Qualcomm announced the new generation of laptop chips a while back, and after months of delays – we finally have one to test. This is the ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607O that’s powered by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite chipset. Over the past two weeks or so, I ran a lot of tests to see how much it has improved and how it competes against its rivals.
Specs
For this test, we’re working with the Snapdragon X2E-94-100. It’s the second-highest-end chipset within the X2 Elite product stack. The list of specs this laptop is:
- Snapdragon X2E-94-100
- Adreno X2-90 integrated GPU
- 48GB of RAM at 9523MT/s
- 1TB of NVMe SSD
Since there is 48GB of RAM available, we can allocate more RAM as shared memory to be used by the GPU as VRAM. Either way, the default is already plentiful. I personally won’t touch this.
This new Snapdragon X2 Elite series comes with Oryon V3 CPU architecture, and the GPU has been beef up drastically too. Plus, Micorosft also improved the Prism translation layer – so we’re going to get a dramatic improvement compared to when we tested Windows on Arm more than a year ago.
With this list of specs, we ran a lot of tests and compared it with the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ D3MTG that is powered by the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H and the supremely powerful Intel B390 integrated GPU. For more information about this laptop, we also did a video here.
Gaming tests
And here are the results that I’ve gathered. All the tests are done at FHD resolution whenever possible. Starting with 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the Snapdragon X2 Elite’s CPU is supremely powerful. It’s mostly thanks to the number of cores that it has. However, the GPU is far below what the Intel B390 integrated GPU can offer.
And this is pretty consistent when it comes to games. For Black Myth Wukong, it we redid the test on both laptops multiple times and the result is consistent. The Intel B390 GPU is just so much more better, hence getting better FPS.
GTA V Enhanced is the same as well. We’re getting much higher FPS on the Intel side for both the maximum and average FPS too. Realistically, I doubt anyone will play at the lowest graphical settings anyway but we’re just showing what sort of numbers we can get.
But, for Cyberpunk 2077, this game is more CPU-intensive than it is GPU-intensive, so we’re getting better FPS on the Snapdragon X2 Elite.
From what we’ve seen, the maximum wattage that the SoC can take in is quite intense too. Intel takes around 54W at most, while the Snapdragon X2E-94-100 can go up to around 68W. Do take note that Snapdragon never publishes their chipset’s TDP, so it’s up to us to find out ourselves.
The minimum idle wattage on Snapdragon is actually superbly impressive, less than 0.4W.
We also have an uncut gaming test showing everything happening in real-time, in case that’s something that you want to watch.
Temperature
The temperature is going to be kinda weird. You see, Intel and AMD processors have a temperature sensor on the package and we can just look up the value using something like HWInfo. However, Snapdragon chips have sensors with random names scattered all over. These are the individual core temperatures, and we don’t have an overall SoC package temperature. So… we just manually calculated the average. Of course, it doesn’t actually work this way – but this is the best we can do.
Also, these two laptops are very different in terms of the thermal design, so this is not a 1:1 comparison.
Video rendering
For video rendering, we used the free version of DaVinci Resolve with our own edited video as the test footage. There is also a dedicated Arm version of DaVinci Resolve that’s been in development for a long time.
However, the performance is still not going to be as good as the Intel counterpart as the rendering time is still faster there.
NPU
The NPU also got beefed up in the X2 Elite, and this particular X2E-94-100 is rated up to 80 TOPS. While its usage is still kinda up in the air as of now, at least Microsoft changed the Snipping Tool to magically snap to wherever we draw the rectangle on. This actually uses the NPU, as we can see on the task manager.
Utility app
By the way, Qualcomm did also release something called the Snapdragon Control Panel. I did download and install to see what’s up with the utility, but it just… doesn’t work at all. It just crashes immediately.
Battery life and efficiency
Now, let’s talk about efficiency. We did the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery life test on both of those laptops. However ,we have to highlight the fact that this battery life benchmark is not made for Arm devices. We did this test by forcing it to run via command line. So, the Snapdragon X2 Elite is basically fighting a very steep uphill battle in this battery life benchmark.
It still managed to get 13 hours out of the test, which is impressive. This isn’t going to be a 1:1 comparison between Intel and Snapdragon since both of these laptops have a different screen size and screen resolution.
But we also calculated the normalized the battery consumption since both these laptops have different battery capacities. The Snapdragon X2 Elite consumes an average about 5.4W throughout the entire test. Again, not a 1:1 comparison between the two chips, and this test is not even compatible with Arm devices in the first place.
However, I can tell you that if I am using this laptop at performance mode to do my stuff, the battery does go down quite fast.
Windows on Arm in 2026
Benchmarks aside, how is the situation with Windows on Arm in the year 2026? Well, I’ll have to say, Microsoft and Qualcomm fixed a lot of the issues. Microsoft improved the Prism translation layer that lets us run x86 apps on Arm to the point that a lot of apps and even games can just run without any issues at all. I kinda forgot that this is an Arm-based laptop and I just used it like any other laptop.
But of course, certain games won’t work at all, like FF7 Rebirth, which just shows “fatal error” and this game just refuses to run at all, saying that it’s incompatible on Windows Server.
Also yes, that Auto SR notification is persistently showing me #$xD;
That aside, many Windows apps are compiled for Arm specifically, which skips the Prism translation layer entirely, so the apps can run much more efficiently without any performance penalty.
On Qualcomm’s side, they kinda “fixed” Snapdragon on Windows by basically upping the wattage, that’s why this laptop now comes with a massive 130W charger. It’s also consuming way more wattage compared to the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, but the Snapdragon X2E-94-100 is still not as good in comparison, at least for most cases.
Performance on battery?
How is the performance while it is running on battery then? It’s going to affect the performance by a bit. Using our Ugreen 140W USB-PD PPS charger, we can get around the same performance as the stock charger.
Is Windows on Arm finally recommended?
So then, is Windows on Arm finally worth buying? Well, you’ll have to know what category of user you fall into. If you’re just watching YouTube videos, Netflix, doing emails, Microsoft Office, dealing with other work in a web browser, all of that stuff – then yeah, go ahead. Windows on Arm is already good enough for that, and you’ll also enjoy a great battery life as well.
Gaming is pretty good as well, but just know that certain games still won’t run, and it throws us some really weird error messages.
Do take note that I have only tested the X2E-94-100 within the Snapdragon X2 Elite family of processors. I do not know what kind of experience we’ll get from other Snapdragon X2 Elite processors.
If you’re a power user, then you should already know if Windows on Arm is for you or not. I do have to say, if you’re getting a Snapdragon laptop, this laptop is pretty much locked into the Windows operating system only. We can’t install Linux – at least not easily. It’s completely locked down.
Oh, as for the review of the laptop featured in this video, it’s the ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607O. Here’s the full review.
Do you think Snapdragon chipsets – or Windows on Arm in general – is a viable option in the year 2026? Let us know in the comments section of our YouTube video at the top of this review. Please do let us know your thoughts and opinions there.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
For more information about the ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607O, click here.
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