HP Spectre x360 15" 2017 - Review & Performance Against Yoga 720

The HP Spectre x360 15" is a 2-1 laptop with digital Windows ink support via an Ntrig pen. With its long battery life and sharp looks it fits well in a business setting.
It has an i7 7500U dual core CPU, GT940mx GPU, 16 GB DDR3 2133 Mhz RAM and 512 GB SSD - Pcie NVME .
Buy on Amazon: amzn.to/2eZAA6R

[@kmorton54]

Steve this is spot on as I was looking at a 12" model of the X360 for my Daughters use at college.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Hey Keith, yes, that will be perfect for her 😊

[@mistrefi]

Dude I been waiting for your video! I saw your video on my recommendation and I had to make some dinner and watch your video 😁 Thank you and beautiful job once again!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

lol, awesome ! I often watch KZbin videos whilst eating dinner too :) Next up will be the unboxing of the Gigabyte Sabre 17 and then the full review of the Asus Zephyrus. Just bought a smoke machine to show its airflow :)

[@mistrefi]

OWNorDISOWN thank you for getting me so pumped!! Can't wait! Hope you had a wonderful weekend, you'll be hearing from me on your next video !

[@UldisZalcmanis]

Very good review. Made up my mind. It seems, since I want to do all my video editing on the laptop, Yoga 720 is a better option. Thanks for the effort!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Thanks, glad you found my reviews useful :) The Yoga 720 was and still is one of my favourites. Have you checked out Dell's XPS 15 2-1 ? I really do like that.

[@jjjose7949]

Stephen coming in clutch like usual

[@CurtisHowell]

Appreciate the review!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Thanks for watching Curtis !

[@gantenkish]

Such a great review bro, keep the best

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Deddy Haryanto Thanks, appreciate it!

[@AntonintheNetherlands]

Very nice review! Looking forward to the review of HP Zbook Studio G4.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Wang Max thanks! Yes the Zbook-studio looks pretty good. I've added it to my list 😁

[@michaelaranda5220]

A good laptop from Lenovo is the 2017 Y700 14 inch...I think your following and I rely on you to give us a honest review...so if It can suggest, sale those laptops you need to and get along. Another good review.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Thanks Michael! Yep, going to start selling them this week.. The Y700 does look interesting 😁

[@AlejandroLopez-cf5eb]

Love your reviews!!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Cheers mate!

[@LeakyBuffer]

Once I got my Spectre, I found some things that reviews generally did not seem to cover as I watched a lot of them before purchasing. 1) When you plug in headphones, the audio quality gets drastically reduced with absolutely no bass, or other EQ tuning to make the music rock-like, or cinema etc. The Bang & Olfsen software disables the EQ when something is plugged in. I had to revert the SST driver to a 'simpler' Realtek High Definition Audio driver which instantly made the headphone music full of bass and overall MUCH better sounding. There is no fix otherwise for this as the B&O software does not support headjack EQ and seems to literally zero everything out. Something to note for folks that like to listen to anything with headphones as you will notice it instantly as it sounds like your listening out of $1 ear buds regardless how expensive your headphones are. 2) Also the laptop does randomly freeze up where the mouse doesn't move from track pad input from time to time (somewhat rarely, but when it happens its super annoying) for periods of 5 seconds to over a minute with each freeze event and when this happens I notice that a lot of the time I can still navigate via the touchscreen... that part I have not been able to fix and shutting off all user programs/services does not solve it, even tried different Anti-Virus solutions so this issue seems more systemic or maybe a limit of those 2 cores. 3) When I use my business apps on it like dropbox, skype for business (IM only), OneDrive personal and business (so 2 instances), Evernote, work related web browsing (not much media), VPN, and office apps (outlook, word, excel), I can get maybe 1.5-2 hours from a full charge before it starts to get down to like 30 minutes remaining or less. To really get say 3 hours or 4 hours of use I need to kill all those apps and system tray services, lower the screen brightness etc. and go into a only watch static videos. Another aspect may be that I like to use the laptop on the bed, couch etc, so it may heat up as I typically don't use a laptop coaster which may cause the fans to ramp up and eat the battery faster. Eitherway if your a pretty solid power user, your battery life may not be anywhere near that 9+ hours they tout in the real world like what I see. This isn't a deal killer for me though as I tend to try to keep things on power cord out of habit anyway. 4) If you do things like remote desktop sessions for work etc., the 4K resolution really screws you up as everything is almost un-readably small unless your remote machine can scale appropriately which is more like an early adopter problem. 5) I also ran into an application that didn't scale at all for 4K, so it's program window was literally like 2" x 2" making it unusable. Luckily I found that editing the EXE properties and changing scaling to 'system' fixed it for me. But there may be plenty more applications like that which are not 4K ready. 6) When I first even barely started using the laptop web browsing was driving me crazy as I use two-fingers to scroll (came from a Macbook Pro), and when you touch the trackpad with two fingers it defaults to issuing a right-click event. So when your scrolling a web page you would routinely get interrupted by a right-click. It was so bad I had thoughts of returning it as I was trying to dig around the device/mouse/trackpad settings for a while, but eventually found the settings to completely disable that in the track pad software... they should try to consider changing those settings from factory - I changed the settings to where you have to physically depress the track pad to get a right-click, not barely even touch it two-finger wise with no physically forceful pressure as it conflicts with natural trackpad scrolling. But admittedly this may just be a difference in opinion for how people like that stuff to work, I know I didn't. Sorry for this massive post, but these are my real-world con's I experienced with it that, after finding fixes, allowed me to keep it and made the end user experience MUCH better. Aside from living with the sporadic freezing of the mouse pointer when using the track pad from time to time. The touch screen really is a thing of beauty and my daughter (6) uses it a ton to practice hand writing and overall just being creative with the apps that work seamlessly with the pen.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Thanks for your comprehensive summary of your real world findings. In my battery test I use the same test and settings across each laptop so I can get a god comparison, 25% brightness, power saver, battery saver , streaming youtube. CPU usage is pretty constant under that work load. It would be interesting to see what your cpu frequency is during your work load as a comparison. What screen brightness do you have yours set at ? Undervolting will probably give you about another 20 mins. I also made it a point to update the nvidia GPU driver whilst on battery. On the Razer Blade 14" I found that it helped optimus work and doubled battery times. The touchpad issue sounds very annoying, did you see if there was a Synaptic driver update? If you have a mouse plugged in does the cursor freeze then?

