Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 laptop review - The fastest Snapdragon X Elite challenges AMD's Zen 5

Please note: We have recently updated our rating system and the results of version 8 are not comparable with the results of version 7. More information is available here. 

The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100 is the fastest mobile processor from Qualcomm, whose 12 cores all feature a maximum clock rate of 3.8 GHz and its dual-core turbo can reach a maximum of 4.2 GHz. As a result, it should be a good bit faster than the X1E-80-100 (max. 3.4 GHz for all cores, max. 4.0 GHz dual-core turbo). Moreover, the X1E-84-100 is equipped with the more powerful version of the X1-85 GPU. For reasons that are unknown, even Samsung's more expensive version of the Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 only comes with 16 GB RAM (LPDDR5x-8448)—which also can't be upgraded.

Three different energy profiles are available in the Samsung settings: quiet, optimized and high performance. The optimized profile is active by default, which we also used for the following measurements and benchmarks. In high performance mode, only the laptop's multi-core performance benefits (single-core and GPU are almost identical to the weaker profiles) and we also ran the CPU benchmarks using this mode—but the significantly louder fans were disproportionate to the increased performance.

But what does this mean for its performance? During the latest Cinebench 2024 multi-core test, its results were only average and the presumably weaker X1E-80-100 inside the Vivobook S 15 was 14 % faster than the X1E-84-100 using high performance mode. All-in-all, the Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 was on par with AMD's new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside the Zenbook S 16 at 28 watts. Apple's passively-cooled M3 chip inside its direct competitor—the MacBook Air 15—was beaten by a long shot, however, the M3 Pro inside the MacBook Pro 16 was faster.

During the single-core tests, the laptop's performance was very good overall, but its advantage over the X1E-80-100 was only small. It beat the Meteor Lake chips as well as the latest Zen 5 chips. We are curious to see how the upcoming Lunar Lake CPUs from Intel will perform. Apple's M3 chips still came ahead in the single-core tests, and the manufacturer's lead will likely increase even further with its upcoming M4 chips.

In addition to the native CPU tests, we also carried out our usual CPU benchmarks, which had to be emulated on the Snapdragon processor and are therefore not representative of its actual performance. However, there simply aren't native versions of all applications, so how it runs emulated apps is also not completely unimportant. As expected, AMD and Intel had a clear advantage in this scenario.

Its performance isn't reduced in battery mode. Further benchmarks are available in our tech section.

The laptop's system performance is generally great and it is a very responsive device. However, its performance may be weaker when running emulated apps and some applications don't run at all. You should check thoroughly in advance whether your desired apps will work on the Snapdragon laptop. Qualcomm itself has its own info page which lists the native apps, and Microsoft also offers a support page.

We couldn't perform our standardized latency test because the LatencyMon application couldn't be launched on the ARM system. When playing a 4K YouTube video, we at least noted no problems with dropped frames.

The SSD capacity of the more expensive Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 model has been increased from 512 to 1024 GB—but it still uses soldered-on UFS 4.0 storage which can't be upgraded. In contrast, the Intel version of the Galaxy Book4 Pro 16 even has two M.2-2280 slots available. There are no advantages for the user in this case. The storage chips inside our test device come from Samsung itself, which is generally fine. In addition, its transfer rates remain completely stable under prolonged load. After first booting up the device, users have 880 GB at their disposal. Further SSD benchmarks are listed here.