Aztec Ruins tests utilize DX12. Despite the newer API, the HP still falls in at the bottom of this list.
Dota 2
Looking at a real-world 3D game, Valve’s Dota 2 is a great test for low-end machines, since it is playable across a wide variety of hardware. It utilizes DX11 for its API, and we’ve tested it on our value settings which are 1366x768 with all of the effects disabled.
Dota 2 can be surprisingly CPU bound. This doesn’t exactly help the Spectre Folio though, since the CPU and GPU are both sharing the same 5-Watt TDP, and therefore one has to make way for the other. The result is not great framerate, although the game is still playable at 44 FPS.
Storage Performance
HP offers a wide selection of SSD options, from 256 GB all the way up to a massive 2 TB. All of the SSDs are NVMe PCIe based as well. The review unit features a Samsung PM961 based SSD which is 256 GB.
Performance is quite good, even with this being the smallest SSD available. Larger SSDs will of course bring more performance as well with the extra NAND offering more parallel channels for data access.
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peevee - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
5W for 2 cores at 1.3GHz.Apple A12 is ~5W for 2 similarly fast (in terms of IPC) cores at ~2.5GHz + 4 slow efficient cores.
10nm fiasco costed Intel a lot.
Retycint - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
Intel was never really as efficient for mobile (<5W) though, which is why their atom line failed spectacularly. ARM-based processors definitely has the advantage in the low-power fieldKorguz - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
im sure HStewart will find a way to refute this.. and bash arm based cpus some how...AshlayW - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
I like the idea of a leather covered laptop, leather feels nice to the touch for me. And it makes a nice change I think. I have an HP ENVY X360 with the Ryzen 2500U in it, and it is a really great little machine and was £649 when I bought it. I can manually set the power limit to 30W and disable the skin temperature throttling for maximum sustained performance. It is around 3.1 GHz all core in multi-thread and 3.4-3.5 GHz in single threaded. In games the GPU can boost to 800-900 MHz and easily beats any Ultrathin Intel iGPU. Also I think at stock the 2500U is heavily throttling so it explains why it gets beaten a lot by this device in the review. (yes I am aware that the whole point is that they are efficient, and yes Intel's processor is more efficient, largely helped by the fact that Intel 14nm+++ has vastly superior power and voltage characteristics to GlobalFoundries 14nmLP/P).As for 5W, in this power envelope, 10/7nm will really, really help a lot here. I think if AMD can get 7nm low power mobile chips out soon-ish, they can have a really big competitive advantage against these 14nm Intel ones. But that said, Ryzen with onboard graphics is usually an entire cycle behind the desktop CPUs without. 12nm 3000-series APU are uninteresting for me, as it is basically 10% or close to that, more performance than my 2500U at the same power use. But I heard the idle power use is vastly improved. Sorry I typed a huge comment.
ikjadoon - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
Excellent review.This laptop was one of the inspirations for Project Athena, apparently.
>Though the HP Spectre Folio wasn’t explicitly described as a Project Athena device, it’s representative of the collaboration between Intel and its PC partners.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3331244/intel-proj...
Props to the 1W display. I'd love a deep dive by Anandtech on how 1W (LPDT) panels work. IIRC, they use LTPS backplanes (a-si -> IGZO -> LTPS from worst to best), panel self-refresh, variable refresh rate, more efficient backlights, and some panel microcontroller efficiencies.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-low-...
So a lot of good technologies on their own brought together into a shipping product.
Gc - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
In 2013, the Sony Fit 13A, 14A, 15A "Flip PCs" had screens that can flip down over the keyboard.https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/sony-vaio-fli...
Spun off, Vaio continued with the Vaio Z Flip in 2016.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10006/vaio-to-start...
That model still seems to be sold in Japan.
https://vaio.com/products/z131/
Gc - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
One benefit of the flip-down screen is that it is simpler and quicker to switch between keyboard mode and pen mode for taking notes. Other convertibles require picking up the whole computer, which can disturb your neighbors in a meeting or lecture. A benefit of the leather surfaces might be to quiet any clattering as the pieces fold together.wr3zzz - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
I pre-order the Folio and have been using it as my daily work machine since. I agree with every point in this review.One thing to note is that Dell just added fans to its XPS 13 2-in-1 so it looks like the Folio could be the only premium fanless notebook with screen larger than 13" left in the market.
ramisingh - Saturday, June 15, 2019 - link
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