[@mubarakabdulghafoor4270]

There's a video on dave2d channel which explains how to get windows precision drivers on any laptop.... I think with those drivers your trackpad experience will be better

[@wholesome4028]

im not in the market for this kind of laptop but i still enjoyed the vid cuz you make great tech vids. also as one other guy suggested, it would be cool to see a review of the msi ge raider series, havnt found many videos on those ones yet

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Daniel Baldi Thanks for watching it Daniel, especially as it's not a laptop you are interested in 😁. Yes, like I said to my other viewer I have two other laptops to finish off before I go on a 2 week holiday. In the meantime I'm going to sell a bunch of stuff so I can afford more laptops!

[@wholesome4028]

OWNorDISOWN anytime and ahh, i must have saw his comment before you posted under it haha. have fun on vacation though man

[@SBGBeatbox]

Nice review! Could you review the MSI GE73VR Raider laptop sometime soon pls🤓

[@OWNORDISOWN]

I would love to mate. I have to sell some laptops first though. I have the Asus Zephyrus to finish off then a Gigabyte Sabre 17. I aim t get those done before I go away on a 2 week holiday..

[@amaarulhassan7263]

Its quite expensive but its has looks and quality

[@VernalScott]

I'm enjoying the Spectre. There are of course more powerful alternatives, but it meets my needs, plus it looks stunning!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Vernal Scott indeed, it looks really nice. They will be coming out with a quad core version soon. That will make it a very good machine 😀

[@VernalScott]

Thanks. Do we know when the quad core will be here?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Vernal Scott I think you can buy it now.. store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-spectre-x360-convertible-laptop-15t-touch-1wb97av-1?source=aw&subacctid=166580&subacctname=Slickdeals&awc=7168_1509300143_040ff59a093a666de503fe7b9524e2f2&jumpid=af_gen_nc_ns&

[@VernalScott]

It doesn't appear to be available here in the UK. Thanks though.

[@VernalScott]

Update: It is available in the UK but for a mighty £1000 more than I paid for the one I've got - which I'll be sticking with!

[@chuanjenchang3153]

awesome!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Thanks Chuanjen !

