The debut wave of Copilot+ PCs—laptops with the latest AI-ready processors—has landed, and the HP OmniBook X 14 (starts at $999.99; $1,049.99 as tested) is one of the first through our doors. Like the latest Microsoft Surface Laptop and Surface Pro we've reviewed, the OmniBook offers a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor, built-in Copilot AI Windows features, and exceptional 30-hour battery life. The slim build, sharp touch screen, and good connectivity (it's a pleasure to see a USB Type-A port on such a thin system) are big pluses for an ultraportable with punchy enough performance to back it up. The screen's a little dim, and the design's a little plain, but you'll find a lot to like for the price. The Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch (UM3406) keeps our Editors' Choice slot among ultraportable as an even better value, but the OmniBook is a compelling alternative if you’re eager for an entry-level Copilot+PC.
Design: Slim, Simple Portability
From a design standpoint, the OmniBook is a highly basic-looking ultraportable. That's not necessarily a bad thing—this is a general-use productivity laptop, so it should blend in anywhere—but we just don't have much to discuss on the visual front. You get an all-gray, simply designed chassis with a reflective silver HP logo on the lid and little other adornment.
The metal exterior feels sturdy enough (HP says the laptop has passed 19 MIL-STD torture tests). The OmniBook doesn't give off a particularly premium feel, but it's superior to some flimsier plastic builds, especially for the price. The chassis uses several recycled materials, including 50% recycled aluminum, 50% recycled plastic in the keycaps, and a small percentage of ocean-bound plastic in the speaker box, which we're always glad to see.
One Cool Thing: Copilot+ Laptops With Snapdragon X Elite
Portability is a major plus, landing a hair under the ultraportable line (2.97 pounds) while measuring 0.56 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches (HWD). The HP doesn't quite match the luxe look of the Dell XPS 14, but that machine (in part thanks to a discrete GPU) is also nearly a pound heavier, not to mention more expensive. Others, like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425) (2.82 pounds and 0.59 inch thick) and the 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop (2.96 pounds and 0.69 inch thick), are much closer to the OmniBook.
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The rest of the build is unremarkable. I'd describe the backlit keyboard and touchpad as adequate, neither standout nor subpar. The keys have comfortable travel and feedback, while the touchpad is responsive enough. A dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard brings up Microsoft's AI assistant. You'll also note a blue helix icon on the right side of the palm reset, denoting this as an "AI ready" PC at a glance.
The 14-inch display is a highlight mainly for its resolution. You'll usually find full HD or 1080p resolution at this price, but the OmniBook provides a sharper 2.2K (2,240-by-1,400-pixel) touch panel. Again, the screen isn't the brightest (it's rated for 300 nits, which is right where it landed in our testing), nor is its IPS tech a match for the brilliant, vivid colors of OLED, but it's more than adequate.
HP continues to lead the way in webcam support with a 5-megapixel camera centered above the display. The webcam supports Windows Hello face recognition and provides a manual privacy shutter. The video quality is pretty sharp, and it handles low lighting better than others I've tested. The laptop also supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth for internet and wireless accessories, respectively.
The left edge holds two USB Type-C ports (one 10Gbps and one 40Gbps) for physical connections, while the right side has a USB Type-A port (with a drop-down jaw since the laptop is so thin) plus a headphone jack. That's no more than the essentials—with no HDMI port, you'll need a USB-C DisplayPort dongle to connect an external monitor—but many machines this size ditch the USB-A port, so maintaining both types is a plus. The AC adapter has a USB-C connector.
Using the HP OmniBook X 14: The Copilot Feature Set
Copilot+ PCs will become commonplace through the rest of 2024 and beyond, so they won't require continued explanation forever, but given the recency of the launch, it's worth filling in for now. We went much deeper in our first Copilot+ PC review, the 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop, so read that review if you want the full details on Copilot, NPUs, and Snapdragon.
What do you need to know? To qualify as a Copilot+ PC, a laptop has to meet a set of requirements, namely a processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) that can run AI workloads locally rather than in the cloud. These laptops come with a local version of Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant that lets you ask questions, find information, change settings, and more. Copilot+ systems also come with built-in Windows features, including videoconferencing enhancements, image generation in Paint, and a few other tricks.
