Hardware Overview and CPU Functioning

There are several HP Spectre options available, with upgrades available for very reasonable prices. The base model, which is the model I have to review, starts at $ane,169.99 for an Intel Core i5-6200U CPU and a 256 GB PCIe SSD. For an extra $80 you can upgrade to a Core i7-6500U processor, and an extra $250 will nab you a 512 GB SSD. This makes the highest-end model (Cadre i7 and 512 GB SSD) cost $ane,499.

The rest of the hardware in the Spectre is standard, which includes 8 GB of LPDDR3 memory. Information technology's disappointing you tin't upgrade this to 16 GB which would be a slap-up mode to complement the faster Cadre i7 CPU. Connectivity is listed as an Intel Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2 combination bit, which in my testing delivered fantastic performance.

The base model's Core i5-6200U processor is a 15W 'Skylake' part featuring two cores and 4 threads clocked at two.three GHz with a Turbo speed of 2.viii GHz. At that place's also an integrated Hard disk 520 GPU with 24 execution units clocked at thou MHz, and 3 MB of L3 cache. The upgrade to a Core i7-6500U increases CPU clock speeds to 2.5 GHz (3.1 GHz Turbo) and introduces 4 MB of L3 cache.

Despite the slim form factor, you are not compromising much on hardware, so the Spectre delivers similar performance to many other peak-end laptops, specially with the Core i7 option. This auto should be very capable of essential spider web tasks, along with some more intensive productivity workloads such as heavy spreadsheet editing, photo editing, and fifty-fifty some simulation workloads like MATLAB.

In our suite of benchmarks, the Cadre i5-6200U has a clear advantage over Intel'due south Core m3-6Y30 by 24% on boilerplate in CPU workloads. This jumps out to a significant 30 to xl percentage improvement in media encoding, which is expert news for video editors who might be tossing up between the ultraportable Spectre or Apple's MacBook.

Judging by previous results, the Core i7-6500U model will be around 13% faster beyond the board, which is similar to the difference in clock speeds between the two CPUs. This upgrade costs $80, a seven percent increment on the base model cost.