[@UldisZalcmanis]

Love the way Spectre looks (and it's important to me) but it's not powerful enough for me (occasional graphics and video editing) and with that premium price tag kind of doesn't really make sense

[@stevethekats]

Im likin the videos keep up the good work, i think im actually getting a MSI Codex X3-012US desktop, with 1080 and a i7-7700K I think for my channel it would be better bc i do gaming lol

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Nice, I see that Microcenter is selling it for $1400. Seems like a good deal :)

[@stevethekats]

OWNorDISOWN yes it is, the only thing that it only comes with SSD but normal hard drives are pretty cheap so lol

[@AhmerJamilKhan]

Hey, I have heard that this device has battery drain issue when shut down, and it drops ~10% over night. Can you confirm if this issue still exists in the 2017 model?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Ahmer Jamil Khan unfortunately I just returned it to the store.. That's a shame, wish you had mentioned it earlier. I can say I did turn it on once after it was unplugged a a few days and I was surprised to see it at 50%, I was sure I had had it plugged in previously but thought I was in error. Perhaps not...

[@ahmadalsadi1786]

There is new model coming in feature specter x360 15 inch 8th gen i7 and mx150 gpu

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Ahmad Alsadi that sounds like it could be a nice upgrade. Thanks for sharing!

[@ahmadalsadi1786]

Spook Daddy you can preorder it and you will get it in 6th September only for US

[@jjhyman6820]

OWNorDISOWN Tech Decisions Made Easy with this upgrade, would you still take the yoga? I’m trying to decide and am wondering if the mx150 will be enough for playing something like fortnite and over watch

[@jjhyman6820]

Spook Daddy don’t get the spectre for gaming?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Like Spook Daddy says I wouldn't get it for gaming. The Yoga 720 15" setill seems the best option - or even the new Surface Book 2 if you can afford it. I'm reviewing the Acer Spin 5 15" with GTX 1050 at the moment and that should be just as capable as the Yoga but the hard drive is really slow so you would have factor in cloning it onto an ssd..

[@maxfrombeyblade]

I just got the HP SPECTRE, its great. Great review too. One question though, do apple earbuds fit into the HP SPECTRE headphone jack? My apple earbuds won't fit and i'm not sure if its the laptops problem or if they're just not compatible. Thanks!

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Frozen PizzaBagel thanks for watching! I have tried regular ear buds and they fit fine. Must be Apple...

[@AliG.G]

Do you have a refurbished hp spectre x360 2017 of i7 4core processor by any chance? Also, can you upgrade the graphics card on these? I know you cant upgrade the RAM.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Ali G Unfortunately not. They have just come out so it will take some time to filter through the supply chain. No, the GPu is soldered to the motherboard. You'll find that is the case with most laptops these days 😕

[@ernestosantiagog.9784]

Hey man, do you know when this laptop was announced? I'm probably going to buy one on december and I was considering on waiting for the refresh, when would you think that would be? And see if they send out a quad core model, GPU isn't really a problem as I value more the battery life over raw (gaming) performance, also I'm planning on getting an eGPU when I finally decide to buy this thing. That's why a quad core would ensure much less, if not any, bottleneck regarding the eGPU.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Ernesto Santiago G. I think this model has been out for 4 to 5 months already. I agree, a quad core is the way to go. Hopefully they will release one soon as we are starting to see the coffee lake cpu's emerge. Did you consider the yoga 720? Not quite as nice looking though.

[@hassanashfaq9785]

Does it support 120hz refresh rate

[@borlach321]

I don't do much gaming, and My video editing is all HD-no 4k. This looks like it would be fine for that?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Yes, you will be perfectly fine for that :)

[@borlach321]

Thanks!

[@strictpillow3781]

Question: I been wanting to get this laptop for a while now. Can this laptop be used for school work and use programs like fl studio, I mainly want to use this laptop for school and beat making, and if there's another laptop that fits the usage can you recommend me one? Also I don't know much about laptops so what's the difference between the refurbished one on amazon and the other that cost 1,500? Thank you very much.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Hi there. It is a nice laptop but note that its CPU performance isn't great. It is a dual core and runs much slower than a quad core. I think with FL Studio you would benefit having as many threads as possible so you can do more simultaneously. Have you considered the Lenovo Yoga 720 with an i7 7700hq CPU ? My review is here:kzbin.info/www/bejne/r17WgHuQgJuBrNU I have bought a number of refurbished systems and have had no issues. Typically they come with only 90 days warranty out of the box but often you can buy an extended warranty

[@strictpillow3781]

OWNorDISOWN Thank you very much!

