I tested a Snapdragon X2 laptop both on and off the charger, and I didn't lose one noticeable ounce of speed

Snapdragon X2 Elite CPU — (Image credit: Qualcomm)

Manufacturers are rushing to catch up to Snapdragon’s battery life game, and it’s a tight race. Well, kind of. Intel’s Panther Lake and AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 chips are putting in the work, for sure, but x86 chips can’t seem to escape the throttling necessary to output high battery life figures.

For x86 chips, throttling the power has been an issue for years. For example, with Intel’s recent Panther Lake, the performance drops roughly 20% when unplugged. That’s a pretty significant dip if you’re trying to get some moderate work done and don’t have access to an outlet nearby.

Now, I’ve spent quite some time with the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11, which sports the latest Snapdragon X2-42 Plus chipset, and I can tell you that it performed a magician’s act. Yes, of course there’s a performance decrease when on battery, but it is dramatically different from the competition.

I got a little over 16 hours of battery life with the IdeaPad Slim 5x with casual hands-on time, using apps like Google Chrome, Spotify, YouTube, and Discord at 50% brightness. However, to be clear, I did not get anywhere near this amount while benchmarking (roughly 2.5 hours). So with the caveat that the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus can be pushed to its limit off the charger, it will kill your battery to do so. The point is to prove that the IdeaPad can maintain stellar performance while on battery, not the same level of battery life during intense performance.

With that out of the way, let me tell you about these numbers.

CPU performance stays strong

On the Geekbench 6 overall performance test, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus scored 12,350 (multi-core) and 3,273 (single-core) while on the charger and 12,095 and 3,230 while on battery, respectively. I’ll do the math for you — that’s a 2% decrease in multi-core performance and a 1.3% decrease in single-core performance (I’ll stick to percentages going forward). I’d like to call that remarkably negligible, and that stacks up to hands-on experience as well.

I spent several hours with the IdeaPad Slim 5x both on and off the charger and noticed no visible difference in performance. I juggled dozens of Google Chrome tabs, Spotify, Discord, and did some light gaming with Hollow Knight. Any slowdowns in performance due to the lower-end chip were present both on and off the charger as well.

Jumping back into benchmarks, I took a tour through the 2024 and 2026 Cinebench suite and noticed a 1.9% and 5.4% decrease in multicore performance and 4.5% and 5.9% in single-core performance, respectively. Those gaps are a bit larger than the overall performance in Geekbench, but still within a short range. Similarly, when transcoding a 4K video to 1080p in Handbrake, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus completed it 3.9% faster when plugged in.

With the largest gap being close to 6%, the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus is still significantly more efficient than its competitors in terms of CPU performance.

The GPU is even more steady

In terms of graphics performance, the Adreno X2-45 GPU doesn’t mess around. To start, I put it through a long list of 3DMark benchmarks.

On the Steel Nomad Light test, which is designed to test the performance of lightweight PCs, I saw only a 0.8% decrease in performance when it was unplugged. Bumping it up to the standard Steel Nomad test for heavier game titles, the difference landed on 1.2%.

Surprisingly, the gap got even shorter in Port Royal and Solar Bay, 3DMark’s real-time ray tracing benchmarks, with just a 0.6% and 0.8% decrease, respectively. Finally, jumping back to lightweight PC tests, the Adreno X2-45 saw only a 0.6% decrease in performance on the Wild Life Extreme benchmark.

These numbers are more negligible than the CPU performance, which is pretty impressive since graphics can vary so heavily in terms of their demands. When crunching the numbers together, across all five of the 3DMark tests, the Adreno X2-45 saw only a 0.8% decrease in performance.

With real-world gaming benchmarks, I hopped on Cyberpunk 2077. Yes, really, because it doesn’t get much more intensive than Night City. Surprisingly, tweaking the settings down to Low with AMD’s Super Resolution set to Performance netted me 33 fps while plugged in and exactly 33 fps while on battery. Yes, the performance is identical. When I flipped on frame generation, I got 43 fps (both times).

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of ARM-compatible games with built-in benchmarks, so I picked up my run of Hollow Knight (great music, painful map). Slicing my way through bugs, trying to figure out the last thing I was doing, the Adreno X2-45 managed 355 fps when unplugged (it’s a very lightweight game). More importantly, it only shot up to 358 fps when I plugged it in, so it maintained virtually the same quality.

The Adreno X2-45 GPU isn’t exactly designed for gaming, especially considering ARM is incompatible with quite a few titles, but it sure as heck gives you the best its got on and off the charger.

All natural

When all is said and done, Intel and AMD may have the battery life numbers to keep up to Snapdragon chips, but the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus’ benchmarks prove that throttling doesn’t have to be the only way to achieve longevity. Now, despite that, pushing the Snapdragon X2-42 Plus to its limit will tank the battery life hard. It’s only natural, especially when you aren’t throttling the performance, but it is a slight trade off.

It would be great to see Snapdragon have improved efficiency in the future when under stress. In the meantime, Intel and AMD should focus on figuring out how to get the battery just as long as Snapdragon’s without slamming the brakes.

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