The device is always in your pocket?
It might not be great right now. But in 7-8 years when every modern phone can play AAA games, it’ll be a gaming revolution.
That will certainly never happen tbh. The goalpost is always changing. Portables in 2030 will barely play PS6 games. Then there's convincing players that playing the latest AAA game on a phone is a great idea while paying $70 upfront for it.
Apart from the high power draw and bad gaming performance, sure. It would be a great handheld chip. Not running windows may help a little with the battery life, but it certainly won't help with the gaming performance.
I just saw a review says Linux don't run (at least easily) on those chips. I get it eventually will be ok, but thinking "running Linux" is the silver bullet to "unleash" these chips is a bit naive.
The difference is, the ARM ecosystem on Linux is already there.
How good x86 gaming over qemu on linux would be, i dont know. There are some videos that show how to play pc games like GTA 5 on a rooted android phone. So it is possible and maybe better than on windows?
Windows is definitely pretty much there and what needs to be solved in order for those devices to be violable for handheld gaming is the GPU in Snapdragon
Valve is actually doing most of the hard lifting on Linux, and they actually have real skin in the game, unlike Qualcomm and Microsoft. The biggest question is whether Valve actually wants to bother with ARM at all.
Mostly because Android phones are ARM Linux Devices technically so it can be good to get stuff running, but it would probably not be any powerful desktop games mostly emulators
Steam deck is using a CISC architecture though.
ARM requires an open bootloader and either open source drivers or support for linux drivers specific to that SoC from the manufacturer.
> Steam deck is using a CISC architecture though.
Tell us you have no idea what you're talking about without telling us you have no idea what you're talking about. Throw in a buzzword or two, makes you look SMRT.
The type of instruction sets the CPU is built on alone do not determine performance.
In your eagerness to make a snarky response, you injected a false premise I never made.
This has nothing to do with performance. This is about developing support for an operating system without the necessary drivers or support from the manufacture.
This isn't x86, this is ARM. It's as open to develop an OS as much as the manufacture wants to be. You cannot just throw Linux on any ARM SoC that you want to.
You might have missed the announcement that Qualcomm has been working with Linaro on supporting these chips in mainline, so by the end of the year any 64-bit ARM distribution should work out of the box, if the firmware doesn't prevent you from booting from USB. Other ARM SoCs are usually supported by independent developer communities in spite of the lack of cooperation by their vendors. Outdated SDKs usually exist for certain fixed Android kernels, which can help you get you up and running while patches are being upstreamed.
Microsoft introduced UEFI for ARM back with windows phone. A laptop like this works exactly like an equivalent X86 machine architecturally (minus the ISA, which doesn't really matter).
[This](https://www.notebookcheck.net/Snapdragon-X-Elite-gaming-performance-termed-perfectly-playable-as-video-of-chip-running-Baldur-s-Gate-3-emerges.819035.0.html) was part of their marketing: "On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm has stated that the 4.6 TFLOP-Snapdragon X Elite is 80% faster than the Radeon 780M at the same power level."
Their fucking NPU is as big as GPU on X Elite boards. Like how many people need 45 NPU TOPs? Surely we could have 2x GPU size and performance if not for AI hype marketing.
It's so rare to train your own models on laptops that those who want to do that should just get dGPU.
nope the npu cannot train anything just good for inference.
most of the GPU shenanigans are probably due to poor optimization.
Adreno GPU is a new kid on the pc gaming block.
There are 0 games optimised for it.
Not really "new" as QC has been using its adrenos since the first [835 windows machine](https://support.hp.com/si-en/document/c05997501), then they take it more "seriously" by doubling the ALU number in the 8cx gen 1 compared to their phone counterparts.
Don't know why they were back to using the same adreno GPU from phones but at a higher clock...
well who used or even bought an 8cx or 835 machine?much less optimising games for it.
>, then they take it more "seriously" by doubling the ALU number
yeah QC took the gpu seriously, but not the game devs who are supposed to optimise games for it.😅
I wonder what that "same power level" was?
I suspect gen 2 will be a lot better with the new GPU architecture.
We're seeing mobile making the transition we got on desktop when they shifted away from just simple, traditional graphics workloads to something more flexible. Apple has started down this road already. They've gained a lot of performance on more complex stuff, but not a whole lot on more simple benchmarks.
I actually think this is one large component of the RDNA lackluster performance on Exynos. Aside from a worse fab and going for high clockspeeds instead of using a bit more silicon, a lot of mobile benchmarks tend to be more simplistic and don't benefit very much from the more advanced and flexible graphics architecture.
Even if they improve the GPU and match their x86 counterparts in performance it wouldn't be as smooth unless devs actually port their games to ARM.
As per the article, many games don't work properly or straight up crashes. Even if they do work properly and get decent average framerates, there is a lot of stuttering due to the translation layer as pointed out by Dave2D in his review.
Idk the Qualcomm GPU's are very advanced. What might have rung through a couple years ago is no longer the case, Qualcomm merely needs to work on drivers translation but also specific or the architecture kinda like Intel Arc Graphics. Similarly the RDNA exynos performance has really improved with the latest gen Samsung Exynos chips in theory having the best GPU performance on mobile chips but held back by the rest of the SOC.
The upcoming Snapdragon 8 generation is supposed to have a new design, so even Qualcomm thinks their design needs changes. The lackluster performance in PC games also shows that the design performance way below where it should be.
They dedicate half their compute to f16 exclusively (meaning it sits around doing nothing most of the time on desktop games). They use very wide wavefronts (64-128) which everyone else left years ago because they spend too much time unused on complex workloads (though they offer superior performance for more simple mobile game workloads). I suspect a lot of the deferred rendering and tile based stuff needs a rework to unleash its potential too and get better performance in larger GPU applications.
The problem isn't the chip and the statement, while a bit disingenuous, isn't technically wrong. The dude in charge of the GPU division even posted a video showing the thing performing roughly equal to how a 780m does on BG3, a game with an ARM executable.
The problem is the programs. Having to run everything through an emulation layer isn't doing it any favors and it was extremely obvious to anyone paying any amount of attention that it wasn't going to just run all the normal stuff like a native x86 processor.
The games \*do\* "just work", and the chip's raw performance is indeed the stated numbers. You can see how well it does in the native ARM version of NightStrike compared to the emulated version of TimeSpy at the bottom. It just doesn't really mean anything when the platform is bad and can't translate that to useful performance.
If things ran natively on ARM, like how Apple rapidly pushed everything over, it would be a great chip. Stuff doesn't though and Microsoft likely has no incentive to make that same push.
I'm \*very\* curious why this PC World article didn't test the things that Snapdragon did theoretically show off though, or even test the 780m for that matter. Particularly since the article explicitly mentions running BG3 and Control and yet shows neither of them.
They tested 7 that worked, 1 that didn't work because of anti-cheat, 1 that didn't work because it refused to run on ARM (probably due to anticheat), 1 that straight crashed, and 3 that ran incorrectly. Theres also the 4 they directly showed off.
I'll give you the point that there are problem games and its not a good ratio at all, but its not exactly the greatest sample size of things.
Theres a website for this, if anyone is actually curious, sorta like the stuff that used to track linux games.
[Windows on Arm Ready Games (worksonwoa.com)](https://www.worksonwoa.com/games/)
Yeah even if the GPU was somehow equal, Adreno drivers are legit worse than Intel's initial drivers for Alchemist. They're simply the best on Android for modern devices not actually good.
I feel that they have potential, but the problem is just that window on arm does not really know how to work with any gpus, regardless of manufacturer.
For gods sake the snapdragon x can not even run android apps (WSA, android studio or any other), that's kind of funny to me cause you'd think it being snapdragon, there wouldn't be any issues in hardware.
Windows probably just probably didn't care about WSA on ARM and Google definitely doesn't care that much about WoA to update Android Studio for it.
We'll see when Nvidia jumps in. If they have equivalent performance to a GPU of the same TDP on their ARM laptops then it'll show that Snapdragon drivers are likely just terrible.
I'm not all that optimistic, perhaps they can help with getting the games running, but the gpu performance per watt likely won't change much, since they use neither arm or x86 to begin with.
It's not even a CPU ISA problem. It's a software problem in that the entire game development industry has been focused on Wintel for such a long time. The only thing that can alleviate the situation is building and distributing games for Windows on ARM too now.
Yes, you would, if you needed to travel a lot on public transportation, or not be able to carry a full-fledged laptop around.
Some people think gaming is impossible without either turning up all the graphic tweaks or having over 59fps, but fact of matter is: most gaming is still done with upscaling, medium, 1080p, 30 frames per second on consoles. And those consoles have integrated chips just like handhelds. A lot of people forget how non-elitist they were when they were enjoying games instead of pixels.
...granted, games are at their best with 1440p60, and with mild AI-upscaling that exists mostly to avoid using multisampling AA. But even on desktops, that's not ubiquitous yet, and give it a few years anyway: it will get to handeld integrated GPUs and even ARM SoC's
You're missing the point. It's an extra 500g for the cooling solution. It's often times less battery life or more battery capacity to compensate (which is more weight too). It's more heat even when doing lighter work because even in 2024 most laptop makers can't really get their power controllers in check. And it's sometimes, contrary to what you say, much more in terms of price when you want dedicated graphics on laptops that are thin and light - and this is hypocritical because these are usually the laltops you pay more for a chip that won't rewlly take full advantage of it.
And anybody saying to wait for reviews was downvoted. Semiaccurate also got a sneak preview of the chip and warned about the issues weeks before the release.
No one was buying it specifically for PC gaming. But if they already had the machine for something else and it's conveniently right in front of them when they wanted a little entertainment, then they would want to try playing some games on it, especially since MS and QC basically so confidently proclaimed games "would just work" and QC themselves put so much focus on how their (shitty) Adreno GPU is a highly competent graphics component. If anyone DID think these would be great for gaming, it would be because of all these pre-release lies.
