The rumour mill is churning out some unexpected news about the Snapdragon X Elite, with reviews suggesting that the chip's performance is significantly slower than what Qualcomm had initially promised.

Reddit user r/caponica23 shared his review of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge. The benchmarks fail to match the performance of the iPhone 12 mini, released in 2021.

Putting the laptop through its paces on GeekBench and CrystalDiskMark, as well as subjective battery and gaming tests, revealed some concerning results for the Snapdragon X Elite processor. While on battery power, the computer scored 1829 on single-core and 11379 on multi-core.

Even when plugged in, the performance only slightly increased to 1841 single-core points and 11537 multi-core points. These numbers are a far cry from Qualcomm's own tests at press events, which boasted 2977 single-core points and 15086 multi-core points.

Gaming performance was also underwhelming, with Resident Evil 7: Village running at 40-50 FPS at 1080p and with AMD's FSR on performance mode.

While we would treat anyone who compares performance with an iPhone as suspect, we are not the only ones. Toms Hardware also questioned how the review could come out that bad.

There were some issues with the review as the  CPU never boosted above 2.52 GHz in the Reddit tests. This is an obvious concern as the Elite X advertises boost clocks up to 4.0 GHz.

The above X thread alleges that the Galaxy Book4 Edge physically limited the CPU speeds to keep cooling and battery performance maintainable, but this doesn't line up with other GeekBench scores for the Samsung laptop arriving today with some of the faster scores in the Copilot+ lineup.

Tom's Hardware played with Microsoft's Surface laptops at the Microsoft Build event in May and found no proof of foul play in Microsoft's demos or benchmarks.  Third-party reviewers have also gotten high results in their deeper testing, though Microsoft commissioned the reviews.