Qualcomm is a company well known for creating Snapdragon SoCs that reach mobile phones and tablets offering high-end performance. Although it has been successful in that sector, in the laptop sector it failed to stand out with its chips. The Snapdragon Now that the first are appearing
review, We realize that those promises of the Qualcomm Snapdragon
performance is well behind expectations.
Qualcomm announced months ago its new SoC for laptops called Snapdragon X Elite. From the first moment, the company demonstrated how the Arm chip was capable of outperforming Intel, AMD and Apple in its performance tests. It seemed impossible, but we decided to continue believing, since new results kept appearing indicating that this would really be its performance. Even when it appeared the first review of the X Elitewe could see that it surpassed its rivals with lower consumption and longer battery life.
The NotebookCheck review shows how the performance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is lower than expected
That first review was from a medium we didn’t know, so there could be doubts about whether they were lying or not. Luckily, enough time has passed to be able to say that we have reviews from media that are better known, such as NotebookCheck. They have done an analysis that deals with all the aspects and characteristics of the ASUS Vivobook S 15 OLED equipped with a Snapdragon, where performance, battery, noise, temperature and more are shown. In this review we are going to go directly to the performance statistics, where we can get the first disappointment.
When displaying the 4 energy profiles ranging from 20 to 50W, We can see that increasing the consumption does not increase performance at all in tests such as 3DMark, while the noise shoots up to a maximum of 57.2 dBA. In Cinebench 2024 We need a minimum of 35W to be able to match the Core Ultra 7 155H, although if we see the test of Cinebench R23 with those 10,856 points only, we can see how there the Core Ultra is 63% faster with 17,780 points.
In games it performs below the Radeon 780M and the Intel Arc of the Core Ultra, sometimes even below the Intel Iris Xe
We can see other CPU tests like Cinebench R20 or Blender, where we see that the Snapdragon Ryzen 7 7840U, which is about 15% faster. In other tests we see that at no time does it reach the Core Ultra 7 155H, a processor that Qualcomm used on numerous occasions, since according to them the X Elite was faster. Then we have a set of tests that evaluate the performance of the entire system, where we find that the 978 points of the ASUS Vivobook S 15 OLED with Snapdragon leave much to be desired, because a Apple M3 doubles it.
Now we move on to the graphical performance in 3DMark 11 where it achieves only 6,352 pointsso a Radeon
780M almost doubles it. In FireStrike we see that it performs almost like the AMD iGPU, but in Time Spy
we found a poor result equivalent to Iris Xe G7 graphics. Then we have examples in various video games such as The Witcher 3 with 19 FPS,
GTA V with 20.4 FPS, FFXV with 15.6 FPS and in general terms, it is below the Radeon 780M and the Intel Arc of the Core Ultra.
Finally, it is time to talk about the battery, since they have not complied here either, since you get 13 hours with WiFi (7 hours 39 minutes with maximum brightness), almost 15 hours watching movies and 1 hour and 37 minutes at maximum performance. Although these are not bad figures, a laptop
Apple MacBook Air 15 M3 offers a 40% longer battery life.