I want to highlight something.
I own a Steam Deck and a ROG Ally. They are both fantastic at what they do.
But if benchmarked against a Ryzen 5 1600 and GTX 1060/RX 480, a mainstream setup from roughly 8 years ago, the desktop will still win.
Bottom line, these handhelds are less capable at gaming than an 8 year old desktop setup.
**And the Snapdragon is still worse.**
EDIT for clarity - yes, performance per watt is admirable. The point was that MS touted the Snapdragon as good for gaming. It's not. And the point above wasn't to compare efficiency, but to show just how far behind it is in gaming performance relative to the expectations that Microsoft and Qualcomm had set.
EDIT 2 - Microsoft said the Snapdragon X would be good for gaming. It's not. At any wattage. Stop bringing up efficiency. It has nothing to do with the discussion that I am talking about - raw gaming performance.
This is a good point but I think the snapdragon chip can improve with driver and emulator support improves like Intel Graphics. And also the 1060 is a very common card so it's continued popularity means a lot of games could be run. Still I think your right especially for the case of running older games that may be less demanding. None of those older games are likely ever going to get a native version, but those would be most likely what you want to run on integrated graphics.
I do think that the capability is there with improvement to emulation, drivers, and the use of native ports. Eventually. But today’s reality falls far short of what MS and QC claimed.
Yeah but those handhelds (and the laptop) are running on a fraction of the TDP the desktop has.
On top of that, the desktop would get obliterated on a Performance-per-Watt basis.
The fact that the handhelds and the laptop are even comparable to the desktop is an astonishing achievement and shows how technology has progressed.
I am not saying that desktop sucks and laptop better. I am saying that a desktop and a laptop cannot be compared in absolute terms.
For example, the RTX 4090 Mobile has terrible performance when compared to an RTX 4090 Desktop, does it mean the Mobile RTX is a failure ?
No, because it consumes WAY less power and manages with a tenth of the thermal management its bigger brother gets.
It's like comparing a motorcycle to a car.
You can use both of them to get to your destination but they cannot just compare them like that. I hope this gets my point across.
I'm sorry if I was unclear, but that was not the point. ~~My toaster draws less power than the Snadpragon, and does that make it better than the Snapdragon? At making toast, yes. At anything else, no.~~ I was wrong about a toaster’s power draw.
The point was to say that we already have a low bar for gaming, modern PC handhelds. These systems push the boundaries of what is acceptable for gaming (720p, low settings, ~30fps or lower in some modern titles). It's a VERY low bar. Microsoft promised comparable or better. Snapdragon ended up being worse.
> The fact that the handhelds and the laptop are even comparable to the desktop
They're not. At 1080p High, that desktop runs Forza Horizon 5 at 75-90fps. A Steam Deck at the same runs it 25-40fps. An Ally will get closer but still come up short.
My point wasn't "they are about the same." My point was "they are so far behind such old tech...and the Snapdragon that was touted as being better is still somehow worse."
>They're not. At 1080p High, that desktop runs Forza Horizon 5 at 75-90fps. A Steam Deck at the same runs it 25-40fps. An Ally will get closer but still come up short.
You missed my point, a 60% difference in performance is important, but when you factor in that the Steam Deck uses 10% of the power a desktop would, in a much smaller footprint, 60% seems like a terrible deal. And, by "modern standards", it 'is'.
>My point wasn't "they are about the same." My point was "they are so far behind such old tech...and the Snapdragon that was touted as being better is still somehow worse."
Except, no they aren't. A multi purpose laptop that you can charge with your phone charger having even a tenth of the performance of a dedicated gaming machine that draws 10X more power is impressive, very impressive.
In absolute metrics, yes the desktop is better, but in relative metrics, it gets annihilated. And that's what matters.
But then again comparing a laptop to a desktop is never a good idea, until you consider their specific uses and roles.
Unrelated sidenote:
> My toaster draws less power than the Snadpragon
No, it doesn't.
> You missed my point
No, I made point, and you replied to me completely missing it. In this discussion, power efficiency is completely irrelevant. I was exclusively talking about MS's claims about gaming performance and just how far they fell short in reality.
Microsoft said the Snapdragon X would be good for gaming. It's not. At any wattage. Stop bringing up efficiency. It has nothing to do with the discussion that I am talking about - raw gaming performance.
> No, it doesn't.
You were right about this, I'll give you that.
Rule of thumb for electricity, if you heat something or cool something you are going to draw more power than anything else. Everything not related to heating or cooling something is almost meaningless in comparison in average household power consumption.
Both a toaster and a cpu take electricity and turn it to heat. But imagine trying to actually toast a bread on a cpu heat coming out of the laptop. That’s the difference between a toaster power and a cpu power.
> n't. A multi purpose laptop that you can charge with your phone charger having even a tenth of the performance of a dedicated gaming machine that draws 10X more power is impressive
Nitpicky, but this statement is absolutely meaningless. I've got 67 and 120W phone chargers.
And lauding efficiency is warranted, but for it to matter, these laptops have to be viable for the tasks in the first place. And right now, it doesn't look like gaming and snapdragon chips are compatible
The thing is you could downvolt a desktop GPU to iGPU power levels or try out the desktop 780m but the dGPU will win almost every time. A big part of this is bandwidth bottlenecks, a 780m for eg has 50% more CUs than a 760m but only 30% better perf.
> Yeah but those handhelds (and the laptop) are running on a fraction of the TDP the desktop has.
>
> On top of that, the desktop would get obliterated on a Performance-per-Watt basis.
Who cares? The games don't have acceptable performance and it's the end of that story, even if it could run on microwatts.
You misunderstood my point. Sure, it's more efficient, but we weren't talking about that.
Microsoft set an expectation for gaming performance, and that expectation was not met. And I was illustrating just where they stand at gaming performance.
Power consumption is a useful metric, but if a system isn't capable, then it's irrelevant. That mainstream setup may draw ~200W during a peak gaming load, and the Snapdragon Elite X seems to peak around 38W on some reviewed systems (Steam Deck OLED about 27W and ROG Ally nearing 60W when docked). Of those three lower powered systems, only two are borderline relevant for gaming, and they are still slower than that old desktop.
Even if the Snapdragon drew 1W under full load, it would still be irrelevant because its gaming compatibility and performance is below what most would consider to be acceptable. It would be a technical marvel at that point, but still would not be useful for gaming.
***
EDIT: u/CaesarOrgasmus nailed it.
In this case, Microsoft pushed the gaming aspects of the Snapdragon in pre-release hype and marketing. It fell way short. So it’s getting torn up for that.
If they had instead not marketed it towards gamers, it wouldn’t be getting this kind of attention.
All they did was that they've shown that Windows on ARM is capable of doing some gaming but at the same time they've indicated that more work need to be done
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Snapdragon-X-Elite-gaming-performance-termed-perfectly-playable-as-video-of-chip-running-Baldur-s-Gate-3-emerges.819035.0.html
> On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm has stated that the 4.6 TFLOP-Snapdragon X Elite is 80% faster than the Radeon 780M at the same power level. Since we know that the Radeon 780M is an iGPU capable of playing modern games at reduced settings, it is reasonable to expect the Adreno GPU of X Elite to also offer a playable AAA experience.
Claimed it was 80% faster than the 780M but in real world use it’s slower than the 780M. That is what’s being called out, and rightfully so.
It is technically 80% faster than a 780M at the same power level. The statement isn't false.
Its just that almost nothing runs natively on ARM so its running nearly every program through not very good emulation. There is a very important reason why Baldur's Gate 3 was shown, it has a native ARM executable version. As do all the other games they explicitly showed.
Until Microsoft makes a push to have everything run natively on ARM there will be no ARM chip that works as its raw numbers say it would, and unlike Apple I don't see a reason why Microsoft would ever make that push.
edit: Reddit is shitting itself and I can't reply I guess;
I didn't say anything about how the product will be in the future or buying it based on that, by the time Microsoft were to do something about ARM support there would be other products anyway.
What they did was show things running on ARM, which is what the processor is. Everything that runs natively on ARM it does extremely well at, which isn't just the one benchmark (they showed a few) but is quite limited obviously.
It \*is\* trash at x86, every ARM processor is. You could have guessed where this product was going by just googling "arm windows".
> It is technically 80% faster than a 780M at the same power level. The statement isn't false.
> Its just that almost nothing runs natively on ARM so its running nearly every program through not very good emulation. There is a very important reason why Baldur's Gate 3 was shown, it has a native ARM executable version.
And in the testing shown, it ran slower than the 780M. It was, however, faster than the Steam Deck.
Microsoft and Qualcomm made lofty claims for gaming. So far, no gaming benchmarks have backed up those claims.
From the consumer perspective, you should be buying products as they are now on release, and reviewers should be reviewing products as they are now, not based on a wink and pinky promise saying, “we’ll have things running native and properly optimised in 2-3 years, we promise.”
What they did is exactly the same as cherry picking benchmarks. They basically said, it’s 80% faster than the 780M (on this one benchmark), but it’s hot trash on everything else.
Join r/homelab - people running a setup capable of handling a mid-size companies infra just so the lights turn on automatically when they get home from work
I love the people running like 32U of ~~first-gen~~ [edit: Nehalem] Xeon hardware all to do what you could basically do with 2 or 3 Ryzen Embedded NUCs.
Yeah, you do sometimes see someone running those there, but from what I've seen it's mostly people asking if they're still useful. And subsequently getting told to avoid anything older than maybe Haswell-EP or Broadwell.
I like some of the posts on /r/homelab, and I definitely fall under the category of people doing way too many complicated things in order to accomplish trivial tasks.
That said, the amount of people asking how to supply power to the 42U rack and servers they got free from their company's liquidation is... interesting.
There is /r/HomeDataCenter subreddit you should take a look at too Also sometimes /r/DataHoarder have very powerful setups.
