hey everybody if longside been and we’ve got another risin laptop to take a look at this one from HP this is their new envy x-360 and it’s powered by one of the new rise in 4500 u processors this is the smallest of the new rise ins I have looked at so far very attractive and lightweight package and this is a two-in-one so you can put it into tablet mode here have it work in tent mode or of course you can just have the display seated like this for watching movies and that sort of thing and we’re going to be taking a closer look at this laptop and what it’s all about in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure if this is on loan from HP so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about now the price point on this one is $7.99 as configured it starts at $6.99 with a rise in 3 configuration and if you want to go fully decked out you can spend about 1400 bucks for an 8 core rise in 7 version so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware our our review unit has an AMD Rison 5 4500 you processor inside that is a 6 core chip it’s got 8 gigabytes of RAM which is ddr4 and dual channel configuration but the RAM is not upgradable this one has a 256 gigabyte nvme SSD you can upgrade the storage on it at least but again not the RAM all configurations of this laptop include a 1080p 13.3 inch touch display it works very nicely it looks great it’s actually one of the brighter displays I’ve seen on some of these newer Rison laptops which is good to see here and I really like the overall industrial design of this it’s all metal and it’s not very big it’s kind of in the smaller footprint versus some of the 13 inch laptops you might be accustomed to so it’s really thin and light very attractive especially compared to the prior generation of this they were
able to strip off a lot of the bezels here and make the package smaller overall with the same screen size and I think they’ve done a really nice job with this it’s a very attractive looking machine both in appearance and just in how it feels now the weight on this one is just under three pounds or a 1.3 kilograms I always like to remind people that the thinner and lighter something gets the more it will cost so you can get rise in machines with the same processor for less money but those are going to be a little bit bigger and heavier so if you want something thin and light like this there will be a price premium but it might be worth it if you don’t want to lug around something that is heavier than what this one weighs let’s take a look at the ports now we’ve got a headphone microphone jack right here next to it is a rather unique USB 3 port this is just a standard USB a connector but it’s got a little door on here and I found the best way to use it is just to take out your cable here and just kind of nudge it in from the side to push the door down and then connect up the cable I’ve never seen a door on a USB port before but this one’s got it next to it is a USB C port this is a full service USB C port so you can use it for a display output along with power in and it will support data devices as well so you could use a docking station or something like that with that USB C port just note though that
this is not a thunderbolt port but it is a Gen 2 USB C port that can run at a max of 10 gigabits per second on the other side of the laptop we’ve got a micro SD card slot here you got another one of those USB 3 ports with a door and you have a power connector so the power connector that comes with the laptop is using that circular barrel connector and not the USB C so when you do have it plugged in you’re not tying up the port if you don’t want to so I thought that was nice that you have the flexibility of power in over here or through the power adapter that’s on the side of the laptop and it’s got a very nice trackpad it’s got plenty of real estate here one thing that I did note is that it’s very sensitive when you tap on it so I did disable tap to click this is a click pad though so I get clicks when I actually push it down that was my only complaint with it and overall very nice input mechanism there nice keyboard too good size keys nicely spaced they made very efficient use of the casing here it’s also backlit so that’s good and you got a couple of other things of note on here you do have a fingerprint reader for getting in with Windows hello so that’s good your power switches here and there’s some other stuff that I thought was kind of neat the first thing is that it’s got a camera shutter for the webcam so when you push down this key it’ll activate the webcams shutter so you can see when you push it down it will put a physical shutter in front of the camera lens and you’ll know it’s on because your camera lens goes all white on you there and then when you want to turn it off of course you just depress the key and that key will light up because the camera will still work it’ll just be obstructed so the key will
be lit when you have the camera obstructed and then when you click it again it will come off and that light will turn off there as well next to it is another feature that was kind of unique to this one in that you can control the fan speed with this key here so when you push the key what you’re going to get is the thermal profile settings and you can see right now I’ve got mine set to performance they have four different settings so you have the performance one which we’re on now which gives you the best performance but the most amount of fan noise HP recommended is a little less performance but a little less fan noise as well it’s kind of the midpoint comfort is kind of an odd one because what it does is keeps the temperature of the laptop down which means it brings the performance of the laptop down but it also runs the fan a little bit more to keep things cool and then the quiet mode will give you minimal performance but also no fan noise the fan will still run very very quietly but you really can’t hear it so if you’re just doing some web browsing or some word processing or something low-key and you don’t want to hear the fan noise in a quiet room you can switch it to quiet and that will turn the fan pretty much down to its lowest possible level barely even audible and you can you the computer in silence but if you want to boot up a game or something you can switch it over to performance and get the better performance out of the machine that this chip can deliver fan noise overall is about what you would expect for a compact laptop it can get a little bit loud so it’s nice to have this
