Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk we’re going to try and talk ourselves out of buying a new laptop. While I love technology and would gladly use the most powerful hardware available, I’m not made of money, and I’m not yet Gamer’sTipsUnboxed so no-one’s sending me freebies. I’ve learned instead to find joy in the budget side of the market, and for my own purchases, using them until they either fall apart and can’t be fixed or no longer do what I need it to do.
Which brings me to my laptop, a venerable 13″ HP Envy x360 from 2018, powered by a Ryzen 5 2500U. HP’s calling this 13-ag0502sa, but I call it Banshee, because all my personal computers are named after Starcraft units, because I am a colossal nerd. While I am at my desktop PC the vast majority of the time, I do like to have a laptop that can handle everything I need to do with it, even if it’s mostly sat on the shelf. I guess I’m a sort of tech version of prepper. Now I’ve apparently added video production to the list of things I do, I suppose it’s time to reassess how it’s holding up as we head into 2026.
Before we get into poking at its limits, let’s go over what it is. As mentioned earlier it has a 13.3″ 1080p screen, that’s still pretty nice for being seven years old. Reviews of the time say it’s colours cover 89% of the sRGB range, it’s contrast is 1,100:1, and reaches 225nits of brightness, from HP’s claim of 250 nits. This means that it’s okay, but not perfect for work such as colour correcting photos and video, and viewing films and whatnot. It’s response times of 30ms grey-to-grey is on the slow side for gaming, the gadgetguy.com.au site claims. I’ll be the judge of that later on.
The party trick of the x360 line is that the screen is able to fold all the way back on itself, turning it into a sort-of-tablet, and indeed any point in-between so it can be used in this tent-type format. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever used this tent formation and don’t really see what benefit it has over normal laptop ergonomics. It seems like the tablet format would be more useful, but even at a not unreasonable 1.3kg this is too heavy to be wielded like an iPad. It’s nice to have, but not all that useful.
What might be an unintended consequence is that this overachieving hinge design has held up well, and given that most people think HP stands for Hinge Problems I am going to take this as a win.
The processor is an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U, a fifteen watt, four core, eight thread part with a 2 GHz base frequency, and up to 3.6 GHz burst frequency. It comes with an un-upgradable 8 GB of DDR4-2400, and this has a 256GB SSD. All of these feel a bit lacking in the here and now, and certainly the RAM and storage weren’t overly generous in 2018. SSD speeds are solid at 2205 MB/s read and 1271 write.
I’d picked this up for £380 in 2019 second hand from eBay, I think a decent price at the time although it did have a few dents in the corner as you see here. Looking at the ports while we’re here, there’s a USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 port that can be used for charging as well as display-out with a suitable dongle, two USB A 3.1 Gen 1 ports, a combo headphone / microphone jack, a barrel power plug if you’d rather use that, and a microSD media card reader that I wish was full sized, but such is life. No ethernet is also a pain, although HP will happily sell you this USB dongle if you aren’t satisfied with relying on the built in 802.11b/g/n/ac (2×2) Wi-Fi, which also handles Bluetooth 4.2 duties. Apparently it shipped with a USB-C to HDMI dongle, but I didn’t receive that with mine so I’m using a Dell USB-C dock for HDMI out to my garbage tier cheapo video capture dongle.
Overall, I think it’s a pleasing design that’s held up quite well. Physically it’s about 31 x 21cm, and 1.5 cm at its thickest. The speakers have Bang & Olufsen branding, and were probably above average for laptop speakers of the era but that’s more of an indictment of laptop speakers in general. In truth they aren’t amazing – they lack much in the way of base so while they are fine for casual YouTube viewing, for most movies, games or music you’d be better served with a headset. Judge for yourself with this ISO standard computer speaker test:
CRAB RAVE
The webcam and mic are, well, judge for yourself, as you are watching and listening to them right now. Serviceable is what I’d go with, although I do really like the Windows Hello IR camera and how streamlined and terrifying it makes logging in.
