On the bright side, the screen was sharp, and I could make out every shard of a shattered glass window. When I played Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, there was a loss of detail in dark areas, and Talion's red outfit was muted.The FX504 covers just 66 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is well below the 98-percent entry-level gaming average, as well as the showings from the Acer Nitro 5 Spin (105 percent) and the HP Pavilion Power 15t (68 percent).The panel on this Asus averaged only 220 nits on our light meter, which is dimmer than both the average (256 nits) and the Nitro 5 Spin (296 percent). The Pavilion Power 15t, however, fared even worse, at just 173 nits.The keys on the TUF Gaming FX504 offer 1.4 millimeters of travel and require a strong 76 grams of force to actuate. While that's just off of our usual preference of 1.5 millimeters, I never felt as if I was bottoming out. My bigger issue was that the keys felt ever-so-slightly bouncy, which took some getting used to. On the 10fastfingers.com typing test, I reached 114 words per minute, which is standard for me, but I had a 3-percent error rate, which is slightly higher than normal for me.
The keyboard has a number pad and is backlit, but only in red. At this price, you can't fault the FX504 for not having a full RGB keyboard.The 4.1 x 2.8-inch touchpad has a Windows Precision touchpad that responded to gestures like four-finger taps to invoke the Action Center and four-finger swipes to reach the Timeline. But when I navigated Windows, the plastic felt slippery and cheap.The speakers on the TUF Gaming FX504 are nice and loud, easily filling up a midsize conference room (and attracting attention from some people outside it). The sounds of Bruno Mars' "Grenade" brought the volume, and the speakers were great at highlighting the vocals and piano.The speakers on the FX504 are nice and loud, easily filling up a midsize conference room (and attracting attention from some people outside it).
One good side effect of the extra weight is the stiff chassis. Pick up the Spectre x360 15 one-handed, and you needn’t fear that you’ll bend it. HP has jumped into 4K with both feet on the Spectre x360 15. While most PC makers offer a 1080p version to lower cost and increase battery life (higher-resolution screens inherently use more power), HP offers only a single, 3840x2160 IPS-like panel option.As more laptops offer 4K displays, it's important to know that this spec isn't a slam-dunk when it comes to quality. Our unit's panel is reasonably bright at a measured maximum output of 319 nits, but other high-end models can hit 400 to 500 nits.
Unlike Apple and Dell, who are busy taking away key travel, the HP Spectre x360 15 features a full 1.5mm of travel on its keyboard.
HP takes a new direction with the keyboard in this generation as well. The prior generation had speakers flanking the keyboard. In this new design, the speakers disappear and the backlit keyboard stretches edge to edge, allowing room for a 10-key numeric keypad. Yes, number-crunchers, it’s a properly designed 10-key, which Gigabyte and MSI still haven’t learned how to implement.While Apple and Dell have been acting like airline carriers, taking away creature comforts like keyboard travel, HP gives you what feels like business-class service, with a plush 1.5 mm for your weary fingers.Our only quibble is the half-height cursor keys for moving up and down. An inverted 'T' is always preferred. The trackpad is a glass-coated Synaptics ClickPad that’s slightly offset to align with the keyboard. We’ve had palm-rejection issues with some of HP’s extra-wide trackpads in the past, but this one we could not get to trigger. Good job.
The Spectre x360 doesn’t skimp on connectivity. You get a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports and a full-size HDMI on the right side. On the left there’s an SD card reader, analog audio jack, standard barrel charger, and—wait for it—a USB Type A port! Yes, Internet, rejoice!If you do a little dance because there’s still a USB Type A port on the new HP Spectre x 360 15, that’s perfectly fine with us.
The charger for the Spectre x360 15 is a beefy 150-watt unit. The Thunderbolt 3 ports with USB PD will also charge the laptop, but at a slower rate than you’ll get with the traditional barrel charger.Much of the excitement around Intel’s Kaby Lake-G CPUs stems from its once-unthinkable marriage of a custom Radeon RX Vega M with a quad-core 8th-generation Kaby Lake CPU. We expected strong graphics. The surprise for us came from the CPU side of things, though.
