HP OmniBook X14

Little to shout about in terms of hardware, but HP delivers its own spin on local AI and the price is right

- TIM DANTON

Like almost every other laptop manufacturer, HP has taken a cautious approach to Copilot+ PCs based on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. You have the choice of the OmniBook X, with either 512GB or 1TB of storage, or a single configuration of the EliteBook Ultra G1q. So, three whole models to choose from. Don’t go too wild, HP.

HP sent me the 1TB version of the OmniBook X, which now costs £1,099 inc VAT (down from its launch price of £1,350). The 512GB version for £999 clearly offers better value, as otherwise the specification is the same. That means 16GB of RAM and a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, which sits at the mid-range of Qualcomm’s lineup: you get 12 cores but no dual-core boost.

You can see the difference in benchmarks, with the OmniBook scoring 2,446 in Geekbench 6’s single-core test versus around 2,800 from laptops I’ve tested with the X1E-80-100 and X1E-84-100, and it’s also slower in the multicore section: 14,314 versus 14,739 from the Dell XPS 13 (see issue 361, p58). Does this matter? I don’t think so. The laptops are equally rapid in Windows, and I was more disappointed by the OmniBook’s battery life of 13hrs 12mins under light use. Fantastic for an Intel or AMD-based machine, but a long way behind the 19hrs 50mins of the Dell and 16hrs 8mins of the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x (see issue 361, p57).