This has a chiclet style backlit keyboard that I find comfortable to type on, and there’s not much if any flex to it, so nothing to complain about here. The trackpad is… sufficient. It could have done with stealing the larger footprint Mac design, and it’s certainly not state of the art now, let alone at the time. It’s fine for office work and web browsing but a bit cramped and inaccurate for serious graphic work.
One optional extra I’ve gone for that should help with this is the HP Tilt Pen, which is a pretty good stylus as far as I can tell – I’m no artist – but it has a supremely annoying design issue in as much as it’s really awful at holding a charge when it’s not being used. This means that without fail when you reach for it, it’s dead and needs charging, so I wound up barely using it. Most irritating.
HP shipped the X360 with Windows 10, which was perfectly acceptable to me until one day it simply stopped booting. As it was coming to the end of support I switched to Ubuntu linux for a year which worked pretty well, but I want to use the same apps on my desktop and laptop, and I just could not find a replacement cross-platform photo app I liked as much as On1 Photo for Windows. So, I’ve hacked on Windows 11 IoT edition, a move of dubious legality but it’s a really good stripped back and efficient version of Windows that doesn’t try to cram AI down your throat at every turn. I’m sure Microsoft will look to crack down on this soon but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
This has a 53 Watt hour battery that HP claimed, under a set of very specific circumstances, would last for eleven hours, and play videos for seven and a half. It’s hard to think of this as anything other than a lie, even with a fresh battery. My degraded seven year old one gives me about 2 hours when watching YouTube and a smidgen less when processing and editing photos, so it can’t be away from the wall for very long.
Let’s do some performance testing. I’m not going to compare this with modern laptops, because, well, I don’t have one. Also because it’d be a bloodbath, and not what I want to find out. I’m looking at whether what I’ve got fits my current needs.
Much as I’d like to pretend that I’m always busy productively battering away at creative or office tasks, I’m more likely to be sat watching YouTube. It handles 1080p streaming video absolutely fine, no matter the source. In fact, web browsing in general is absolutely fine. I would of course recommend the use of Firefox and an ad-blocker to everyone, for a variety of reasons but it also speeds up the browsing experience greatly while helping to protect your privacy.
I’ve not had to do anything more complicated in Office apps than a simple letter or some very basic tracking spreadsheets, so it can handle all that fine in any of Microsoft Office, LibreOffice or Google Docs. For writing scripts like this one I’m doing right now, I’m just using plain text in Google Keep, so that could be managed by practically any computer made this millennium.
As mentioned earlier I like to use On1 Photo. While obviously a 9800X3D system is much faster at everything in general, the experience on the X360 is acceptable. Here’s me doing the usual fairly light edits to a Panasonic RAW photo, a bit of levelling and cropping, a bit of exposure and colour correcting, checking the lens correction, a bit of denoising which i think is as computationally difficult as it gets, and a final export. Not blazing fast, but not frustrating enough to make me want to lay out money on a new laptop. If anything’s a pain compared to working on my desktop it’s the lack of screen space compared to a honkin’ great widescreen monitor, but that’s not a problem inherent to this machine.
I also on occasion use Affinty’s suite of photo and design apps, I suppose mainly these days for video thumbnails. Nothing too complex, just really adding some text overlays, so here’s that being done, and no issues with that really for my simple uses.
I’ve not recorded a podcast in a few years now, but I used to and from previous experience I can tell you there’s no problem recording podcast audio in Audacity while chatting on Discord and editing the participants tracks together in Reaper, applying the compression and any intro music and audio stings is no easily done, with the only real difference from my desktop being a few minutes longer export time for the longer episodes. I can live with that.
I do want to have the capacity for a bit of gaming for any downtime. There’s two drawbacks here, the 256GB SSD is barely big enough for some of today’s games, which is solved by the other drawback, the integrated Vega 8 graphics isn’t powerful enough to run them. After all, at a 15W TDP for the combined CPU and GPU, it’s got maybe 3 to 5% of the raw horsepower of the systems we’ve been looking at recently.
