Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
We referenced the Spectre x360 14's eagerness to dial-down frequency earlier in the review, and this is reflected in average CPU temperature toward the end of the Blender benchmark. There's clearly scope for the chip to run quicker, but HP puts a greater emphasis on keeping cool and quiet at all times. Not the worst idea.
Speed purists may prefer to select a performance profile or manually crank-up fan speeds, but we're quite content with out-the-box settings that keep noise levels down to a minimum. The fans switch off at low load and spin into action gradually, keeping relatively quiet during most tasks.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which repeats the common Fire Strike test to provide a worst-case scenario.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
10 hours of office use ought to be a minimum for any modern ultra-portable laptop. HP's Spectre x360 14 does well to keep going for almost 12 hours, and the larger-than-average 66Wh battery provides enough juice to get well beyond a full working day.