The video call improvements are collectively called Studio Effects. For one, background blur while you're on camera is offloaded to the NPU, freeing the CPU to process more active tasks. Virtual background blur is nothing new, so we have to restrain our praise somewhat, but the NPU taking over to improve general performance is a plus. Auto framing (which keeps you centered if you move around while on camera) does a decent job with significant adjustments, though I found the eye tracking feature didn't work well. The image generation tool in Paint is a fun novelty but its use cases are fairly limited, while the contentious Recall usage history has not rolled out yet.
We haven't found these features essential in any system so far, and I'd only call some truly helpful (namely a couple of Studio Effects features). More built-in features will come, Copilot will improve, and many standalone applications will add their own AI enhancements. This is only a draw for early adopters and AI enthusiasts. If you know your favorite software (notably the Adobe creative suite) plans to add a killer AI feature that will make your life easier, buying one of these laptops becomes all the more appealing.
Components and Configuration: X Elite at a Fair Price
NPUs of a certain power ceiling (measured in TOPS or trillions of operations per second) are a must for a Copilot+ PC, and right now Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors are the only available chips that qualify. Intel and AMD will launch Copilot-qualified AI processors later this year, but at launch time, all Copilot+ PCs rely on Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus silicon.
Another layer to this is that Qualcomm builds its chips on Arm architecture rather than the x86 platform used by Intel and AMD, which is the default for Windows machines. Arm has seen compatibility and performance issues with Windows in past attempts, but this time around, Qualcomm and Microsoft have made long strides on both fronts. Applications that don't yet have native Arm versions run via Microsoft's new Prism emulation tool, and in our first round of testing we've generally found swift performance and few issues launching or running programs.
The OmniBook X is powered by the Snapdragon X Elite, specifically the X1E-78-100 version. It's a slight step down from the X1E-80-100 chip we tested in the Surface Laptop, a 12-core chip with a 3.4GHz clock speed lacking the dual-boost capability of the 80 and 84 models. Its NPU is rated at 45 TOPS, the same as other flavors of the X Elite.
Alongside that processor, our Windows 11 Home test unit had 16GB of memory and a 1TB solid-state drive, plus the 2,240-by-1,400-pixel touch screen and Qualcomm Adreno integrated graphics. (A $999.99 base model has a 512GB SSD.) Considering its specs, our system's $1,049.99 price (on sale from $1,199.99) is quite reasonable.
Testing the HP OmniBook X 14: Snapdragon X Rears Its Head
Now, let's get into the testing. The OmniBook was one of our initial machines benchmarked alongside the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, so we'd already put it through its paces before this review. Some of our usual performance benchmarks, notably UL's PCMark 10 and 3DMark Night Raid and Time Spy, were among the few x86-not-Arm apps that balked at running. Our Adobe Photoshop testing utility also wouldn't install, so we supplemented our other benchmarks with some different CPU and graphics tests, plus some AI tests.
The lineup of comparison systems includes two other Snapdragons, Microsoft's Surface Laptop and the soon-to-be-reviewed HP EliteBook Ultra G1q AI; an AMD Ryzen 7 AI alternative in the Acer Swift Go 14; as well as laptops with Intel Core Ultra 7 AI processors, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 and Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Q425. These are equivalently sized and priced laptops, with some variations. The EliteBook has the same chip as the OmniBook, the Surface has the step-up X Elite chip, and the other systems use existing Intel and AMD processors with NPUs—but not those that qualify as Copilot+ PCs, which will come later this year.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first group of tests represents workloads such as content creation, office productivity, and raw CPU speeds. Our go-to overall productivity and storage test, PCMark 10, is not yet Snapdragon-compatible, so we focused on core-crushing media tasks. We used the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 (instead of our usual release 1.4, since 1.8 has both Arm and x86 versions) to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
We also included two legacy tests: Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses the Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Those two tests are part of our standard test suite, but we added Cinebench 2024 (which includes an Arm-optimized installer) and Geekbench 6.3 (which is better optimized for Arm) to test the Snapdragon X Elite machines.