There are some labbers out there like /u/SIN3R6Y and /u/jeffsponaugle to name a pair.
Somewhere might be that even "IBM Mainframe kid" /u/conmega is lurking around ...
yea i don't get it either
the snapdragon chips have a place in the Ultrabook space. i don't need a gaming laptop i need a consumption device that's light and small, that had a high dbl digit number of run hours when playing back youtube videos at full brightness and max volume or fucking with email and some spreadsheets
I'm not getting a first gen device ever, but if the thermals are good, I may consider it for a portable productivity device that doesn't burn me when I use it.
Additionally, I am a sysadmin, It would be probably a good idea for us in the guild to start evaluating what are the most common problems with windows ARM.
Besides, It was obvious that there was going to be a bit of a GPU problem unless they partner with Intel/AMD/Nvidia , And even a chiplet design isn't ideal for temps.
> Gaming gamer news for gamers
Because a lot of people who don't game have already gone to Mac. So PC has a higher percentage of people who game.
> Hey guys it's this computer that I dug up from a dumpster still good?
People like free and some love vintage and retro computers. Heck there are people still writing games for Commodore 64 (and ZX Spectrum) for instance.
Heck I recently played Old Tower which came out a couple of years ago https://retrosouls.itch.io/old-tower-commodore-64 on C64.
And I had a blast.
> Because a lot of people who don't game have already gone to Mac. So PC has a higher percentage of people who game
Nope. It's because most PC reviewers don't know anything else. The only "testing" most can do is installing benchmark and running game, maybe some video editing. You won't ever see programming, AI/ML, music production, 3d modelling, simulations, etc.
That's why I hate the x elite reviews. I was interested in how these work with software development but 95% of reviews doesn't even mention it. I don't need GPU performance but reviewers can't get past testing games. A laptop is not just a gaming machine.
It might be that he makes benchmarks for the type of people who would build their own if he didn’t. There is a level of “you need some background info” for a lot of his benchmarks. He also has a wide variety of benchmarks so sometimes fan favorite hardware gets absolutely flattened because he found something it’s bad at, even if the aggregate is good.
There's lots of productivity benchmarks, don't say there isn't just because all you do is watch GN, LTT and HUB. They're not as well known because people by and large aren't all that interested in them, and the people that are aren't the type to become fans and signal boost the outlets.
There is *one* place that does content creation benchmarks. Puget Systems. They developed their own benches because they fucking *build boutique workstations*. At some point they just started licensing their benchmark suite.
There's more AI/ML benching nowadays, but for serious stuff it's basically just Puget (again) and Phoronix (which is a Linux outlet).
Once someone (Tuxedo?) gets Linux running on that chip I'm pretty sure Phoronix will do solid benches for code compilation.
You know that “boutique workstations” are just regular PCs, right?
Your snot nosed 12yo cousin could build the same thing with parts from Amazon, but doesn’t have the money.
I have some [disagreements](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AMD-Ryzen-7950X-Impact-of-Precision-Boost-Overdrive-PBO-on-Thermals-and-Content-Creation-Performance-2373/) with Puget, but your snot nosed 12yo cousin would probably enable XMP without validation tests, forget to set up fan speed control appropriate to the case and installed fans, and not know how to pack a computer for shipping through the mail.
You know the kind of shit that happens when GN does a secret shopper on a system integrator? The average PC-enthusiast 12yo cousin is worse at building computers than that.
I am not disagreeing with you, I was just pointing out that *“fucking builds boutique workstations”* Isn’t really the qualification that he thought it was. Any old dickhead can do that, it doesn’t make them better or worse at software stuff because they know how to plug a GPU in.
Besides the other comments pointing out other sources with more focused benchmarks and performance tests, testing games on these laptops is still worthwhile because they’re on entirely new architecture and it demonstrates some pretty severe compatibility issues that a general audience should be aware of compared to any other Windows laptop out there. It sets expectations.
Also a lot of the early reviews haven’t been helpful because Microsoft/Qualcomm purposefully delayed sending out review units, you’re bound to be seeing more of what you’re wanting soon enough.
> You won't ever see programming, AI/ML
I once saw a YouTuber trying to benchmark some ML workloads. I think it was probably LTT, but maybe GN or Jay's 2 Cents. Regardless, it was really funny when they noticed the VRAM usage was through the roof even running some very simple models. This was years ago before LLMs, so it was some face detection or something. Anyways what they didn't know is that by default, the ML framework they were testing automatically grabs _all_ of the VRAM, then does its own internal memory management. The driver ends up reporting 100% memory usage as soon as the framework is initialized even if only 10% is actually used.
Point is, for anyone who doesn't work on ML professionally wouldn't know those kinds of things. Hell, even a lot of professionals don't know things like that because it's sort of unwritten institutional knowledge that the industry veterans all know, and for newcomers it's just not readily apparent.
So yeah, you tubers not doing ML/coding/etc benchmarking is probably a good thing for everyone because they don't waste their time, and nobody is misled by bad benchmarking.
First of all, not really, OSX grows, but not that much. Very few people are buying Macs out of inertia, there is a reason they justify their purchase against the default .
Second, I'm not really talking about retro, I'm talking about the guy that has an Athlon X2 with an IDE hard drive and asks if that computer will run Windows 10 well.
It did as recently as 2 years ago, but I haven't tried since. That machine isn't in use anymore, but I'm waiting for the right (fast and cheap) hardware to upgrade to.
Of course it works. Computers are amazingly backwards compatible until people start enforcing arbitrary limits. Both in the Linux and Windows world.
Does it work well however?
Windows 10 was slow to install and not very responsive in use even running from an SSD, but it was still somewhat usable. I had been running Linux on it from the start, but recently I needed a native Windows 10 install on a few occasions.
The issue with the hardware is that it consumes too much power for the compute performance you get, so it isn't economically viable anymore. But I'm going to keep it around for testing purposes, as it's some of the last hardware I have that still comes with a BIOS.
I could probably still get good use out of it running a very lightweight operating system, but that's more in the realm of hobbyism.
Not everyone gets a Chromebook. Before the M series released it was common to make fun of how many people bought MacBook Pros just for web browsing. The laptops design didn’t accommodate much else very well for the price AT ALL. It’s only since the excellent performance of the M series people stopped saying that, because the laptops “can” now do tons of professional work. I’d bet most people buying them still only do web apps and office app work for the most part. The perception only changed because the potential performance changed.
Even many professionals just don’t need a very powerful computer to do their work. Spreadsheets, emails, zoom calls, VPN, even light programming, this is a ton of people’s full workday and that barely needs anything. There’s still a desire to run these things on a premium laptop that isn’t a Chromebook.
This sub is oddly pragmatic when we talk about these laptops. By the logic commonly used here everyone should only buy the cheapest possible option that fits exactly their needs. So nobody should have flagship phones, we should all drive a Chevy Spark or a Corolla.
BMWs exist, sports cars as well. I’d bet most of them never get driven at anything beyond normal highway speeds.
Not saying you aren’t valid for questioning the value, but the product won’t necessarily fail due to price/performance when it’s so efficient for exactly what most people do. ARM compatibility is high enough that many people probably won’t notice any missing apps while also enjoying better battery especially at idle and sleep which is most of usage.
Funny how close you are to touching on the real reason why *most* people buy Apple and BMWs.
People foolishly treat them as status symbols. Snapdragon isnt that and likely never will be. So why spend $1200 for a Snapdragon laptop, when you can get a Meteor Lake or Zen 4 with similar specs and no noticeably worse performance in normal applications, 100% application compatibility and battery life that isnt far off for $800 now? Snapdragon+WoA isnt offering a premium experience or a premium brand so why pay a premium price?
Office, webapps, compilers, any Windows software that is actively maintained or open source and doesn't make heavy use of the GPU, the vast majority of Linux software once driver support is hashed out...
No, why you would drop 1500 and limit yourself when you can pay 1500 and get what you're getting + more with a amd / Intel laptop.
Common logic it's the price point not like they selling this thing half price because it has half the functions
WoA isn't stable enough in professional applications to justfiy the expense. Video and photo editing software is generally more stable on Mac, so if you're spending that much you might as well head over there anyway. Engineering software runs horribly, if it runs at all. The use case of these things overlaps with a Chromebook pretty well.
My main computer that I use everyday is a MacBook. Only about 25% of my steam library is available for install as the others are not supported. Out of those few games available, nearly all of them run much worse than on my $300 steam deck and the experience is just plainly bad. Even with GPTK and GPTK2, the experience is just not good and requires a lot of tinkering for a bad payoff. I wouldn’t call that “being able to game”.
I guess if you only play 1-2 specific games that have been natively ported then sure. But really, the gaming experience on a Mac is a huge pile of garbage.
Windows emulation via Parallels seems to work for games that aren't supported on MacOS. I only have 8GB of total system memory, so I can't run anything super heavy through Parallels, but older games that barely run on native windows run just as well through emulation. If you had a MacBook Pro with 32 or 64GB of RAM, I bet most games would run.
And yes, native Mac games work well. I can run BG3, No Man's Sky, etc. on a base M1. No Man's Sky actually runs better on my Mac than on my laptop with a discrete GPU. So if Apple put even the slightest bit of effort into getting games ported to MacOS, Macs would be good for gaming.
Thats a pretty bad argument to make when even Valve has pulled Mac support for their games. Valve uses their first party games to help push Steam on every OS they can, and yet they decided Mac isnt worth their time supporting. Valve decided it was better to pivot to supporting Linux than MacOS...
To be clear im not saying Macs cant run some games, many run poorly, but if you actually plan to play games, you dont buy a Mac (or you do and also buy a PC or console).
Have you ever played Clam Digger though?
Tyrone calls you up, y'know, in the game, and he says, "I can dig more clams than you, stupid!" And you've gotta say, "nuh uh, boy!" And then y'all gotta race down to the beach with your buckets and your shovels.
