HP Envy X360 4700U Premiere Pro Editing and Gaming Test 2020

So, one again it’s the Envy X360, and we are addressing some of the issues
that might be of nuisance to some users.

At the beginning ITs a bit hard to lift the lid it does not have a cut out for effortless opening. and in some situations, you might have a few seconds of hard time trying to open the laptop.

When you finally open the device, the screen is 16:9 not 16:10... I honestly don’t understand why is not 16:10 as all the competitors start doing that in 2020. Look at the black bar at the bottom of the screen. The only thing it is useful for is the HP logo. BUT on the other hand, imagine the screen extends to the very bottom, like almost touching the keyboard level and imagine you have a touch screen and you want to touch the start menu. Wont it be awkward to touch icons that are so close to the keyboard... I think it would...

So today I wanted to do some testing while gaming and doing Premiere pro workloads. But my first problem is that you can’t see the CPU temperature in Hardware monitor. How I am supposed to relate the temperatures to you guys if I don’t know what they are.

Fortunately, the new windows 2004 update that came to my device just yesterday shows GPU temps in task manager and this could give us indication at what temps the CPU is running. Also, During the 2004 update the laptop automatically updates the bios and and amd drivers. Good

Ok let’s do some gaming.
The only game that I own is Arma 3. Both of my machines run this game well and on both devices the game is playable using almost the same settings. Texture detail on my desktop PC was set to HIGH however the Envy x360 max texture setting was Standard. The rest of the settings were exactly the same.

I could easily play the game on the Envy x360 with no lag or stutter. the frames were about 50 fps in comparison to 60 fps on my desktop PC. Please don’t forget that the Ryzen 7 is running an integrated GPU my desktop PC has a dedicated GeForce 1660. The GPU and probably the CPU temperature was around 63 degrees while in HP Recommended mode and after switching to Performance mode the temps were around 73 degrees Celsius.

The laptop got hot to the touch especially where the base of the unit meets the screen. This area was significantly hotter that the middle of the keyboard. The 13inch screen on the Envy is small and I would not feel comfortable playing any visually detailed game that requires prolonged episodes of focussed observation. Yea I am used to playing games on a 50-inch TV in 4k :)

Some folks in the comments asked if the screen size an issue. While playing games yes, I would prefer a bigger screen, And I suspect that even a 17-inch laptop would not satisfy my needs.

Also, someone asked is the screen brightness an issue? Well not indoors, no. But as soon as you go out and want you do a lot of work that is concentrated around finding details and small items, numbers or buttons located on the screen, then yes it would be an issue.

Ok let’s move to Premiere Pro.
And yeah... the small form factor and lack of hyperthreading definitely shows here. Note that the two version of adobe Premiere are slightly different. The sequence setting are exactly the same and both devices use hardware acceleration. CUDA for Nvidia and Open Cl for AMD.
First let’s launch the same project on both devices. The TV on top shows the Ryzen 2700X with 64 GB of ram and the difference is clearly visible.

Next, using the same sequence I try to play a 4K mp4 clip at full resolution on both devices. The Envy uses almost 100% of its CPU but it plays the 4K clip well. The situation changes when you add an effect. I used Lumetri colour to bring down the highlights and the Envy starts to be unusable. ITs dropping frames everywhere. After adding another lumetri colour the situation is similar. You will not be able to play the video in real time.
After dropping the resolution to half still the Envy X360 is not playing the video smoothly. Only after dropping the resolution to a quarter the envy plays the video with all the effects without visible stutter and frame drops.

Honestly, I was expecting the ryzen 4700U to do a better job. The device is clearly designed for light video editing and colour grading in especially in 1080P.