PC World - USA (2020-09)

SEPTEMBER 2020 PCWorld 37

small-bodied laptops, the Envy x360 13’s are
down-firing. A comparable laptop with
top-firing speakers, such as the premium HP
Elite Dragonfly (go.pcworld.com/drfy),
sounds louder, with less distortion. The Elite
Dragonfly’s premium Bang & Olufsen-tuned
speakers also outshine the Envy x360 13 in
midrange and bass response.
Still, the Envy x360 13 is surprisingly
loud—actually richer and louder than many
larger gaming laptops. The XPG Xenia 15’s
speakers, for example, sound appallingly thin
compared to the Envy x360’s. (That pretty
much tells you about the state of audio quality
in most gaming laptops these days, when a
13-inch midrange ultrabook sounds better.)

Storage performance
The laptop features a microSD slot that lets
you easily add semi-permanent storage to the
laptop. The card protrudes a little less than a
millimeter when inserted. Our pro tip is to put

tape over the card to

prevent it from falling

out, should you brush

up against it.

The performance of

the actual card reader is

fair. Using a SanDisk

Extreme 256GB card,

we logged about

73MBps writes and

94MBps reads. The card

is rated for about

90MBps writes and 160MBps read speeds—

but the latter is only when using SanDisk’s

proprietary USB reader.

One of the less impressive features in the

Envy x360 13 is its storage. The Toshiba/

Kioxa SSD is M.2 NVMe and PCIe Gen 3, but

oddly it uses only two PCIe lanes. In most

higher-end laptops, the SSD will use four

PCIe lanes. In CrystalDisk Mark 7, that means

the drive will hit about 1.5GBps reads and

1GBps writes. A x4 drive in a higher-end

laptop might push 2.5GBps read speeds and

closer to 2GBps writes. This difference

matters little in everyday use, but you’ll notice

when copying very large files to the laptop.

Webcam design and quality

Webcams matter now, when the pandemic

has forced many of us to work remotely. Most

are 720p resolution, including the one on the

Envy x360 13. While it’s not a spiffy Windows

Hello-enabled biometric camera, its image

The rear features one set of real vents and one set of fake vents.