Still, seeing as I have a suite of test games from previous videos on an external SSD I suppose we can quickly run them and see if we can get anything playable from the demanding end before looking at something more realistic.
Cinebench 2024 aborts its run due to a lack of RAM, so that’s not a great start. It’s also not a game, so that’s fine. Speaking of not games, here’s the rest of the usual synthetic tests – 3DMark’s Time Spy gets a whopping 818 points, Fire Strike screams its way to a blistering 2149, and Unigine’s Superposition at 1080p High settings gets a stratospheric 971.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider takes quite a while to load, and our usual benchmark run at 1080p High settings gives an average of 8 fps, and 720p lowest settings still wasn’t playable at 23 fps.
Counter-Strike 2 gets a very jerky 13 average fps at 1080p Very High, although 720p Low settings gives a reasonably playable 55 average fps.
Cyberpunk 2077 at our usual 1080p Ultra settings gives a Powerpointesque 4 fps, and 720p Low settings isn’t much better at 14 average fps.
COD Warzone crashes to desktop in fairly spectacular fashion, as did Assassin’s Creed Mirage at 1080p High Settings, with 720p Low settings getting 22 average fps.
Unreal Engine 5 games are just not happening – Black Myth Wukong gets 4 fps at 1080p High without Framegen, and at 720p Low with framegen and 67% FSR scaling it scrabbles its way to a still unacceptable 21 average fps.
Marvel Rivals at the usual 1080p Medium, Native Res gives a whole 2 fps, and at even at 720p low, performance settings & a bunch of FSR we’re stuck at 13 fps.
Red Dead Redemption 2, as with most of these games so far warns us about low memory on launch, and at 720p, lowest settings gets an 18 fps average.
It’s even a bridge too far for the highly optimised Forza Horizon 5, getting 12 fps at 1080p Medium settings, improving to 29 fps at 720p Lowest settings, and Horizon Zero Dawn at a barely recognisable 480p lowest settings stuttered its way to 18 fps.
So, if that’s a bit of a bust, what can I play instead? Well, my backlog of games goes back to before the advent of Steam, so there’s no shortage of less demanding games on my “to play” list that this can handle.
For example, any 2D game that I can think of, so the likes of Hollow Knight and it’s platformer brethren like Dead Cells, indie Harvest Moon killer Stardew Valley, gorgeous golden era animation themed run and gun Cuphead, addictive card battler rogue-like Slay the Spire, colony slash failure sim Rimworld and so many others run very well. Hell, Rimworld and the other addictive card battler rogue-like Balatro alone could consume my entire life, so we’re not hurting for entertainment.
That’s not to say 3D games aren’t beyond it, if you calibrate your expectations. Going back in time a bit to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, we can easily run games like perhaps my favourite RPG Fallout: New Vegas, the most profitable game of all time Grand Theft Auto V, the last outing of the sadly missed Max Payne 3, perhaps my favourite RPG Skyrim, one of the best fighters in Ultra Street Fighter 4, the amazing Nepobaby vigilante simulator Batman Arkham City, and perhaps my favourite RPG Mass Effect.
Of course, there’s also a near infinite raft of PC games going way back to the MSDOS era that can mostly be persuaded to play by some means, either natively or using the excellent exoDos project to get hold of classics like Wing Commander or Tie Fighter. I’m told non-space combat games are also available.
EMULATION
It’s not just PC games on the menu of course, there’s plenty of console games that can be played through emulation. As with PC games, the 2D era won’t be a problem, so the 8 and 16 bit consoles from the Atari 2600 through to the Neo Geo are going to run perfectly.
Stepping into 3D, the OG PlayStation and the N64 are easily dealt with.
Sega’s Dreamcast might just be my favourite console, and seems oddly easy to emulate given how good I think this still looks. The most demanding games like Metropolis Street Racer and Shenmue II look better than ever with some upscaling applied, and there’s so many classic arcade experiences to, er, experience on this console.