[@hudline65]

Worship Gaming the newest version has a quad core cpu

[@punoskaters]

hi im ingeriering student do you think this hp spectre will work. for me?? i also play games and i like editing videos, etc... thanks

[@OWNORDISOWN]

I think the Lenovo Yoga 720 would be better for you. Much faster CPU and GPU, yet still very good battery life and portability. Here is my review: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r17WgHuQgJuBrNU

[@abdullahqaiser6050]

have you gotten any issues with the refurb model bcoz I'm looking at one to on amazon and was wondering about the reliability?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Nick crompton : I had no issues at all. My MSI GP72MVRX is also a refurbished unit and that is fine too 😀

[@abdullahqaiser6050]

OWNorDISOWN Tech Decisions Made Easy thanks dude appreciate you replying

[@TheCrazyGolfer]

any problems with fannoise on the spectre?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Not that I recall. I believe I measured it in my review..

[@ahmadalsadi1786]

Lenovo yoga 720 in my countery is full hd but i think if there is away to change the screen to in any pc tech as you are a tech pro is there away to do this ?change full hd screen to 4k in any laptop stores

[@hasanahmad3420]

they are out of stock right now im waiting for 1TB 4k display model which not available on their site right now

[@ahmadalsadi1786]

Hasan Ahmad for how long if you know i am form UAE Dubai

[@hasanahmad3420]

I called them they said they should have a lot more coming in, about 1 month

[@OWNORDISOWN]

That's good news. the 4k is nice , probably worth the wait. If you can find the right screen size you could probably do it yourself but a month is worth the wait I would say. good luck!

[@ahmadalsadi1786]

OWNorDISOWN OWNorDISOWN just now there is a 4k edition on my countery UAE and I am so fucking happy and I do really like your videos so plz can you make any video for lenovo yoga 720 just about anything would very helpful

[@ww8720]

Can the hp spectre x360 run fifa18 without reducing any settings

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Dennis Dennis I think it will struggle. According to the specs the min for dx12 is the gtx 660 and for dx12 a gtx 460. According to Futuremark even the 950m is below these www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu?_ga=2.147603767.1620379581.1507850790-1311582337.1507850790

[@ww8720]

OWNorDISOWN thanks

[@robertcollis7951]

I think someone likes the Yoga. Perhaps you should compare computers with the same chip.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

Robert Collis in an ideal world that woukd be perfect, however I am buying these things. I am now skint and have to start saving up again. I had already reviewed the Yoga 720 and they both cater to the same market and do provide a viable comparison, especially as the Hp Spectre x 360 was more expensive.

[@whitemugcollectives641]

please review the HP Envy 17" :) pls pls pls

[@OWNORDISOWN]

i'll add it to my list :)

[@infooptimalfitness7720]

What do you think of this unit with the 8th Gen Intel Core™ i7-8550U?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

I think it is a very good option. You gain battery life at the expense of gaming performance, that is it. At the time the Intel option was much more expensive, the gap might be closer now...but if battery life is key then Intel is the way to go

[@infooptimalfitness7720]

Thank you for the reply. I am trying to decide between the Yoga 730 and the HP Spectre in a 15 inch. They both seem to have the same specs other than the video card. I'm not a gamer but do want a fast laptop. Battery life doesn't really matter too much since it is always plugged in on my desk. So an hour give or take is not a deal breaker. I think my biggest want is the best built between the 2. I want something that will last 5 plus years. Thanks again.

[@OWNORDISOWN]

@@infooptimalfitness7720 I havent put my hands on the 730 so can only compare with the 720 which is similar. I did have issues getting one of the screws to line up once I took the back off so I had to leave it out and I recall someone saying the threads stripped easily. I would say the build quality on the HP is better. Good luck !

[@infooptimalfitness7720]

I got the HP Specter and the Yoga 730 together. Figure if I am going to spend the money I might as well try them both out. I had to return the HP because the screen had pixels out and the touch pad rattled. Plus the HP touch pad was crazy all over the place. Even on the slowest setting it was hard to control it. The 730 is solid! It is actually quicker than the HP. The only thing I dont like about the 730 is that I wish it had a better battery life. Right now it is around 5 hours and the HP was about 8. Not a deal breaker for me since it is always plugged in at my office. Thanks again for your great review and if you can get your hands on the 730 I would like to hear your thoughts. Cheers!!!

[@zeerak500]

Hp envy 15 review... ?

[@OWNORDISOWN]

I can add it to my list 😊

[@Antler69]

Whoever considering this x360 Spectre This laptop #wobbles and doesn't rest flat on table!! The worst experience ever!!!!

[@human3504]

;o

[@human3504]

Nah not in the market. I prefer 17 inch :p

[@OWNORDISOWN]

I prefer to game on a 17" indeed. But I think one of my favourites is my Surface Book for its portability.

[@SumukhaNamchoom]

lol really