HP Chromebook 11 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 15, 2013 2:45 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- HP
- Chrome OS
- Chromebook
WiFi & Performance
WiFi on the Chromebook 11 is similarly well executed. There’s a 2-stream dual-band 802.11n controller inside, capable of negotiating at up to 300Mbps link rates. Given how uncommon finding 5GHz WiFi support was in cheap PCs from not too long ago, it’s good to see HP/Google choose properly here.
About my only complaint hardware wise on the Chromebook 11 is its SoC. HP settled on the same Exynos 5250 SoC that Samsung used in last year’s 11.6-inch Chromebook. Unfortunately, the design hasn’t aged well. Truth be told, there are far better options today than a dual-core 32nm 1.7GHz Cortex A15 design. I would’ve loved to have seen Bay Trail in the Chromebook 11, or at least a Snapdragon 800. I’ll get to the power consumption discussion in a moment, but performance of the Chromebook 11 really needs work. For single tasking, the 5250 is ok. Hitting heavier websites or scrolling while having a graph search overlay in Facebook will cause serious drops in UI frame rate.
Playing back HD videos in YouTube is borderline too much for the machine. If you try to play videos in the background while you browse the web, expect serious lag on the input front. I ran Kraken both with and without a background YouTube video playing just to show the impact of multitasking on performance:
| Multitasking Performance on Chromebook 11 | |||||||||||
| Kraken | Kraken + YouTube Video Playback | % Increase in Kraken Completion Time | |||||||||
| HP Chromebook 11 | 5262.4 ms | 10997.3 ms | 109% | ||||||||
Kraken took over twice as long to complete with YouTube actively playing in the background. The Chromebook 11 either needs more cores or better cores (or both) if you're going to be doing any sort of real multitasking/heavy web browsing.
Basic word processing using Google Docs is fine on the Chromebook 11, but again you need to make sure that you don’t have anything too CPU intensive in the background. Multitasking with Pandora is ok thankfully.
Our traditional js benchmark suite shows the relatively decent performance of Chrome + ARM's Cortex A15 at lightly threaded workloads. Single tasking shouldn't be a problem for this platform, it's the heavier workloads that will be problematic.
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Krysto - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Also:"If you’re looking for the Chromebook 11 to last you for 5 years..."
Why would you expect that from a $280 machine? I don't even keep my Core i7 machines for that long.
DanNeely - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
That's very user dependent; and the casual web user systems like this are marketed at are very much the use it until it breaks type, not chase the newest and shiniest people.Until the power jack died a few weeks ago my Mom was happily using a netbook I bought in 08. If an oven-reflow is able to resurrect it, I wouldn't be surprised if she keeps using it until something else breaks.
tat tvam asi - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Totally off topic:Waiting to read AnandTech's take on Imagination Tech's new MIPs core:
Imagination reveals first MIPS ‘Warrior P-class’ CPU core:
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsI...
hechacker1 - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Thanks for the review. I almost preordered this because overall it does appear to be a really nice machine.I can live with the 5 hour battery life; I rarely have to be away from an outlet that long.
But the poor multitasking, and poor web FPS means I won't be happy using this browsing the web and writing the occasional document/code.
Now if I could get a full blown copy of linux on this, then I wouldn't mind the performance considering how much you can tweak linux to run on low power machines.
Hung - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I wish you had talked about the timing. I assume the primary market is students who don't need anything other than media playback, productivity, and web browsing. The release happened way too late. All those students who could have appreciated it already have devices. I guess HP could hope for some Black Friday sales. I doubt it will fare well against the new crop of netbooks come Christmas.But damn, I bought the Chromebook 3 literally a month ago and I'm pissed. It's a great device and all, but the display is terrible. Hopefully, the 11 uses the same connectors and I can just buy an LCD off eBay for <$80.
I can definitely see myself using the Chromebook for another year. With flashblock, browsing seems perfectly adequate. More often I find myself longing for better display uniformity and viewing angles, or contrast in well-lit indoor conditions. I rarely wish for more power, although I do observe occasional checkerboxing. And while I agree about the good keyboard (I hate chiclet and that fact that everyone has moved to it), the touchpad could use a higher sensitivity setting. It's a little too slow at the highest setting, although it's probably limited by the low resolution of the touchpad itself.
Hung - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Forgot to mention, it's a great supplemental device. However, I would definitely not recommend it as a primary computer. I built a great desktop a few years back and have been incrementally upgrading it over time. But you can't lug any kind of tower around to meetings, interviews, conferences, classes or out to a cup of coffee.moejurray - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I've been using the Samsung A5(?) for about a year now. It's fine. The price makes it easier to carry in a backpack, and let kids use it. What I mean is the shear value is low, so the care and worry about it are less than say, my old MBP.What bothers me most is the lack of horsepower that shows itself with stammering scrolling, slow page load times, and uneven video playback, even on Youtube - which I find surprising from Google.
Other stuff:
- The lack of stiffness makes it feel cheap. The mousepad is not smooth and taping, double clicking and other gestures are not always recognized.
- I'm a cloud user, so the little on-board storage is not an issue. And I've yet to get any warning on filling what there is.
So I'm looking forward to trying out a newer version. Hopefully it takes care of these concerns, and I can pass my old one down to a kid.
quagga - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Thank you for this! I actually won one of these recently from Google so I expect it to show up eventually. Based on what I've read, this is basically the Samsung Chromebook in a new case with a better keyboard and screen. I find it odd the product literature keeps talking about how it has a 60% color gamut. I have no idea what that means - 60% of sRGB, 60% of Adobe RGB?CrushingBore - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
So does the battery test for ChromeBook include loading pages which load Flash? If so could that explain the poor results as Flash is a known CPU hog? How about repeating the Tablet Web Browsing Test (WiFi) for the ChromeBook or disabling Flash and repeating the existing test?OneOfTheseDays - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
Chrome OS is a joke of an OS, which is why they have roughly 0.02% marketshare.The only people pimping these obviously inferior solutions are tech reviewers with Google hardons that desperately want to see MSFT dethroned. Sadly, Anand is becoming more and more like them every day.
If a Windows laptop ever came out with this poor peformance, battery life, etc. it would get slammed 6 ways from Sunday. But because this is Google it gets reviewed favorably.
I'd ask yourself why hasn't this site even reviewed the Lumia 1020? Seriously, this POS is more important? Give me a break.