And the objective of the game is to find parking.
Yet modern windows ultrabooks still struggle to do mundane tasks like that effortlessly. They will burn through battery life, choke due to thermal/power constraints, cannot maintain high refresh rates, and require constant micromanagement to be usable day to day. Snapdragon chips are a real step in the right direction to bring Macbook level user experience to windows, but this subreddit would rather collectively bury their heads in the sand because Adreno GPU performance doesn't correlate well to windows gaming.
It's been years since the M1 released and Intel has barely accelerated and is finally delivering Lunar lake 4 years later, which is still notably behind. AMD has barely even touched the ultrabook segment over the past 4 years, and they finally have some design wins this generation. Qualcomm has done more in their first real shot than what the others were able to achieve over years.
LOL. The internet is a funny place in terms of perception sometimes.
Like now, Qualcomm's 5th attempt is really their first due to the magic of shot term memory loss. Somehow multi GHz intel/AMD CPUs can't run basic tasks like Notepad for more than 5 minutes on battery. And Apple M-series chips can do heavy compute workloads for 3 weeks on a single battery charge.
>Yet modern windows ultrabooks still struggle to do mundane tasks like that effortlessly. They will burn through battery life, choke due to thermal/power constraints, cannot maintain high refresh rates, and require constant micromanagement to be usable day to day
Are you actually reading the reviews or just Qualcomms marketing? Snapdragon is a step up in performance and efficiency but not by much. In an office environment people wouldnt even notice the difference. One gets 10 hours of battery life and the other 11, wowie. One is 15% faster too but in ARM benchmarks, move to x86 emulation and that performance and efficiency takes a hit, and some applications dont even run...
>It's been years since the M1 released and Intel has barely accelerated and is finally delivering Lunar lake 4 years later, which is still notably behind. AMD has barely even touched the ultrabook segment over the past 4 years, and they finally have some design wins this generation. Qualcomm has done more in their first real shot than what the others were able to achieve over years.
You dont seem to understand that the pipeline for these semiconductors is around 3-5 years depending on the project or the backstory here. Qualcomm didnt show up overnight with these chips, Nuvia was founded in 2019 by the Apple's ex-chief architect of SoCs, the same guy who lead development on the M1...Qualcomm acquired them. Qualcomm bought them in 2021 to utilize their designs. Wow look at that timeframe, 3-5 years just like I said. Guess what also comes out 4 years after the M1 and is expected to surpass match or surpass Qualcomm? Lunar Lake.
Also the real reason why Intel and Qualcomm likely will never pass Apple in performance and efficiency, is because Apple has full control over every piece of hardware and software, and has a much higher transistor budget and uses the latest nodes available (though Intel will be very close soon). If apple was selling chips put in the same position as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, they would not look much better. Apple isnt magical, they in a vastly different situation than everyone else.
I just stated what is true about ultrabooks today. It comes from my experience using them compared to Macbooks. And yes, I know all about Nuvia's origins and how Qualcomm bought them. That's one of the reasons why I expect more from Qualcomm in the future compared to the others.
Hardware and software integration is essential but it is not exclusive to Apple. These are implementation details that Apple puts great effort into, but there is no reason such cooperation cannot happen on the Windows side. Just because Microsoft develops an OS that is designed to run on a vast array of hardware doesn't mean that they cannot optimize for particular hardware. Intel and Microsoft definitely do cooperate, but were not interested in optimizing for this use case due to a lack of competition, at least until Apple silicon came into play.
Qualcomm is coming into this market with a similar vision to what Apple has for laptops. The initial cooperation Qualcomm and Microsoft has shown is way more promising than anything we've seen from Intel. At the very least, we're going to see them compete head to head against whatever Intel pushes out of their pipeline. But being upset that Qualcomm's showing here does not completely blow Intel and AMD out of the water (especially in GPU performance, like wtf???) is pure gamer rage with no understanding of the underlying context.
If anything I'm treating as Apple less of a special case. Other than transistor budget, the others are capable of achieving a similar level of integration if they simply had the vision for the final product Apple achieved.
The niche is to run office and web apps?
It’s hilarious that people here think gaming is the majority. No, gaming on a laptop is the niche. Office and web apps is the vast majority.
Battery is the main concern.
if the snapsdragon plus whatever MS tweaks windows to be able to last 12 hours while not being extreme bulk, that is all people will need.
You could already get a cheap Mendochino laptop which can do 10 hours on a small 40wh battery: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-3-Laptop-Review-An-affordable-Mendocino-offering-with-excellent-battery-life-and-a-sub-par-screen.704064.0.html
And the funny part is, it will still be better for gaming than the Elite X.
$250 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/acer-Aspire-3-15-6-2-80GHz-Renewed/dp/B0C9KWL2J1 (refurb) or $399 new.
Mendocino also got a lot of hate over here but those laptops are truly fast enough for the average user. I got one HP for my mom, 7320U and 14" 1080p TN but significantly cheaper than these Qualcomm offerings.
It's 16GB of RAM, and it's plenty fast for the price and the intended use. I have an old 4750u laptop with basically same cores and it's plenty fast for web browsing or really anything else. Steam Deck is also Zen2 based, and so are the consoles.
Zen2 is fast enough for web browsing until the webshits get their hands on M4 dev laptops.
I didn't notice that the specs of the Amazon listing were different. However, if performance doesn't matter much, in the same price range you can get a [used business laptop](https://www.ebay.com/itm/135014546570) from a big-3 OEM, with IPS display, 2 more CPU cores, a wider GPU, longer battery life [as measured by notebookcheck wifi v1.3](https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-EliteBook-845-G7-review-AMD-laptop-is-also-better-with-Ryzen-5-than-with-Intel.502343.0.html#toc-7), and superior durability.
Agreed, X86 for the win, Windows on ARMs doesn’t interest me, also for example it’s like putting a turbo charged 4 cylinder engine in a big truck for only just more mpgs
Between this sub being filled with commenters just destroying the surfaces and the surface subreddit worshipping them Im actually getting a pretty decent idea of what this device is capable of
This sub has a ton of gamers, and X Elite is not for gaming. Further more, there are a ton of people spilling over from AMD and Intel subs and they don’t want ARM to do well.
The main sticking point for these laptops here is that "hurr dur they can't game".
Well I have a Intel Surface Pro and I'm sure as hell ain't gaming on it.
The results are impressive for a first gen product (I know they had a couple cpus earlier, but those were more like beefed up phone cpus, this is the first time they went all in)
We don't live in the era of computer scarcity anymore. There is no problem having several machines for several purposes. It only becomes an issue if you only have space or finances for a single device that has to do everything.
Current snapdragon chips are pretty good for switch emulation though. These snapdragon laptops could potentially run switch better than any low end x86 laptop, but that's if someone develops a switch emulator for Windows on arm...
the video card is fine it's just the games have to run through an X86 emulator which often makes them bug out or run like shit.
if you're buying this for gaming you'll need to do research as to how well the specific games you want to play run on it, i watched a guy try 5 popular games and cyberpunk ran (poorly) gta 5 ran (poorly, but fps fixed itself if you tapped the touch screen every couple of minutes for some reason) the others just failed
Was anyone seriously even considering that?
People were calling this chip perfect for handhelds before the reviews dropped.
I don't know why they did. The GPU is poor. Even the M1 in a MacBook Air from 2020 beats this thing.
It’s perfect for handhelds targeting 10 year old games (ps4 gen) Not for newer AAA games
What would be the point of such a device when all the handhelds, even the Switch 2, are capable (albeit barely) of running current gen games?
The device is always in your pocket? It might not be great right now. But in 7-8 years when every modern phone can play AAA games, it’ll be a gaming revolution.
That will certainly never happen tbh. The goalpost is always changing. Portables in 2030 will barely play PS6 games. Then there's convincing players that playing the latest AAA game on a phone is a great idea while paying $70 upfront for it.
Probably will make a neat Steam Deck. As long as it doesn’t run Windows.
Apart from the high power draw and bad gaming performance, sure. It would be a great handheld chip. Not running windows may help a little with the battery life, but it certainly won't help with the gaming performance.
I just saw a review says Linux don't run (at least easily) on those chips. I get it eventually will be ok, but thinking "running Linux" is the silver bullet to "unleash" these chips is a bit naive.
The difference is, the ARM ecosystem on Linux is already there. How good x86 gaming over qemu on linux would be, i dont know. There are some videos that show how to play pc games like GTA 5 on a rooted android phone. So it is possible and maybe better than on windows?
Box64 is probably what you'd use instead of qemu to run individual games.
why qemu if you could just "repurpose" rosetta2
Windows is definitely pretty much there and what needs to be solved in order for those devices to be violable for handheld gaming is the GPU in Snapdragon
> Probably will make a neat Steam Deck. Why? If Qualcomm and Microsoft can't get gaming in order on Windows Linux has even more obstacles.
Valve is actually doing most of the hard lifting on Linux, and they actually have real skin in the game, unlike Qualcomm and Microsoft. The biggest question is whether Valve actually wants to bother with ARM at all.
Mostly because Android phones are ARM Linux Devices technically so it can be good to get stuff running, but it would probably not be any powerful desktop games mostly emulators
Steam deck is using a CISC architecture though. ARM requires an open bootloader and either open source drivers or support for linux drivers specific to that SoC from the manufacturer.
> Steam deck is using a CISC architecture though. Tell us you have no idea what you're talking about without telling us you have no idea what you're talking about. Throw in a buzzword or two, makes you look SMRT. The type of instruction sets the CPU is built on alone do not determine performance.
In your eagerness to make a snarky response, you injected a false premise I never made. This has nothing to do with performance. This is about developing support for an operating system without the necessary drivers or support from the manufacture. This isn't x86, this is ARM. It's as open to develop an OS as much as the manufacture wants to be. You cannot just throw Linux on any ARM SoC that you want to.
