Samsung Galaxy Book4 edge 16 Review: Highest Performance Snapdragon X Elite But Not the Right Fit For All
Samsung has been quietly making premium Windows laptops for years, and its Galaxy Book series stands out for its AMOLED displays and aluminum unibody designs. For its first Snapdragon X Elite Galaxy Books, Samsung offers two sizes: 14” ($1350) and 16” ($1450 or $1750). All versions ship with 16GB RAM and a 512GB eUFS drive for storage. The $1750 16” model is uniquely outfitted with Qualcomm’s top-spec 12-core 3.8 GHz peak version of the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-84-100), and that is the configuration I tested.
Like the Intel versions before it, for such a large screen size, the Galaxy Book4 edge is extremely thin and much lighter than it looks. Build quality is excellent, though it does have a bit of a sharp edge – a bit more chamfering would make it more comfortable to hold and open. The 3K 120Hz AMOLED 2X is superb – bright and punchy. Unlike Lenovo’s YOGA Slim 7x, Samsung manages to coax out reasonable volume from the speakers, making the Galaxy a great media machine. I also like the integration with other Samsung Galaxy devices; outside of China, the only laptop vendors that are also volume sellers of smartphones are Apple and Lenovo/Motorola. Samsung should actually be highlighting these capabilities more both in marketing and with post-purchase reminders, but this is already a competitive differentiator.
Samsung has a lot of real estate available on the laptop’s deck, and it uses it to add a numpad and what looks like the world’s largest trackpad. I have talked with users who love this layout, but I don’t like either of these decisions. The numpad forces your hands off to the left, which means either you’re awkwardly twisting your body or annoyingly twisting your neck for a more centered view. The trackpad is so large that I routinely missed the area for a ‘left click’ and every click turns into a ‘right click’ instead. There are settings that can compensate somewhat, but even then I had many false touches of the touchpad because of its size relative to where I want to rest my wrists.
New Silicon Architecture: Snapdragon X Elite
Today’s Qualcomm is diversified across IP, phones, automotive, and IoT, but it wasn’t always thus. One of the first phone-adjacent markets that Qualcomm tried to enter was computing, and it was not seeing much success. To help break through, Qualcomm acquired NUVIA in 2021 for its engineering talent. NUVIA CEO Gerard Williams was the chief architect of Apple Silicon before leaving to found NUVIA, and he agreed to take some of the Arm-based ideas his team was developing for datacenters and repurpose them for personal computing. The resulting architecture is roughly competitive with Apple’s base M3 in some performance-per-watt comparisons and has an enormous NPU for on-device AI processing.
Samsung is the only vendor to use the highest-end version of the Snapdragon X Elite, and in my benchmarks I saw a clear jump in performance, especially over the entry model X1E78100 used in HP and Lenovo’s YOGA competitors. In practice, this did not make a noticeable difference for my productivity workload, but it should speed up heavier duty tasks like video editing in Da Vinci Resolve or Adobe’s Creative Suite.
Content creation is a good use case for the Galaxy Book4 edge, as the 16” size makes this more of a desktop replacement than a go-everywhere notebook. The Galaxy Book4 edge 16 does not fit on a United economy tray table. It is also unwieldy on my lap during press conferences. If you are not taking this laptop everywhere and you can keep it plugged in, then the primary benefit of Snapdragon X Elite – its performance-per-watt, which allows for long battery life and high performance – is mooted. Battery life was not as strong as I was expecting, possibly due to my invoking performance mode for testing, and possibly due to keeping the brightness of the huge AMOLED display just above 50% in order to get the most out of it visually.
| Geekbench 6 - on battery | Apple iPad Pro M4 16GB | Apple MacBook Air 15" M2 16GB | Apple MacBook Pro 14" M3 Max 64GB | HP Elitebook Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100 | Lenovo Slim 7x Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100 | Microsoft Surface Laptop Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100 | Samsung GalaxyBook4 Edge Snapdragon X Elite X1E84100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU single-core | 3846 | 2649 | 2886 | 2415 | 2418 | 2831 | 2913 |
| CPU multi-core | 14608 | 10097 | 21106 | 13765 | 13909 | 14494 | 14145 |
Windows on Arm (Not New, But Might as Well Be)
This is not the first time Microsoft and Qualcomm have attempted to build a market for Windows on Arm architecture, but this is the first time it has a chance to be broadly viable. All of Microsoft’s productivity apps have been recompiled to native apps for Arm. (Fair warning: the one issue I ran into was that only the new version of Outlook is available for Snapdragon X Elite now, and it has different license restrictions.) All the major web browsers now have native versions as well. Many core creative apps from Adobe and others are either native today, or will be in the coming months.
