I thought it might be useful to compare this HP to another similar 2-in-1 that people may also be considering, the Lenovo Yoga 6. I purchased both laptops on sale and paid $674.99 for the HP ENVY x360 2-in-1 as an open box in excellent condition, and $539.99 for the Lenovo Yoga 6. Both come with current-gen processors and integrated graphics, and both come with 8GB RAM. The HP does have a larger SSD, though at 512GB vs 256 for the Yoga 6.
The HP x360 is quite a nice little laptop. Compared to the Yoga 6, it’s a little thinner, a little lighter and has an overall slightly smaller footprint. It’s made of metal, its screen is brighter, its audio is better (despite downward-firing speakers), and I like that its keyboard has media controls and buttons to kill the webcam and mike. I also like that it has a micro-USB slot, and Thunderbolt 4. The Yoga six has none of these things.
But ultimately, I returned the HP in favor of the Lenovo Yoga 6. The main reason was performance.
While the HP x360 uses a 4-core, 8-thread 11th-gen Intel i7 w/the new Xe integrated graphics, the Yoga 6 uses the excellent AMD Ryzen 4650U Pro, a 6-core, 12-thread processor that is simply faster than Intel’s offering overall. And while Intel has been touting their new Xe graphics as going head-to-head with the NVidia MX350, the truth is that in real-world applications, and at lower TDPs than Intel’s 28W reference laptop design, that’s just not true in my testing. Perhaps in time better drivers from Intel will close the gap, but it’s certainly not the case now. In fact, in actual use, the Xe graphics couldn’t even keep up with the Radeon Vega 6 graphics in the Yoga 6. I ran a few benchmarks on these and will show just a couple of results here (see photos).
In the photo of the two laptops side by side, you can see the results of a graphics benchmark test using the game Dirt Rally on battery power (since I like to game on the go with small laptops like these, I test on battery as well as plugged in. Settings were identical for each – 1600x900, medium preset, identical options, both laptops set to their performance modes, etc. You can see that the Yoga 6 had an avg of 67.42 FPS with its Radeon Vega 6 graphics, vs 43.88 for the HP x360 with its intel Xe graphics (a 35% difference). Min and max frames were also much higher with the Yoga 6, and you can see from the test summary that over the course of the benchmarking, the HP Envy dropped thousands of frames compared to the Yoga 6. Every gaming benchmark I tested showed the Yoga 6 to consistently beat the HP ENVY x360 in frame rates.
The other two photos show results from Novabench on battery. Novabench is a quick and light benchmarking program, and I use it only to get a performance snapshot before doing more in-depth testing. While the HP Envy scored 2057 overall, the Yoga 6 scored 2405 overall, and had higher sub scores for CPU, and Disk. Interestingly, although the Envy did score slightly higher on the GPU and RAM sub scores, this did *not* translate into a real-world performance issue in use. The Yoga 6 was just a little bit faster in daily use, and significantly faster in games. It was also significantly faster to boot up – 6 seconds compared to about 12 seconds.
Again, the HP ENVY is a nice little laptop, and some people will have no issue paying more for the slightly smaller metal build, thunderbolt, brighter screen, etc. I don’t think it’s unreasonably priced (especially at the sale price) at all and would recommend it for those who understand what it can do, and what it can't. For my needs, however, I ultimately chose the Yoga 6.
Finally, I thought I might try to answer a couple questions I saw that were asked and answered incorrectly here in Best Buy’s Questions. The HP x360 does NOT have Optane memory, CPU-Z reports that the RAM *is* in dual channel mode, and the key to turn the privacy screen off and on is F1, not F2. RAM is soldered, but the SSD is replaceable.
I hope people find this information useful/helpful.