control at their ready so if you’re really bothered by the fan noise when you’re trying to concentrate on work you can switch it into quiet mode but if you don’t care about that and need the performance you can easily switch it back and I thought it was kind of neat that they mapped that control to the keyboard and made it a very important feature that you can get at easily so that was unique there there’s also a microphone mute button here as well so you can mute the mic just like you can shutter the camera with a key press now there is pen support on this one but we did not get a pen in the box with it however HP says it supports the Microsoft pen protocol 2.0 which supports some additional options for drawing on screen now these new Rison ships get great battery life and this laptop is no exception to that rule an hour testing with the display brightness up pretty high we were getting about eight hours ish of basic tasks done on the laptop basic web browsing we’re processing that sort of thing if you start doing photo editing and video editing and things that impact the processor more significantly you’ll see less battery life of course HP is rating the battery at about 12 hours for basic tasks provided you have the display brightness turned down and I would agree with them on that battery life estimate again provided you’ve got the display at a lower level the display usually is one of the biggest eaters of battery life so if you get that display brightness down and you’re going for a long hall or something I think you can definitely get close to their estimates it does charge pretty quickly it does support fast charging so I think you should be able to get the juice back in the tank
pretty quick on it and overall it’s a good battery performer that I think will get most people through a workday so let’s take a look now at performance and we’ll load up Google Chrome here and take a look at the nasa.gov homepage and see how that all comes together as you can see things render up here very quickly we’re disconnected my home Wi-Fi I have AC Wi-Fi in my house but the Wi-Fi radio inside supports the new Wi-Fi six standard as well and as you can see here web browsing is working pretty nice on here and is very snappy let’s take a look now at some YouTube videos so here we’ve got a 1080p 60 video running from my youtube channel I did drop a few frames initially when I first started playing the video and then when I made it fullscreen it dropped a few more but now that the videos playing back here at fullscreen no problems and we haven’t had any additional drop frames so I think you’ll have a good outcome here playing back YouTube videos even those that are running at 60 frames per second along with Netflix and the other video services as well and on the browser bench org speedometer test with the full performance settings enabled we got a score of one hundred and seventy eight point four on version 1.0 of that test and 101 on version 2.0 that puts it very close to the Lenovo IdeaPad flex 15 the margin of error there and you can also see that all of these Rison ships are very competitive against some of the Intel machines out there namely the new tenth generation eye five chips but we’re these AMD devices do better is in graphics and we’re going to load up some games now and I think you’ll be pretty impressed with the
performance that we’re able to get out of one of these new AMD processors let’s kick things off with Grand Theft Auto 5 so here is GTA 5 running on the laptop here and we are at 1080p lowest settings and as you can see our frame rate is in the 50s it’ll occasionally jump into the 40s as you can see here sometimes we’ll see a little bit of a hit when it reads off the disc I have a USB Drive powering this right now but overall it’s been great and on par with other rising based machines that we have looked at recently with this new generation these chips are exceptionally powerful for the price point and what we’re seeing here is performance that we would typically get out of one of those MX 150 GPUs from just a couple of years ago yet we’ve got everything in a really thin and light package here so GTA 5 is running great on this device and you’ll probably get even better frame rates at a 720p resolution so next up is rocket League and we’re running it at 1080p with all of the settings turned up and as you can see here we’re getting about 30 frames per second at those settings a little bit of a dip there 220 but by and large it is holding its own at the maximum now of course if we were to turn the settings down we could get a better framerate at this resolution or we could go down to 720p and adjust the settings up again again it’s up to you to figure out the best balance of visual quality and frame rate but overall this is spectacular for a computer that lacks that discrete GPU let’s take a look at a few more things so here is doom 2016 we’re running in Vulcan Mode 1080p lowest settings and as you can see we’re getting about 30 frames per second sometimes 40 frames per second if we were to turn it down to 720p we would get into the 60 frames per
