HP OmniBook X review: a new breed of Windows laptop

The OmniBook X comes in just two configurations. For $1,150, you get the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 14.0-inch 2.2K IPS display. For $100 more, you can upgrade to a 1TB SSD.

Those are attractive prices for a laptop with excellent performance and very good battery life. Its most direct competitors, the Apple MacBook Air M3 and Dell XPS 13, are considerably more expensive.

The OmniBook X keyboard has the same comfortable layout as HP’s other premium laptops, with large keycaps, lots of spacing, and bold lettering that’s easy to see in all lighting conditions (including in the dark thanks to quality backlighting). The switches are snappy and precise, and they require a bit of extra force compared to some others, including the excellent Magic Keyboard on the MacBook Air. If found the keyboard a bit too firm for my tastes, but most people will probably love it.

The touchpad is a mechanical version, and it’s OK. It’s large enough, although there’s room on the palm rest for it to be slightly larger. It’s responsive enough and the clicks are firm but a bit loud. The MacBook Air’s Force Touch haptic touchpad is much better, as is the haptic touchpad on the Spectre x360 14. I would have liked to see it used here as well.

The display is touch-enabled. That’s a plus and something the MacBook Air doesn’t offer.

The OmniBook X Elite uses the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 chipset. Like all Elite X versions, it has 12 cores — eight performance and four efficient. The X1E-78-100 is the slowest version, running at a maximum of 3.4GHz, where the X1E-00-1DE, for example, runs at 3.8GHz. The X1E-78-100 does not have a dual-core boost mode, where the X1E-00-1DE can boost to 4.3GHz. In addition, its Adreno GPU runs at 3.8 TFLOPS compared to 4.6 TFLOPS. The OmniBook X isn’t fanless, but its fans are reasonably quiet at full throttle. The MacBook Air M3 has no fans and so is completely silent.

The biggest challenge with evaluating the OmniBook X’s performance is the lack of benchmarks for Windows on Arm. Only a few run natively on the Arm chipset, some run in emulation, and some don’t run at all. While I could poke around running various apps to see how responsive they are, this process isn’t as objective as I wish it were right now. For my own part, I found the OmniBook X to be very quick during my review and as quick as comparable Intel Meteor Lake and Apple Silicon laptops while performing the same day-to-day tasks.

Looking at Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024, both of which run natively on Arm, the OmniBook X is slightly faster than Intel Meteor Lake laptops and the MacBook Air M3 in multi-core performance. The MacBook Air M3 is faster across the board in single-core, which will affect day-to-day performance the most. I also ran the PCMark 10 Applications benchmark that runs in emulation on Windows on Arm, but even so the OmniBook X was faster. This is the most real-world benchmark we currently have, and it shows that the OmniBook X will be plenty fast for productivity workflows based around things like email, web browsing, and office applications. Interestingly, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x with the same chipset was a bit faster overall, which demonstrates that design still matters.

The bottom line — and it’s significant — is that the Snapdragon X Elite chipset is must faster than previous Windows on Arm implementations. In the past, Windows on Arm imposed a significant performance penalty, and it no longer does. At the same time, contrary to some of the claims made since the new chipset was announced, I wouldn’t say that the OmniBook X is significantly faster than the alternatives in the kinds of tasks these laptops will be asked to perform.

I included scores from the MacBook Pro 16 with the M3 Max chipset to give an idea of how Apple Silicon scales by comparison. While it might seem like the 14-inch model is a better comparison, both MacBook Pros perform similarly. It’s obvious that the M3 Max is a step above, even when compared with the faster Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100.