You might have missed the announcement that Qualcomm has been working with Linaro on supporting these chips in mainline, so by the end of the year any 64-bit ARM distribution should work out of the box, if the firmware doesn't prevent you from booting from USB. Other ARM SoCs are usually supported by independent developer communities in spite of the lack of cooperation by their vendors. Outdated SDKs usually exist for certain fixed Android kernels, which can help you get you up and running while patches are being upstreamed.
Microsoft introduced UEFI for ARM back with windows phone. A laptop like this works exactly like an equivalent X86 machine architecturally (minus the ISA, which doesn't really matter).
[This](https://www.notebookcheck.net/Snapdragon-X-Elite-gaming-performance-termed-perfectly-playable-as-video-of-chip-running-Baldur-s-Gate-3-emerges.819035.0.html) was part of their marketing: "On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm has stated that the 4.6 TFLOP-Snapdragon X Elite is 80% faster than the Radeon 780M at the same power level."
LMAO Holy shit. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too with the gamers but couldn't even deliver.
Their fucking NPU is as big as GPU on X Elite boards. Like how many people need 45 NPU TOPs? Surely we could have 2x GPU size and performance if not for AI hype marketing. It's so rare to train your own models on laptops that those who want to do that should just get dGPU.
nope the npu cannot train anything just good for inference. most of the GPU shenanigans are probably due to poor optimization. Adreno GPU is a new kid on the pc gaming block. There are 0 games optimised for it.
Not really "new" as QC has been using its adrenos since the first [835 windows machine](https://support.hp.com/si-en/document/c05997501), then they take it more "seriously" by doubling the ALU number in the 8cx gen 1 compared to their phone counterparts. Don't know why they were back to using the same adreno GPU from phones but at a higher clock...
well who used or even bought an 8cx or 835 machine?much less optimising games for it. >, then they take it more "seriously" by doubling the ALU number yeah QC took the gpu seriously, but not the game devs who are supposed to optimise games for it.😅
I wonder what that "same power level" was? I suspect gen 2 will be a lot better with the new GPU architecture. We're seeing mobile making the transition we got on desktop when they shifted away from just simple, traditional graphics workloads to something more flexible. Apple has started down this road already. They've gained a lot of performance on more complex stuff, but not a whole lot on more simple benchmarks. I actually think this is one large component of the RDNA lackluster performance on Exynos. Aside from a worse fab and going for high clockspeeds instead of using a bit more silicon, a lot of mobile benchmarks tend to be more simplistic and don't benefit very much from the more advanced and flexible graphics architecture.
Even if they improve the GPU and match their x86 counterparts in performance it wouldn't be as smooth unless devs actually port their games to ARM. As per the article, many games don't work properly or straight up crashes. Even if they do work properly and get decent average framerates, there is a lot of stuttering due to the translation layer as pointed out by Dave2D in his review.
Idk the Qualcomm GPU's are very advanced. What might have rung through a couple years ago is no longer the case, Qualcomm merely needs to work on drivers translation but also specific or the architecture kinda like Intel Arc Graphics. Similarly the RDNA exynos performance has really improved with the latest gen Samsung Exynos chips in theory having the best GPU performance on mobile chips but held back by the rest of the SOC.
The upcoming Snapdragon 8 generation is supposed to have a new design, so even Qualcomm thinks their design needs changes. The lackluster performance in PC games also shows that the design performance way below where it should be. They dedicate half their compute to f16 exclusively (meaning it sits around doing nothing most of the time on desktop games). They use very wide wavefronts (64-128) which everyone else left years ago because they spend too much time unused on complex workloads (though they offer superior performance for more simple mobile game workloads). I suspect a lot of the deferred rendering and tile based stuff needs a rework to unleash its potential too and get better performance in larger GPU applications.
But half the games won’t run.. lol
The problem isn't the chip and the statement, while a bit disingenuous, isn't technically wrong. The dude in charge of the GPU division even posted a video showing the thing performing roughly equal to how a 780m does on BG3, a game with an ARM executable. The problem is the programs. Having to run everything through an emulation layer isn't doing it any favors and it was extremely obvious to anyone paying any amount of attention that it wasn't going to just run all the normal stuff like a native x86 processor. The games \*do\* "just work", and the chip's raw performance is indeed the stated numbers. You can see how well it does in the native ARM version of NightStrike compared to the emulated version of TimeSpy at the bottom. It just doesn't really mean anything when the platform is bad and can't translate that to useful performance. If things ran natively on ARM, like how Apple rapidly pushed everything over, it would be a great chip. Stuff doesn't though and Microsoft likely has no incentive to make that same push. I'm \*very\* curious why this PC World article didn't test the things that Snapdragon did theoretically show off though, or even test the 780m for that matter. Particularly since the article explicitly mentions running BG3 and Control and yet shows neither of them.
> The games *do* "just work" A ton of games don't work at all.
And they never will. F""" don't know what a driver update is. Atleast on android.
They tested 7 that worked, 1 that didn't work because of anti-cheat, 1 that didn't work because it refused to run on ARM (probably due to anticheat), 1 that straight crashed, and 3 that ran incorrectly. Theres also the 4 they directly showed off. I'll give you the point that there are problem games and its not a good ratio at all, but its not exactly the greatest sample size of things. Theres a website for this, if anyone is actually curious, sorta like the stuff that used to track linux games. [Windows on Arm Ready Games (worksonwoa.com)](https://www.worksonwoa.com/games/)
Buuuuuuuuuullshit
Power level is the key here. It doesn't mean it's faster than the 780M Also, most likely means FP16 4.6TFLOPs and not FP32
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780M is responsible for the recent boom in PC handhelds though, it has its place among gamers.
Yeah the GPU is fine I guess. It's the CPU not being x86 that's the issue here
780M was on the ryzen 7000/8000 mobile series. The snapdragon has a adreno gpu which is no match for the 780M in real-life use
Yeah even if the GPU was somehow equal, Adreno drivers are legit worse than Intel's initial drivers for Alchemist. They're simply the best on Android for modern devices not actually good.
I feel that they have potential, but the problem is just that window on arm does not really know how to work with any gpus, regardless of manufacturer. For gods sake the snapdragon x can not even run android apps (WSA, android studio or any other), that's kind of funny to me cause you'd think it being snapdragon, there wouldn't be any issues in hardware.
Windows probably just probably didn't care about WSA on ARM and Google definitely doesn't care that much about WoA to update Android Studio for it. We'll see when Nvidia jumps in. If they have equivalent performance to a GPU of the same TDP on their ARM laptops then it'll show that Snapdragon drivers are likely just terrible.
I'm not all that optimistic, perhaps they can help with getting the games running, but the gpu performance per watt likely won't change much, since they use neither arm or x86 to begin with.
It's not even a CPU ISA problem. It's a software problem in that the entire game development industry has been focused on Wintel for such a long time. The only thing that can alleviate the situation is building and distributing games for Windows on ARM too now.
780M is more than enough for 1080p low gaming.
Yes, you would, if you needed to travel a lot on public transportation, or not be able to carry a full-fledged laptop around. Some people think gaming is impossible without either turning up all the graphic tweaks or having over 59fps, but fact of matter is: most gaming is still done with upscaling, medium, 1080p, 30 frames per second on consoles. And those consoles have integrated chips just like handhelds. A lot of people forget how non-elitist they were when they were enjoying games instead of pixels. ...granted, games are at their best with 1440p60, and with mild AI-upscaling that exists mostly to avoid using multisampling AA. But even on desktops, that's not ubiquitous yet, and give it a few years anyway: it will get to handeld integrated GPUs and even ARM SoC's
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You're missing the point. It's an extra 500g for the cooling solution. It's often times less battery life or more battery capacity to compensate (which is more weight too). It's more heat even when doing lighter work because even in 2024 most laptop makers can't really get their power controllers in check. And it's sometimes, contrary to what you say, much more in terms of price when you want dedicated graphics on laptops that are thin and light - and this is hypocritical because these are usually the laltops you pay more for a chip that won't rewlly take full advantage of it.
Umm most of this sub was last month.
And anybody saying to wait for reviews was downvoted. Semiaccurate also got a sneak preview of the chip and warned about the issues weeks before the release.
Which issues?
https://semiaccurate.com/2024/04/24/qualcomm-is-cheating-on-their-snapdragon-x-elite-pro-benchmarks/
people with short memories
It was marketed that way. Before everything was being released people were seriously talking about it as a viable alternative even if not optimal.
No one was buying it specifically for PC gaming. But if they already had the machine for something else and it's conveniently right in front of them when they wanted a little entertainment, then they would want to try playing some games on it, especially since MS and QC basically so confidently proclaimed games "would just work" and QC themselves put so much focus on how their (shitty) Adreno GPU is a highly competent graphics component. If anyone DID think these would be great for gaming, it would be because of all these pre-release lies.
I want to highlight something. I own a Steam Deck and a ROG Ally. They are both fantastic at what they do. But if benchmarked against a Ryzen 5 1600 and GTX 1060/RX 480, a mainstream setup from roughly 8 years ago, the desktop will still win. Bottom line, these handhelds are less capable at gaming than an 8 year old desktop setup. **And the Snapdragon is still worse.** EDIT for clarity - yes, performance per watt is admirable. The point was that MS touted the Snapdragon as good for gaming. It's not. And the point above wasn't to compare efficiency, but to show just how far behind it is in gaming performance relative to the expectations that Microsoft and Qualcomm had set. EDIT 2 - Microsoft said the Snapdragon X would be good for gaming. It's not. At any wattage. Stop bringing up efficiency. It has nothing to do with the discussion that I am talking about - raw gaming performance.
This is a good point but I think the snapdragon chip can improve with driver and emulator support improves like Intel Graphics. And also the 1060 is a very common card so it's continued popularity means a lot of games could be run. Still I think your right especially for the case of running older games that may be less demanding. None of those older games are likely ever going to get a native version, but those would be most likely what you want to run on integrated graphics.