As with previous generations of its laptop CPUs, Intel’s 8th generation comes in two variants: low-power “U” chips and high-power “H” chips. The H chips usually rule the school, but Kaby Lake-G brings in some fresh, fast blood.Intel has been pretty coy about exactly what’s inside the “G” series of CPUs. Sure, they’re 8th-gen, but are they low-power or high-power? Well, it turns out, they’re high-power for the most part. Intel said it's using a new Dynamic Power Sharing feature that's possible only with the unique design of the Kaby Lake-G CPU. As you might guess from the name, performance between the CPU and the GPU is shared based on workload. If the GPU is at rest, power and thermals can be used to push the CPU to higher levels.
Our performance tests, therefore, are really a battle between the established H and the upstart G (while the low-power U watches from the sidelines). Which will prevail?First up is Cinebench R15, which tests multi-core CPU performance when rendering a 3D scene. We included results from the two other Spectre x360 15s in our performance chart: The Kaby Lake-R twin to our test unit, with the low-power quad-core Core i7-8550U, and the previous-generation low-power dual-core Core i7-7500U. The older unit comes in last, while the younger easily outpaces it.The Core i7-8705G in the Spectre x360 15 performs far closer to an H-series-class CPU, thanks to a unique power-sharing arrangement between the GPU and CPU
As we expect given its Core i7-7700HQ H chip, the Dell XPS 15 clamshell outruns everyone...except the new Core i7-8705G. The Dell XPS 15 and the new HP Spectre x360 15 actually have the same basic CPU, but the 8th-gen Kaby Lake-G version in the Spectre x360 15 is more than 50 percent faster than the 8th-gen Kaby Lake-R version in the XPS 15.
One other result we want to point out above is from the Lenovo Yoga 720. It’s another 15-inch convertible laptop with a high-power Core i7-7700HQ inside, plus GeForce GTX 1050 graphics. But it’s a good example of the performance you give up when you try to stuff a 45-watt CPU inside a convertible laptop with a 75-watt graphics card. In this CPU test, the Spectre x360 15 is more than 30 percent faster.Single-core performance for the Spectre x360 15 also sings, as you can see from our results in Cinebench (below) using a single CPU thread. These numbers are more indicative of what you’ll see in most real-world use, given that few applications will use all of the cores of a CPU.
Because all of the CPUs here use the same basic design, it comes down to how you can run the CPU. The newest 8th-gen chips take the lead, even over higher-power CPUs.The Cinebench benchmark is very useful, but it usually takes just a couple of minutes to run on many laptops. That’s not long enough to see how prolonged heat affects a system. That’s why we run our HandBrake encoding test, which can push the CPU hard for more than 40 minutes on a quad-core. In theory, if a laptop isn’t adequately cooled, or if it decides to sacrifice performance for fan noise, the effects will show up here.The results again put the new Spectre x360 15 ahead of the competition, but it’s really a tie. The good news for HP is it’s tied with Dell’s XPS 15, which is a standard clamshell design with fewer thermal compromises. What the test really tells us is the new Kaby Lake G is every bit as fast as a 45-watt H-series CPU.
We'd stop most mainstream laptop testing at this point. But with the Radeon RX Vega inside Kaby Lake-G, we also want to see how it performs in games. The first result we give you is Futuremark’s 3DMark Sky Diver. The results are right where Intel claimed they’d be: Between GeForce GTX 1050 and GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.The test is a little sensitive to CPU performance, which propels the Spectre x360 15 a little higher than you’ll see in a more graphics-intensive games. It’s entirely likely that older games will see the graphics power of the Spectre x360 15 creep up a lot closer to GTX 1060 Max-Q.If you hoped the Spectre x360 15 would run with gaming laptops in all games, we return to reality in Rise of the Tomb Raider, where the Spectre x360 15 is slightly slower than a GeForce GTX 1050 laptop.
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