Is a 360° hinge worth it? (HP ENVY X360 13" VS. HP ENVY 13")

Bob Jim · June 27, 2018

Hi,

So I'm in the UK looking for a thin and light 13" laptop with some graphics capability for light gaming. These 2 HP laptops seem perfect, but I don't know which one to get, so to people who already have a 360° hinge,

How useful really is that flexibility? Use cases that I can see are that the X360 would be good for watching films, and casual sofa use as a tablet. I am a student so I might also take advantage of the pen capability, but I'm not sure whether I'd like it or not.

The other factors I'm considering in regards to these 2:

X360 advantages: 2x the storage (512 vs. 256), HDMI port, Displayport 1.4 compatible.
Normal 13" advantages: Fingerprint sensor, better battery life, £50 cheaper

Also, is the Ryzen R7 2700u with Vega 10 better than an i5-8250u with an MX150? The X360 has the ryzen.

Thanks for any help!

genexis_x · June 27, 2018

24 minutes ago, Bob Jim said:

How useful really is that flexibility?

Depends on you. Personally I like 2 in 1 as they can save space and the touchscreen is nice to have (can be used as tablet)

24 minutes ago, Bob Jim said:

is the Ryzen R7 2700u with Vega 10 better than an i5-8250u with an MX150?

Let me clear things up. In order to unleash the full potential of Ryzen mobile APU, a decent cooling solution is needed and the TDP needs to be tuned to 25W. Performance@15W just sucks. Unfortunately most 13 inch thin and light laptops don't have good cooling. Thus, 13 inch laptops with KBL-R CPU and 8-10W MX150 has better performance (further elaboration below).

If a laptop is equipped with good cooling and the 2500U/2700U CPU is tuned to 25W, multi core and graphics performance will be better than KBL-R ULVs (without iGPU) without any tuning. Single core performance is still worse for whatever reason. MX150 is always faster than Vega 10 in 2700U, even with the low powered variant.

Also worth mentioning that AMD Ryzen mobile APUs are still slightly behind Intel KBL-R ULVs in terms of efficiency. This means you will notice slightly worse battery life in Ryzen laptops. Also slightly worse temps