Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite: What We Truly Think
June 26, 2024
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New Surface Laptop 7
Summary
The new Qualcomm Snapdragon Laptops are a step forward but they have been hyped like there’s no tomorrow. We are here to help you decide whether you should buy.
These new Qualcomm Snapdragon Laptops are a big step forward. Compared to Windows competitors they have much longer battery life, significantly less fan noise, and appear faster in benchmarks. But, they have been hyped like there’s no tomorrow. Today we are going go beyond the hype to show you what these devices are really like, including who should buy one and who should not.
Casual Users
Let’s start with casual users those who use their laptop for watching YouTube, responding to emails, and doing light office work. They out perform similar sized laptops with Intel or AMD, and they even perform better than a MacBook Air and are similar to a MacBook Pro 14 (M3 Pro 11 Core) at a fraction of the price.
In real-world use, we spent the whole day installing and testing applications on the Surface Laptop 7 while it was unplugged. We found its battery lasted substantially longer than a similar laptop with Intel or AMD. In fact, it felt like the same all-day battery that you’d get on a MacBook, and that is fantastic.
As far as fan noise and heat, these machines were quieter than their windows competition however not as quiet as the MacBook Air, which utilizes a fan less design, or MacBook Pro.
Be advised…
These processors utilize a new system architecture. Many applications have to be re-coded and/or re-compiled for it. As most casual users use a narrow set of applications that run nativity, this isn’t as big of an issue, but if you’re concerned, we have compiled a list of application compatibility linked here.
However, even for casual users, we did notice several instabilities with this new hardware. Our Samsung GalaxyBook 4 Edge 16 had graphics driver issues and its screen brightness could not be adjusted. It was unable to be resolved even with a factory restore, so we had to return and rebuy the device. Our Surface Laptop 7 was also unable to use our existing USB C chargers that work on all our other laptops. The Surface Laptop also crashed completely during a basic web conference via Slack.
So, for casual users these are a solid step forward from current Intel and AMD laptops, but there are instabilities, and you’re going to have to be patient with that.
Professional Users
If you are using your laptop for professional tasks or you're studying a discipline that requires specialist software, performance and application compatibility matter a lot. For application compatibility, you’re going to want to check out the article we mentioned above. Many applications work, many do not, and several work but poorly.
For CPU performance, we use the industry standard test: Cinebench. It tests how the processor performs when maxed out. You can see that all these Snapdragon laptops perform better than similar-sized laptops with Intel or AMD. Several of them perform substantially better, still eclipsing the performance of a MacBook Pro 14 with the M3 Pro 11 core chip. Rest assured these are the closest apples-to-apples comparisons that we could perform with Intel and AMD. Some of the laptops in our comparison even use identical chassis, such as the Yoga Slim 7 with AMD which is the same chassis as the Yoga Slim 7x.
One thing you will notice from these graphs is that the processor model is not the determining factor in these laptop’s performance. Just like all modern laptops, it’s the power that the manufacturer chooses to feed to it and that the chassis’ cooling solution can dissipate. That is why our Yoga Slim 7x with its supposedly slower X Elite 78-100 beats laptops with the 80-100 chip. Which leads us to power draw.
Be advised…
If you’re only doing burst performance tasks, like many forms of programming, these new laptops are a good step forward. They also offer more performance for the same power draw as Intel. However, if you plan to do sustained very high-performance tasks their power efficiency drops at high wattage. At high power draws, these Snapdragon laptops offer the same power efficiency as Intel’s current Core Ultra. They do reach this diminishing marginal returns point at slightly higher power draws though. This makes them only incrementally better than those with Intel and far behind Apple’s M3 MacBooks.
Another thing to note is the drop in application performance we saw between comparable laptops. For example, in our testing between our two Samsung GalaxyBook’s - one with a Snapdragon processor and one without, and Lenovo Slim 7’s, we noticed a significant testing decrease in code indexing in Android Studio and benchmarking in MatLab with these new laptops. These performance discrepancies lead us to our final point.
Who Should Not Buy
None of these new laptops come close to the CPU performance offered by larger laptops with Intel, AMD, or Apple's highest end chips. This is especially so for graphics. In gaming or 3D rendering, these laptops just aren’t going to cut it. In fact, several common games like League of Legends do not run.
Overall, these devices are not for those of you who want the most performance out of your laptop.
Conclusion
Since we used our own money to buy these laptops, we want to emphasize that we can say what we truly think. Overall, what Qualcomm have done here for the laptop industry is fantastic. The improvements in battery life, short-burst performance, and fan noise over their Intel and AMD competition is very impactful for a lot of users- so long as your applications work. However, these laptops are really being overhyped and that is our biggest problem with them.
If you know for sure that you are not going to be using any specialist applications and only care about light use, these are going to be a great buy for you, as long as you’re patient. Check out our favorites:
If you’re delving into professional application usage, it’s risky. If you are a programmer many things work. If you’re a hardcore video editor or gamer, it’s an easy pass right now.
Hopefully this article helped you make a buying decision. If you’re still looking for more info, check out our favorite laptops for various types of users on this site and give our other articles a read too.