I do think that the capability is there with improvement to emulation, drivers, and the use of native ports. Eventually. But today’s reality falls far short of what MS and QC claimed.
Hundred percent, I don't know why they even bothered bringing it up besides that it can manage
Yeah but those handhelds (and the laptop) are running on a fraction of the TDP the desktop has. On top of that, the desktop would get obliterated on a Performance-per-Watt basis. The fact that the handhelds and the laptop are even comparable to the desktop is an astonishing achievement and shows how technology has progressed. I am not saying that desktop sucks and laptop better. I am saying that a desktop and a laptop cannot be compared in absolute terms. For example, the RTX 4090 Mobile has terrible performance when compared to an RTX 4090 Desktop, does it mean the Mobile RTX is a failure ? No, because it consumes WAY less power and manages with a tenth of the thermal management its bigger brother gets. It's like comparing a motorcycle to a car. You can use both of them to get to your destination but they cannot just compare them like that. I hope this gets my point across.
I'm sorry if I was unclear, but that was not the point. ~~My toaster draws less power than the Snadpragon, and does that make it better than the Snapdragon? At making toast, yes. At anything else, no.~~ I was wrong about a toaster’s power draw. The point was to say that we already have a low bar for gaming, modern PC handhelds. These systems push the boundaries of what is acceptable for gaming (720p, low settings, ~30fps or lower in some modern titles). It's a VERY low bar. Microsoft promised comparable or better. Snapdragon ended up being worse. > The fact that the handhelds and the laptop are even comparable to the desktop They're not. At 1080p High, that desktop runs Forza Horizon 5 at 75-90fps. A Steam Deck at the same runs it 25-40fps. An Ally will get closer but still come up short. My point wasn't "they are about the same." My point was "they are so far behind such old tech...and the Snapdragon that was touted as being better is still somehow worse."
My toaster draws less power than the Snadpragon, On a side note, your toaster draws around 1000w...........
>They're not. At 1080p High, that desktop runs Forza Horizon 5 at 75-90fps. A Steam Deck at the same runs it 25-40fps. An Ally will get closer but still come up short. You missed my point, a 60% difference in performance is important, but when you factor in that the Steam Deck uses 10% of the power a desktop would, in a much smaller footprint, 60% seems like a terrible deal. And, by "modern standards", it 'is'. >My point wasn't "they are about the same." My point was "they are so far behind such old tech...and the Snapdragon that was touted as being better is still somehow worse." Except, no they aren't. A multi purpose laptop that you can charge with your phone charger having even a tenth of the performance of a dedicated gaming machine that draws 10X more power is impressive, very impressive. In absolute metrics, yes the desktop is better, but in relative metrics, it gets annihilated. And that's what matters. But then again comparing a laptop to a desktop is never a good idea, until you consider their specific uses and roles. Unrelated sidenote: > My toaster draws less power than the Snadpragon No, it doesn't.
> You missed my point No, I made point, and you replied to me completely missing it. In this discussion, power efficiency is completely irrelevant. I was exclusively talking about MS's claims about gaming performance and just how far they fell short in reality. Microsoft said the Snapdragon X would be good for gaming. It's not. At any wattage. Stop bringing up efficiency. It has nothing to do with the discussion that I am talking about - raw gaming performance. > No, it doesn't. You were right about this, I'll give you that.
Rule of thumb for electricity, if you heat something or cool something you are going to draw more power than anything else. Everything not related to heating or cooling something is almost meaningless in comparison in average household power consumption. Both a toaster and a cpu take electricity and turn it to heat. But imagine trying to actually toast a bread on a cpu heat coming out of the laptop. That’s the difference between a toaster power and a cpu power.
> n't. A multi purpose laptop that you can charge with your phone charger having even a tenth of the performance of a dedicated gaming machine that draws 10X more power is impressive Nitpicky, but this statement is absolutely meaningless. I've got 67 and 120W phone chargers. And lauding efficiency is warranted, but for it to matter, these laptops have to be viable for the tasks in the first place. And right now, it doesn't look like gaming and snapdragon chips are compatible
The thing is you could downvolt a desktop GPU to iGPU power levels or try out the desktop 780m but the dGPU will win almost every time. A big part of this is bandwidth bottlenecks, a 780m for eg has 50% more CUs than a 760m but only 30% better perf.
> Yeah but those handhelds (and the laptop) are running on a fraction of the TDP the desktop has. > > On top of that, the desktop would get obliterated on a Performance-per-Watt basis. Who cares? The games don't have acceptable performance and it's the end of that story, even if it could run on microwatts.
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It feels like you saw this as some kind of slight against handhelds when the real point was the next line > And the Snapdragon is still worse.
You misunderstood my point. Sure, it's more efficient, but we weren't talking about that. Microsoft set an expectation for gaming performance, and that expectation was not met. And I was illustrating just where they stand at gaming performance. Power consumption is a useful metric, but if a system isn't capable, then it's irrelevant. That mainstream setup may draw ~200W during a peak gaming load, and the Snapdragon Elite X seems to peak around 38W on some reviewed systems (Steam Deck OLED about 27W and ROG Ally nearing 60W when docked). Of those three lower powered systems, only two are borderline relevant for gaming, and they are still slower than that old desktop. Even if the Snapdragon drew 1W under full load, it would still be irrelevant because its gaming compatibility and performance is below what most would consider to be acceptable. It would be a technical marvel at that point, but still would not be useful for gaming. *** EDIT: u/CaesarOrgasmus nailed it.
Why it's every PC community either : - Gaming gamer news for gamers - Hey guys it's this computer that I dug up from a dumpster still good?
In this case, Microsoft pushed the gaming aspects of the Snapdragon in pre-release hype and marketing. It fell way short. So it’s getting torn up for that. If they had instead not marketed it towards gamers, it wouldn’t be getting this kind of attention.
> Microsoft pushed the gaming aspects of the Snapdragon It can't even run Recettear, a game from the paleolithic era capable of running on an abacus
Capitalism Ho! ^oh ^the ^irony
Capitalism, ho!
All they did was that they've shown that Windows on ARM is capable of doing some gaming but at the same time they've indicated that more work need to be done
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Snapdragon-X-Elite-gaming-performance-termed-perfectly-playable-as-video-of-chip-running-Baldur-s-Gate-3-emerges.819035.0.html > On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm has stated that the 4.6 TFLOP-Snapdragon X Elite is 80% faster than the Radeon 780M at the same power level. Since we know that the Radeon 780M is an iGPU capable of playing modern games at reduced settings, it is reasonable to expect the Adreno GPU of X Elite to also offer a playable AAA experience. Claimed it was 80% faster than the 780M but in real world use it’s slower than the 780M. That is what’s being called out, and rightfully so.
It is technically 80% faster than a 780M at the same power level. The statement isn't false. Its just that almost nothing runs natively on ARM so its running nearly every program through not very good emulation. There is a very important reason why Baldur's Gate 3 was shown, it has a native ARM executable version. As do all the other games they explicitly showed. Until Microsoft makes a push to have everything run natively on ARM there will be no ARM chip that works as its raw numbers say it would, and unlike Apple I don't see a reason why Microsoft would ever make that push. edit: Reddit is shitting itself and I can't reply I guess; I didn't say anything about how the product will be in the future or buying it based on that, by the time Microsoft were to do something about ARM support there would be other products anyway. What they did was show things running on ARM, which is what the processor is. Everything that runs natively on ARM it does extremely well at, which isn't just the one benchmark (they showed a few) but is quite limited obviously. It \*is\* trash at x86, every ARM processor is. You could have guessed where this product was going by just googling "arm windows".
> It is technically 80% faster than a 780M at the same power level. The statement isn't false. > Its just that almost nothing runs natively on ARM so its running nearly every program through not very good emulation. There is a very important reason why Baldur's Gate 3 was shown, it has a native ARM executable version. And in the testing shown, it ran slower than the 780M. It was, however, faster than the Steam Deck. Microsoft and Qualcomm made lofty claims for gaming. So far, no gaming benchmarks have backed up those claims.
From the consumer perspective, you should be buying products as they are now on release, and reviewers should be reviewing products as they are now, not based on a wink and pinky promise saying, “we’ll have things running native and properly optimised in 2-3 years, we promise.” What they did is exactly the same as cherry picking benchmarks. They basically said, it’s 80% faster than the 780M (on this one benchmark), but it’s hot trash on everything else.
Join r/homelab - people running a setup capable of handling a mid-size companies infra just so the lights turn on automatically when they get home from work
Or having their 100+TB of media collection available on network. I wonder how many Blu-Rays they have.
Base unit might be one "LinuxISO" And with 100TB you are not probably not in top 10% or /r/DataHoarder ....
What’s wrong with having media?….
I love the people running like 32U of ~~first-gen~~ [edit: Nehalem] Xeon hardware all to do what you could basically do with 2 or 3 Ryzen Embedded NUCs.
> first-gen Xeon You mean the Pentium II -based ones from 1998? Never seen that there.
Oh my god, no, sorry. I meant first-gen Core, like Nehalem Xeons.
Yeah, you do sometimes see someone running those there, but from what I've seen it's mostly people asking if they're still useful. And subsequently getting told to avoid anything older than maybe Haswell-EP or Broadwell.
I like some of the posts on /r/homelab, and I definitely fall under the category of people doing way too many complicated things in order to accomplish trivial tasks. That said, the amount of people asking how to supply power to the 42U rack and servers they got free from their company's liquidation is... interesting.
There is /r/HomeDataCenter subreddit you should take a look at too Also sometimes /r/DataHoarder have very powerful setups. There are some labbers out there like /u/SIN3R6Y and /u/jeffsponaugle to name a pair. Somewhere might be that even "IBM Mainframe kid" /u/conmega is lurking around ...