Finally, most apps that don’t have native Arm versions can run well in emulation thanks to Microsoft’s new improved Prism emulation layer and the raw horsepower that the Snapdragon X Elite platform provides. You wouldn’t want to buy a Snapdragon X PC just to run emulated apps – they won’t be as fast or as efficient as native apps – but the 3.8 GHz X1E-84-100 on the Galaxy Book4 edge should do a better job than its competitors that use lower-performance Snapdragon X Elite parts. Long tail apps like music players, image viewers, and even the encryption apps I tried all worked without issue.
There are still three areas to be aware of:
Gaming – Engineering is one use case where a better-supported GPU may be more important than the NPU today, but another one is certainly gaming. Samsung doesn’t have a gaming brand, but the Galaxy Book4 Ultra with an Intel processor and dedicated nvidia graphics and 16” 120Hz 3K display fits the role nicely. The Galaxy Book4 edge has the same display and a faster CPU but games that have been ported to Arm and optimized for Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU are few and far between. You can run some games effectively in emulation, and Xbox Cloud gaming works – I tested it – but gaming is not a realistic use case for Snapdragon X Elite at the moment.
Device drivers – Compatibility could be a problem if you regularly need to connect to unique printers, scanners, or lab equipment. However, I had no problems with anything normal (consumer printers, small business scanners) or obscure (old external media drives).
Unique corporate, engineering, VPN, and creativity apps – Consumers aren’t likely to encounter too many of these, and this is a problem that I expect will largely be resolved over time as apps from Adobe, Box, and others get updated. For example, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and Lightroom are all native now, and the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite is scheduled for optimization. Adobe Premiere Pro didn’t run at launch, but just a few weeks later it can run slowly in emulation, and a native version is expected soon. Also worth noting: the iTunes app for Windows works fine, but Apple TV+ will not even download.
Copilot+ PC Isn’t Helping
Microsoft launched its Copilot+ PC initiative alongside Qualcomm to great fanfare ahead of its BUILD developer conference in May (see Microsoft Reinvigorates Windows with Recall and Snapdragon). The Copilot+ PC program requires PCs to have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with a performance measurement of at least 40 TOPS to handle on-device AI tasks without slowing down the CPU or GPU or killing battery life. The Snapdragon X provides 45 TOPS.
Unfortunately, the Copilot+ PC featureset isn’t all that compelling even a few months after it launched. The flagship feature, Recall, has been recalled for security reasons and still isn’t expected to ship for another two months. That leaves drawing assistant CoCreator in Microsoft Paint, Live Captions, and Studio Effects in Teams video calls as the main AI-enhanced features. None of these capabilities are game-changing, and within months they will be available on new chips from Intel and AMD. In fact, for some workloads, choosing Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Ultra – now discounted close to the price of the Galaxy Book4 edge – will be a better fit due to its discrete GPU.
There is also a small but growing library of third-party apps that take advantage of the Snapdragon X Elite’s NPU to power AI features on-device. For example, Zoom and Camo have Snapdragon X -specific image processing capabilities that run on the NPU for better performance without impacting battery life. Helping things further: the webcam on the Galaxy Book4 edge is much better than average.
Conclusion
The Galaxy Book4 edge 16 performs well, but battery life – while still good – didn’t live up to what I’m seeing on other Snapdragon X Elite laptops. It makes an extraordinary little theater for watching content, but the 14” version of the Galaxy Book4 edge, with its better keyboard ergonomics and portability, and slightly slower Snapdragon X Elite chipset, is likely a better choice. Lenovo’s YOGA Slim 7x is a well-balanced Snapdragon X Elite alternative with its own OLED display. Samsung’s Intel-based Galaxy Book4 Ultra will be a better fit for those who need a discrete GPU in a 16” chassis, though this is much more expensive when not on sale, and it could be nearing end of life now that new silicon from Intel and AMD is on the way. The just-announced Galaxy Book5 360 Pro with Intel’s Core Ultra 2 (Lunar Lake) could be an interesting way to split the difference: better battery life and strong integrated Arc graphics, but Techsponential hasn’t had a chance to see if that platform lives up to the hype.
To discuss the implications of this report on your business, product, or investment strategies, contact Techsponential at avi@techsponential.com.