HP OmniBook 5 NGAI 14in (Snapdragon)

This well-built Snapdragon laptop with an OLED panel has much to recommend it - at its discounted price

- SASHA MULLER

At £599, the HP OmniBook 5 is the cheapest Copilot + PC we've tested. That assumes that Currys sticks to its price as we go to press, with the unit's official RRP listed as £799, but that seems a fair assumption.

One reason it’s so cheap is that it uses Qualcomm’s pared-back Snapdragon X X1-26-100 processor, which we first saw in the £999 Acer Aspire 16 AI (see issue 374, p56). Application performance is pretty good overall, being roughly equivalent to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 256V chips. What's more, it has exactly the same NPU as the rest of the Qualcomm range, easily meeting Microsoft's criteria for Copilot+ PC status.

The big trade-off is GPU power. The Adreno X1-45 was between 45% and 50% slower than the X1-85 GPU in the Snapdragon X Elite chips in our suite of tests, and that’s hardly an impressive performer in the first place. Put the X1-45 up against Intel’s Core Ultra 7 and it lags anything from 60% to 80% behind. You'll struggle to get run any demanding games at acceptable frame rates.