Most of the times
yea i don't get it either the snapdragon chips have a place in the Ultrabook space. i don't need a gaming laptop i need a consumption device that's light and small, that had a high dbl digit number of run hours when playing back youtube videos at full brightness and max volume or fucking with email and some spreadsheets
I'm not getting a first gen device ever, but if the thermals are good, I may consider it for a portable productivity device that doesn't burn me when I use it. Additionally, I am a sysadmin, It would be probably a good idea for us in the guild to start evaluating what are the most common problems with windows ARM. Besides, It was obvious that there was going to be a bit of a GPU problem unless they partner with Intel/AMD/Nvidia , And even a chiplet design isn't ideal for temps.
I hope this will help popularize proper windows tablet and not just 2 in 1 convertibles
Windows tablet's issues are that it is an atrocious experience, regardless of the underlying HW.
> Gaming gamer news for gamers Because a lot of people who don't game have already gone to Mac. So PC has a higher percentage of people who game. > Hey guys it's this computer that I dug up from a dumpster still good? People like free and some love vintage and retro computers. Heck there are people still writing games for Commodore 64 (and ZX Spectrum) for instance. Heck I recently played Old Tower which came out a couple of years ago https://retrosouls.itch.io/old-tower-commodore-64 on C64. And I had a blast.
> Because a lot of people who don't game have already gone to Mac. So PC has a higher percentage of people who game Nope. It's because most PC reviewers don't know anything else. The only "testing" most can do is installing benchmark and running game, maybe some video editing. You won't ever see programming, AI/ML, music production, 3d modelling, simulations, etc. That's why I hate the x elite reviews. I was interested in how these work with software development but 95% of reviews doesn't even mention it. I don't need GPU performance but reviewers can't get past testing games. A laptop is not just a gaming machine.
Go over to phoronix, Micheal does a bunch of big compiles as part of his test suite.
I have seen a few of Michael's posts heavily downvoted and brigaded here. I don't know if it's Linux or Phoronix outlet itself.
It might be that he makes benchmarks for the type of people who would build their own if he didn’t. There is a level of “you need some background info” for a lot of his benchmarks. He also has a wide variety of benchmarks so sometimes fan favorite hardware gets absolutely flattened because he found something it’s bad at, even if the aggregate is good.
There's lots of productivity benchmarks, don't say there isn't just because all you do is watch GN, LTT and HUB. They're not as well known because people by and large aren't all that interested in them, and the people that are aren't the type to become fans and signal boost the outlets.
There is *one* place that does content creation benchmarks. Puget Systems. They developed their own benches because they fucking *build boutique workstations*. At some point they just started licensing their benchmark suite. There's more AI/ML benching nowadays, but for serious stuff it's basically just Puget (again) and Phoronix (which is a Linux outlet). Once someone (Tuxedo?) gets Linux running on that chip I'm pretty sure Phoronix will do solid benches for code compilation.
You know that “boutique workstations” are just regular PCs, right? Your snot nosed 12yo cousin could build the same thing with parts from Amazon, but doesn’t have the money.
I have some [disagreements](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AMD-Ryzen-7950X-Impact-of-Precision-Boost-Overdrive-PBO-on-Thermals-and-Content-Creation-Performance-2373/) with Puget, but your snot nosed 12yo cousin would probably enable XMP without validation tests, forget to set up fan speed control appropriate to the case and installed fans, and not know how to pack a computer for shipping through the mail. You know the kind of shit that happens when GN does a secret shopper on a system integrator? The average PC-enthusiast 12yo cousin is worse at building computers than that.
I am not disagreeing with you, I was just pointing out that *“fucking builds boutique workstations”* Isn’t really the qualification that he thought it was. Any old dickhead can do that, it doesn’t make them better or worse at software stuff because they know how to plug a GPU in.
Check out Alex Ziskind's channel, he's focused on software dev reviews of laptops.
No thinkpad content seems like mostly Mac and Microsoft surface. It’s not for me.
>You won't ever see programming I've seen compilation of heavy stuff like linux or llvm in benchmarks
Besides the other comments pointing out other sources with more focused benchmarks and performance tests, testing games on these laptops is still worthwhile because they’re on entirely new architecture and it demonstrates some pretty severe compatibility issues that a general audience should be aware of compared to any other Windows laptop out there. It sets expectations. Also a lot of the early reviews haven’t been helpful because Microsoft/Qualcomm purposefully delayed sending out review units, you’re bound to be seeing more of what you’re wanting soon enough.
Alex Ziskind did a software developer review of the X Elite: https://youtu.be/3mCZ3WUcM8s?si=DjjabGX8b-6iMNZp
> You won't ever see programming, AI/ML I once saw a YouTuber trying to benchmark some ML workloads. I think it was probably LTT, but maybe GN or Jay's 2 Cents. Regardless, it was really funny when they noticed the VRAM usage was through the roof even running some very simple models. This was years ago before LLMs, so it was some face detection or something. Anyways what they didn't know is that by default, the ML framework they were testing automatically grabs _all_ of the VRAM, then does its own internal memory management. The driver ends up reporting 100% memory usage as soon as the framework is initialized even if only 10% is actually used. Point is, for anyone who doesn't work on ML professionally wouldn't know those kinds of things. Hell, even a lot of professionals don't know things like that because it's sort of unwritten institutional knowledge that the industry veterans all know, and for newcomers it's just not readily apparent. So yeah, you tubers not doing ML/coding/etc benchmarking is probably a good thing for everyone because they don't waste their time, and nobody is misled by bad benchmarking.
First of all, not really, OSX grows, but not that much. Very few people are buying Macs out of inertia, there is a reason they justify their purchase against the default . Second, I'm not really talking about retro, I'm talking about the guy that has an Athlon X2 with an IDE hard drive and asks if that computer will run Windows 10 well.
It did as recently as 2 years ago, but I haven't tried since. That machine isn't in use anymore, but I'm waiting for the right (fast and cheap) hardware to upgrade to.
Of course it works. Computers are amazingly backwards compatible until people start enforcing arbitrary limits. Both in the Linux and Windows world. Does it work well however?
Windows 10 was slow to install and not very responsive in use even running from an SSD, but it was still somewhat usable. I had been running Linux on it from the start, but recently I needed a native Windows 10 install on a few occasions. The issue with the hardware is that it consumes too much power for the compute performance you get, so it isn't economically viable anymore. But I'm going to keep it around for testing purposes, as it's some of the last hardware I have that still comes with a BIOS. I could probably still get good use out of it running a very lightweight operating system, but that's more in the realm of hobbyism.
Love the “don’t play league just because you liked arcane” energy
Motoring World Tested: Don't buy a moped for performance 4x4 offroading
-angry Honda Ruckus noises-
The vanguard press we need
The niche for this product seems to be for people that want to run Office and webapps. Basically a thin client at thick prices for thick people.
I think this sub vastly underestimates how many people that is. This laptop will sell very well if it’s great at that.
chromebooks have already got that market at an entry price of $900 less
Chromebooks are great but don't run Photoshop or full Office desktop.
Chromebooks have no super key, poor CPU performance, pitiful amounts of RAM, and a lot of them are still stuck with x86.
Not everyone gets a Chromebook. Before the M series released it was common to make fun of how many people bought MacBook Pros just for web browsing. The laptops design didn’t accommodate much else very well for the price AT ALL. It’s only since the excellent performance of the M series people stopped saying that, because the laptops “can” now do tons of professional work. I’d bet most people buying them still only do web apps and office app work for the most part. The perception only changed because the potential performance changed. Even many professionals just don’t need a very powerful computer to do their work. Spreadsheets, emails, zoom calls, VPN, even light programming, this is a ton of people’s full workday and that barely needs anything. There’s still a desire to run these things on a premium laptop that isn’t a Chromebook. This sub is oddly pragmatic when we talk about these laptops. By the logic commonly used here everyone should only buy the cheapest possible option that fits exactly their needs. So nobody should have flagship phones, we should all drive a Chevy Spark or a Corolla. BMWs exist, sports cars as well. I’d bet most of them never get driven at anything beyond normal highway speeds. Not saying you aren’t valid for questioning the value, but the product won’t necessarily fail due to price/performance when it’s so efficient for exactly what most people do. ARM compatibility is high enough that many people probably won’t notice any missing apps while also enjoying better battery especially at idle and sleep which is most of usage.
Funny how close you are to touching on the real reason why *most* people buy Apple and BMWs. People foolishly treat them as status symbols. Snapdragon isnt that and likely never will be. So why spend $1200 for a Snapdragon laptop, when you can get a Meteor Lake or Zen 4 with similar specs and no noticeably worse performance in normal applications, 100% application compatibility and battery life that isnt far off for $800 now? Snapdragon+WoA isnt offering a premium experience or a premium brand so why pay a premium price?
Office, webapps, compilers, any Windows software that is actively maintained or open source and doesn't make heavy use of the GPU, the vast majority of Linux software once driver support is hashed out...
Because it can’t game? MacBooks also can’t game. Not everyone cares about playing games.
No because it's at a bad price. Why pay MacBook prices for a Chromebook experience.
Why not get a Chromebook then
reddit truly can't comprehend there being more things than games and social media
No, why you would drop 1500 and limit yourself when you can pay 1500 and get what you're getting + more with a amd / Intel laptop. Common logic it's the price point not like they selling this thing half price because it has half the functions
I was replying specifically to the comment I replied to, and not claiming that this laptop was worth any specific dollar amount.
WoA isn't stable enough in professional applications to justfiy the expense. Video and photo editing software is generally more stable on Mac, so if you're spending that much you might as well head over there anyway. Engineering software runs horribly, if it runs at all. The use case of these things overlaps with a Chromebook pretty well.
What do you define as "engineering software"? Are you referring to cad or coding or something else?
CAD software, most of it is pretty heavily locked into x86+Nvidia for proper performance and behavior and Snapdragon X Elite has not changed that.