My other contender for favourite console would be the Sega Saturn, whose, um, unique, hardware is troublesome to emulate, so the like of Panzer Dragoon Saga and Burning Rangers are a bit of a stretch, but I’d say they can be playable.
I did not have a Nintendo GameCube at the time, so I do want to catch up with the likes of Metroid Prime and Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, and these harder to run games play variably on this laptop – Metroid seems fine, but Rogue Leader stutters quite badly. Less demanding games will run fine.
That might be as far as we can reliably push it though – trying some of the more demanding PlayStation 2 games give a similar experience to GameCube. God of War II runs pretty well, but Shadow of the Colossus and doesn’t give a very good experience, so again less demanding games will run fine but it’s a bit variable. PlayStation 3 and the assorted Xboxes are beyond it.
On to what prompted this video, namely, er, videos, and the editing thereof. Looking at the minimum specs for Davinci Resolve 20 on their website, it just says Windows 10 Creators Update. No hardware. And I have some hardware, so that must be fine, right? Other websites suggest 16GB of RAM and a proper graphics card, so that’s less promising.
Thankfully I’m only recording and editing in 1080p, so there’s at least an outside chance of this working. If I ever jump to 4K I do not expect this to cut it. Even at 1080p, it’s best to use proxy clips – downsampled, easier to handle clips – for editing, that are replaced with the full quality clips for final export.
Running though my usual fairly light use case of stitching together of clips, background music and simple titles, there’s a few problems but we can work around them. On my main PC I can simply dump on the eighty-odd gigabytes of raw footage into Resolve’s media bin then preview, pick and insert without any problems. Attempting to front load that on the laptop causes it to be unresponsive, I assume from the workload of trying to create all the proxy clips at once. Adding the necessary files as I need them, doing the previewing in the VLC video player outside of Resolve is working, but it’s a slower, less convenient workflow.
It also wasn’t recognising videos from my Pixel phone, but that’s my mistake in not installing the HEVC pack. Which turned out to be a saga in itself, as I don’t have the Microsoft Store installed on this stripped back IoT edition, which means the app installer for MSIX and appxbundle format installers wasn’t installed. Nothing a bit of Googling couldn’t solve, and after installing the installer for the installer I could install the codecs.
With that fixed, playback of the clips during editing was a little choppy, but never unbearably so. On two occasions it didn’t load a clip correctly requiring a restart to fix, but overall the main barriers to being as productive as I could be on my desktop were a more cramped screen and a slightly worse mouse, so at least for my current amateurish, basic editing style, this laptop can handle it.
The final render to the 1080p YouTube setting took 24 minutes 11 seconds, quite a while for an ten-ish minute video and much longer than the 1 minute 33 seconds my desktop takes to render the same project, but I’m only doing that once a week so I can live with that. If nothing else, it’s a useful incentive to double check your work before rendering.
It’s good news for my overdraft – there’s no pressing need to upgrade by laptop at this precise moment. Sure, it can’t play the most demanding games, but there’s plenty of older games that it can, and that’s the only area it really can’t do acceptably.
If I was making my living editing photos or particularly video, I’d want something faster as my daily driver. If I keep this YouTube lark up and learn any more demanding techniques or effects, or move to 4K video, then this will go past what this guy can offer.
But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Overall, this is still doing what I need it to, and I’m still quite happy with it. I just need this to be able to handle the same duties of my main desktop, not match it for speed. Faster processors, better graphics capabilities, OLED screens, just better hardware in general has of course become available in the seven years since this launched, and as much as I’d like it, I can’t justify it.
At least not yet, and if there’s any point to the past quarter hour of waffling it’s simply that you do not need to be on the bleeding edge of hardware to get serious work done, and have a decent time with playing too. I’ve not searched extensively on eBay but these seem to be going for around £150 for a good condition example. I don’t know if that’s the best deal available, but I think it’s a decent value and will be better than a new machine at that price point.
If you have any thoughts on this please post a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.