I would love to be able to tell you exactly how the OmniBook X performs in AI-related tasks. After all, the Snapdragon X Elite is marketed with a neural processing unit (NPU) that’s significantly faster at 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) than Meteor Lake’s 10 TOPS and the Apple M3’s Neural Engine (NE) at 18 TOPS. Unfortunately, there aren’t good cross-platform benchmarks yet for the machine learning (ML) tasks underlying generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

For example, Geekbench ML can evaluate the NE in Apple Silicon but not in Intel or Qualcomm chipsets. And it also can’t evaluate performance in ML tasks on Intel or AMD integrated GPUs, but it can test the Snapdragon X Elite’s Adreno GPU, discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, and the GPU cores in Apple Silicon. Finally, it can measure CPU performance in ML tasks across all of these chipsets. However, of the three components, discrete GPUs are the fastest at ML processes, NPUs are next-fastest, and CPUs are slowest.

UL Solutions makes a suite of AI benchmarks in its Procyon tool, but I’m still working out how they can be used to compare different platforms. They use components differently and AI inferences are supported differently as well.  So, at this point, they’re not helpful in evaluating Qualcomm’s NPU.

There’s no metric that’s more important for this round of Windows on Arm laptops than battery life. That’s where Apple’s Silicon MacBooks impress the most — they’re not only fast but they’ve offered unparalleled battery life since their introduction. Where the typical Windows laptop might not make it through a full day even running a lightweight workflow, MacBooks routinely last for multiple days. And where Windows laptops run down after a couple of hours when running demanding tasks, MacBooks can make it past lunchtime.

The OmniBook X has a 54 watt-hour battery, which isn’t huge for a 14-inch laptop, and it equips a 2.2K IPS display, which isn’t as power-hungry as the OLED displays in most of our comparison group below. The MacBook Air M3 has a 52.6 watt-hour battery and an IPS display, making for a more direct comparison. And that’s the comparison that’s most relevant. After all, the MacBook Air is the OmniBook X’s most important target.

Again, we’re limited in how we can test a Windows on Arm laptop. In our web browsing test, the OmniBook X lasted longer than most Meteor Lake laptops but considerably shorter than the MacBook Air M3. It wasn’t a terribly impressive performance. The OmniBook X lasted longer in our video looping test, where it again did well relative to most Windows laptops, but it wasn’t in another class entirely and it wasn’t as strong as the MacBook Air M3.

It’s a challenge to find a battery test to evaluate how long these laptops can run more demanding tasks. One approach was to run Cinebench 2024 multi-core with each core active. In this test, the OmniBook X lasted for roughly two hours while running at close to 100% performance, while the XPS 13 made it to 1.5 hours in performance mode. The MacBook Air M3, also running at 100%, lasted for 3.5 hours. Again, it’s in another class entirely.

Therefore, I have to conclude at this point that the MacBook Air retains its spot as much more efficient than any Windows laptop available today. Windows on Arm is certainly more efficient than current Intel chipsets. Intel’s Lunar Lake promises to be its most efficient yet, and Apple’s M4 could also boost its already incredible efficiency.

The OmniBook X has one display option, a 14.0-inch 16:10 2.2K (2240 x 1400) IPS panel running at 60Hz. I found it a good enough experience for the kind of tasks I perform when putting together a review, but I’ve been spoiled by so many OLED displays that provide a different kind of experience.

My colorimeter says that this is a good but not great IPS display. It’s bright enough at 325 nits, and it has the usual IPS colors at 100% of sRGB, 78% of AdobeRGB, and 79% of DCI-P3. Those are all averages today. The colors were very accurate though at a DeltaE of 0.98. The contrast was very good for IPS at 1,400:1, which is still well below OLED’s near infinite contrast.

Overall, the display is good but not great, meeting the needs of productivity users but falling a bit short for creators and media consumers. That combines with just good enough audio provided by two downward-firing speakers that were just loud and clear enough but lacking in bass and depth.

There’s still lots of work to do in evaluating the new Windows on Arm experience. The OmniBook X held up well when considering performance and battery life when compared with Intel’s current generation. At the same time, it doesn’t quite take the crown from Apple Silicon, with the MacBook Air M3 being a more efficient laptop.