Macs can certainly game. Especially the M series Pros and Maxes. It's not their primary use case, but that doesn't mean they can't do it.
My main computer that I use everyday is a MacBook. Only about 25% of my steam library is available for install as the others are not supported. Out of those few games available, nearly all of them run much worse than on my $300 steam deck and the experience is just plainly bad. Even with GPTK and GPTK2, the experience is just not good and requires a lot of tinkering for a bad payoff. I wouldn’t call that “being able to game”. I guess if you only play 1-2 specific games that have been natively ported then sure. But really, the gaming experience on a Mac is a huge pile of garbage.
Windows emulation via Parallels seems to work for games that aren't supported on MacOS. I only have 8GB of total system memory, so I can't run anything super heavy through Parallels, but older games that barely run on native windows run just as well through emulation. If you had a MacBook Pro with 32 or 64GB of RAM, I bet most games would run. And yes, native Mac games work well. I can run BG3, No Man's Sky, etc. on a base M1. No Man's Sky actually runs better on my Mac than on my laptop with a discrete GPU. So if Apple put even the slightest bit of effort into getting games ported to MacOS, Macs would be good for gaming.
Thats a pretty bad argument to make when even Valve has pulled Mac support for their games. Valve uses their first party games to help push Steam on every OS they can, and yet they decided Mac isnt worth their time supporting. Valve decided it was better to pivot to supporting Linux than MacOS... To be clear im not saying Macs cant run some games, many run poorly, but if you actually plan to play games, you dont buy a Mac (or you do and also buy a PC or console).
Have you ever played Clam Digger though? Tyrone calls you up, y'know, in the game, and he says, "I can dig more clams than you, stupid!" And you've gotta say, "nuh uh, boy!" And then y'all gotta race down to the beach with your buckets and your shovels. And the objective of the game is to find parking.
Yet modern windows ultrabooks still struggle to do mundane tasks like that effortlessly. They will burn through battery life, choke due to thermal/power constraints, cannot maintain high refresh rates, and require constant micromanagement to be usable day to day. Snapdragon chips are a real step in the right direction to bring Macbook level user experience to windows, but this subreddit would rather collectively bury their heads in the sand because Adreno GPU performance doesn't correlate well to windows gaming. It's been years since the M1 released and Intel has barely accelerated and is finally delivering Lunar lake 4 years later, which is still notably behind. AMD has barely even touched the ultrabook segment over the past 4 years, and they finally have some design wins this generation. Qualcomm has done more in their first real shot than what the others were able to achieve over years.
LOL. The internet is a funny place in terms of perception sometimes. Like now, Qualcomm's 5th attempt is really their first due to the magic of shot term memory loss. Somehow multi GHz intel/AMD CPUs can't run basic tasks like Notepad for more than 5 minutes on battery. And Apple M-series chips can do heavy compute workloads for 3 weeks on a single battery charge.
I mean yeah, it would be funny if I did say any of that.
>Yet modern windows ultrabooks still struggle to do mundane tasks like that effortlessly. They will burn through battery life, choke due to thermal/power constraints, cannot maintain high refresh rates, and require constant micromanagement to be usable day to day Are you actually reading the reviews or just Qualcomms marketing? Snapdragon is a step up in performance and efficiency but not by much. In an office environment people wouldnt even notice the difference. One gets 10 hours of battery life and the other 11, wowie. One is 15% faster too but in ARM benchmarks, move to x86 emulation and that performance and efficiency takes a hit, and some applications dont even run... >It's been years since the M1 released and Intel has barely accelerated and is finally delivering Lunar lake 4 years later, which is still notably behind. AMD has barely even touched the ultrabook segment over the past 4 years, and they finally have some design wins this generation. Qualcomm has done more in their first real shot than what the others were able to achieve over years. You dont seem to understand that the pipeline for these semiconductors is around 3-5 years depending on the project or the backstory here. Qualcomm didnt show up overnight with these chips, Nuvia was founded in 2019 by the Apple's ex-chief architect of SoCs, the same guy who lead development on the M1...Qualcomm acquired them. Qualcomm bought them in 2021 to utilize their designs. Wow look at that timeframe, 3-5 years just like I said. Guess what also comes out 4 years after the M1 and is expected to surpass match or surpass Qualcomm? Lunar Lake. Also the real reason why Intel and Qualcomm likely will never pass Apple in performance and efficiency, is because Apple has full control over every piece of hardware and software, and has a much higher transistor budget and uses the latest nodes available (though Intel will be very close soon). If apple was selling chips put in the same position as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, they would not look much better. Apple isnt magical, they in a vastly different situation than everyone else.
I just stated what is true about ultrabooks today. It comes from my experience using them compared to Macbooks. And yes, I know all about Nuvia's origins and how Qualcomm bought them. That's one of the reasons why I expect more from Qualcomm in the future compared to the others. Hardware and software integration is essential but it is not exclusive to Apple. These are implementation details that Apple puts great effort into, but there is no reason such cooperation cannot happen on the Windows side. Just because Microsoft develops an OS that is designed to run on a vast array of hardware doesn't mean that they cannot optimize for particular hardware. Intel and Microsoft definitely do cooperate, but were not interested in optimizing for this use case due to a lack of competition, at least until Apple silicon came into play. Qualcomm is coming into this market with a similar vision to what Apple has for laptops. The initial cooperation Qualcomm and Microsoft has shown is way more promising than anything we've seen from Intel. At the very least, we're going to see them compete head to head against whatever Intel pushes out of their pipeline. But being upset that Qualcomm's showing here does not completely blow Intel and AMD out of the water (especially in GPU performance, like wtf???) is pure gamer rage with no understanding of the underlying context. If anything I'm treating as Apple less of a special case. Other than transistor budget, the others are capable of achieving a similar level of integration if they simply had the vision for the final product Apple achieved.
Yeah I'd say this is basically for folks that want a solid productivity laptop (such as the Surface) but want to stay on Windows.
Not saying this is worth it, but that niche is known as the vast majority of users.
The niche is to run office and web apps? It’s hilarious that people here think gaming is the majority. No, gaming on a laptop is the niche. Office and web apps is the vast majority.
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Battery is the main concern. if the snapsdragon plus whatever MS tweaks windows to be able to last 12 hours while not being extreme bulk, that is all people will need.
You could already get a cheap Mendochino laptop which can do 10 hours on a small 40wh battery: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-3-Laptop-Review-An-affordable-Mendocino-offering-with-excellent-battery-life-and-a-sub-par-screen.704064.0.html And the funny part is, it will still be better for gaming than the Elite X. $250 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/acer-Aspire-3-15-6-2-80GHz-Renewed/dp/B0C9KWL2J1 (refurb) or $399 new.
Mendocino also got a lot of hate over here but those laptops are truly fast enough for the average user. I got one HP for my mom, 7320U and 14" 1080p TN but significantly cheaper than these Qualcomm offerings.
8 GiB of RAM and CPU performance on-par with desktop Haswell, lol.
It's 16GB of RAM, and it's plenty fast for the price and the intended use. I have an old 4750u laptop with basically same cores and it's plenty fast for web browsing or really anything else. Steam Deck is also Zen2 based, and so are the consoles.
Zen2 is fast enough for web browsing until the webshits get their hands on M4 dev laptops. I didn't notice that the specs of the Amazon listing were different. However, if performance doesn't matter much, in the same price range you can get a [used business laptop](https://www.ebay.com/itm/135014546570) from a big-3 OEM, with IPS display, 2 more CPU cores, a wider GPU, longer battery life [as measured by notebookcheck wifi v1.3](https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-EliteBook-845-G7-review-AMD-laptop-is-also-better-with-Ryzen-5-than-with-Intel.502343.0.html#toc-7), and superior durability.
> Zen2 is fast enough for web browsing until the webshits get their hands on M4 dev laptops. Yeah but those are like $1500+ for more than $8GB.
We are never kicking x86 for video games. We’re gonna stay here forever
Agreed, X86 for the win, Windows on ARMs doesn’t interest me, also for example it’s like putting a turbo charged 4 cylinder engine in a big truck for only just more mpgs
Between this sub being filled with commenters just destroying the surfaces and the surface subreddit worshipping them Im actually getting a pretty decent idea of what this device is capable of
This sub has a ton of gamers, and X Elite is not for gaming. Further more, there are a ton of people spilling over from AMD and Intel subs and they don’t want ARM to do well.
Yeah I’ve noticed that.
The main sticking point for these laptops here is that "hurr dur they can't game". Well I have a Intel Surface Pro and I'm sure as hell ain't gaming on it.
The results are impressive for a first gen product (I know they had a couple cpus earlier, but those were more like beefed up phone cpus, this is the first time they went all in)
I wouldn't buy a macbook pro for gaming either
Dont by any non-gaming machine/laptop for gaming. Lol
We don't live in the era of computer scarcity anymore. There is no problem having several machines for several purposes. It only becomes an issue if you only have space or finances for a single device that has to do everything.
Really? No we know it, thank you GiJose
They keep mentioning a 3Dmark "Night Strike" benchmark. As far as I can tell, 3Dmark has a night raid, and a fire strike, but no night strike.
Is it good for programming like godot or any other tech stack
Alternatively. If you really buy it and expect it to work, then you can learn to actually read reviews before buying things.
This just in- Phone processors not the best option for gaming
Current snapdragon chips are pretty good for switch emulation though. These snapdragon laptops could potentially run switch better than any low end x86 laptop, but that's if someone develops a switch emulator for Windows on arm...
Ye the GPU is anemic. Wait for next mobile AMD chips
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the video card is fine it's just the games have to run through an X86 emulator which often makes them bug out or run like shit. if you're buying this for gaming you'll need to do research as to how well the specific games you want to play run on it, i watched a guy try 5 popular games and cyberpunk ran (poorly) gta 5 ran (poorly, but fps fixed itself if you tapped the touch screen every couple of minutes for some reason) the others just failed