second territory but again another you know recent title that is running exceptionally well on a computer without a discrete GPU alright next up is no man’s sky 1080p lowest settings we’re getting about 30 to 35 frames per second or so when we’re in the spaceship and then when we go down to the surface of the planet we’re in probably around the 20 frames per second territory give or take this is one game that would do better at 720p and I think there are a lot of triple-a titles that will also perform better on this chipset at around that resolution as well most of the time with low settings but nonetheless this is something that you really couldn’t do very well on one of these small laptops in the past and now you can do that without having to spend a lot on a gaming laptop so it’s a great little gaming device if you’re looking to play games casually of course you’ll probably want to go with a gaming laptop to get better performance with its own GPU but again I think you know this is fantastic for what you’re getting here and it’s really remarkable to see how far along these processors have come since I started reviewing pcs about 6 years ago and on the 3dmark time spy benchmark test we got a score of 964 with the laptop here set in its performance mode that puts it right on par with the lenovo that we looked at a few weeks ago and even the acer Swift 3 which was running with the 8 core variant of this AMD processor again you’ll be hearing the fan really going on this thing when you’re running games like this and that’s what that performance mode is there for but you can also turn it down with that utility we looked at a little bit earlier when you’re not playing games to get quieter operations going I also ran this benchmark on each of the different performance settings just so you can get a feel for what that does to the overall system performance and if we pull up that
slide now you’ll see of course that we get 964 in that performance mode the recommended mode is pretty close 9:57 it’s a little bit slower on the CPU side but pretty close to what we got on the performance mode comfort of course we’ll take a dip in performance both on the CPU and the GPU and then of course quiet will run at the least amount of performance so going from the performance mode to the quiet mode is a substantial step down in performance for games but I do think when you’re running basic web browsing and word processing and that sort of thing the quiet mode if that’s important to you really won’t impact your day-to-day work all that much and on the 3dmark stress test we got a score of 98.3% that is a passing grade and you can see also the temperature that the processor was registering when it was at the end of that test one thing to note is that we ran that test in performance mode which means that when you are set to that mode you shouldn’t see all that much variation in performance especially when you’re playing games and that was something we experienced when we were playing the games we were testing just a few minutes ago so pretty consistent across the board but note if you go into comfort mode or quiet mode that’s where you’re going to see the thermal
throttling because it will be adjusting the processor performance based on how much heat it is detecting and that’ll be very very evident in the quiet mode so again quiet mode is going to be good for the basics but if you start doing things that are more demanding on the processor you will see in quiet mode a pretty big variation in performance from 1min to the next so switch it into performance mode those fans will kick on but you’ll have very consistent performance when you’re stressing the processor now the fan intake is on the bottom here so you’re going to want to keep the laptop off of carpet and fabric and things that would clog up those vents the rubber feet here will keep it elevated enough to get air flow in to cool down that processor the speakers are also here on the bottom there on the left and right hand side here they are downward firing so they will vary in their sound quality depending on what they’re placed down upon I found the speakers to be ok they are Bang & Olufsen branded but there’s not a lot of bass to them but there’s good stereo separation however if you want better audio quality I would plug in a pair of headphones or use some Bluetooth headphones here on the laptop let’s take a look now and see if it runs Linux and then we’ll wrap things up alright so we’ve got them boom two twenty point zero four loaded up here as you can see the touch display is working
video is being detected properly Wi-Fi Bluetooth audio all good on here the one thing that isn’t good is the brightness setting here I can’t get the brightness to change on the display even though it thinks it’s doing it so that’s one area that I’ll have to spend a little bit more time tinkering with but beyond that it looks like it’s running Linux as well as some of the other recent 4000 series Rison chips we have looked at so altogether I think it’s a very nice laptop I think it’s pretty reasonably priced for what it is the performance is great I really just like the overall look and feel of it and it just feels like a nice premium Rison experience and it’s nice to see these chips getting some love in some higher-end looking hardware here so all in I continue to be very excited about the direction that AMD has taken with these new chips and we’re seeing just remarkable performance out of all of these new computers and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of these as the year progresses here so stay tuned for that let me know what you thought down in the comments below and until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lime tv supporters including gold-level supporters Tom Albrecht cristela Greta David Hawkman Brian Parker Mike Patterson and bill Pomerance if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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