The OmniBook lagged behind in a couple of tests, but by and large it proved to be a quick laptop that hung with the rest of the pack. When you look at the as-configured price of the Surface Laptop we tested, the HP is a much less expensive way to get an X Elite chip and this level of performance. While you have to keep an eye on app compatibility, even tests that ran via emulation didn't perform too poorly, and the overall speed for daily productivity and media editing was quick.
AI Tests
The following benchmarks are laser-focused on these systems' AI performance (though it's only fair to note this kind of testing is in its infancy). First up is UL's Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark, which leverages several AI inference engines executing everyday machine-vision tasks using various popular neural networks. The tests were run using integer operations under respective platform runtime SDK models: Qualcomm SNPE for the X Elites and Intel OpenVINO for the others.
The numbers from this test largely speak for themselves if you compare the X Elite systems against one another. We wouldn't directly compare them with the x86 machines here, for which the benchmark required us to run the test separately on CPU, GPU, and NPU.
Meanwhile, Geekbench's new cross-platform ML test simulates real-world machine learning tasks to gauge overall AI workload performance, leaning on the CPU, GPU, and NPU. We ran this test in its CPU and DirectML (which leverages the GPU, in this case integrated) inference back-end options.
Graphics Tests
For our initial round of testing, we were somewhat limited as to available graphics benchmarks, so UL's latest 3DMark is the only test represented. However, at least two of the company's benchmarks are ready for Arm-based systems. First is 3DMark Wild Life and its Extreme variant. These tests, run at the Unlimited preset, are compatible with laptops and smartphones, using the Vulkan graphics API at 1440p resolution to measure GPU speeds. The Extreme version ups the resolution to 2160p or 4K, further stressing the graphics chips.
Second is Steel Nomad, another new 3DMark test that works with Arm CPUs. Steel Nomad and its Light variant test focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like DirectX 12 and Metal, to produce insights more closely aligned with how games can expect to perform on the system, with an increased focus on geometry and particle effects. None of these tests is ray-traced. Higher scores are better.
The Snapdragon laptops were in lockstep on most of these tests (the Surface dropped off on Wild Life), and they interestingly swapped leads with the Intel and AMD systems. Regardless, all of these systems' integrated graphics have a limited ceiling for gaming-style graphics; discrete GPUs from Nvidia and AMD blow them all out of the water, though they're rare in laptops this small.
You probably know who you are if your professional workload requires a GPU. For everyone else, the OmniBook and the others are capable of light tasks and entry-level gaming.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We ensure the battery is fully charged, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off before the test.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Qualcomm has been touting the efficiency of its Snapdragon CPUs, and it's hard to argue with the results. Arm systems have consistently scored well in our battery rundown test—it was one of the few clear advantages of the SQ3-based Surface Pro—and the OmniBook X 14's stamina is simply on another level for a Windows machine. Thirty hours is quite literally more than all-day battery life, and while more demanding tasks will run the battery down faster, you can clearly make it through a full day of work or school without worry.
Again, the HP's display quality is OK, with middling color coverage and passable brightness. The 50% brightness setting is perhaps too dark for everyday use in a normally lit room, though. You'll want to crank it up.
Verdict: A Deal on Snapdragon
We've covered the Snapdragon, Arm, and Copilot angles extensively by now, with varying degrees of enthusiasm in our conclusions, so let's focus on the HP OmniBook X 14 itself. All Copilot+ PCs will have shared traits, but we like what this HP brings to the table. The design isn't the most exciting, but it's hard not to be impressed at its performance, portability, battery life, and better-than-1080p display, especially at its current sale price.
The OmniBook is still not the very best bargain around; the Editors' Choice award-winning Asus Zenbook 14 OLED Touch (UM3406) is a lovely deal (as are many of Asus’ other Zenbooks, like the Q425 mentioned above), and we don't think the Copilot+ PC feature set is a must-have as of today. But if you're itching to join the first generation of AI PCs, and keen to try out Windows on Arm in its latest iteration, the OmniBook X 14 is a great way to go.
A feathery, sleek machine, the HP OmniBook X 14 nets you snappy performance with its Snapdragon X Elite processor, plus great battery life at a fair price.
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