The USP of the Snapdragon-powered notebooks is the ability to run full Windows 10 on ARM without the restrictions that Windows RT posed back in the heyday. Asus includes a copy of Windows 10 S with the NovaGo and while it is good enough for web use and for apps from the Microsoft Store, it can be limiting when it comes to installing conventional Windows x86 programs. Thankfully, you can upgrade Windows 10 S to Windows 10 Pro for free but that's not without its caveats. x86 bloating aside, not all programs are optimized to efficiently run on the ARM architecture. Although Microsoft includes an x86 emulation layer, many programs need fine tuning to work efficiently with it. However, PCWorld reports that once the emulation layer has interpreted an x86 binary, it is cached to help improve subsequent performance. Therefore, many existing benchmarks will tend to post low or less than ideal scores. As we go on, we will see things improve on the software side so there's no immediate reason to worry.

The scores below reflect some of the performance metrics one can expect before the notebook heads to production. They are nothing to write home about but should indicate enough performance for every day use. The Geekbench 4 scores are lower than even most Android phones featuring the same Snapdragon 835 SoC. Again, this could be due to the pre-production sample or due to the benchmarks not being optimized for the x86 emulation on the ARM platform. We are a bit wary about the Cinebench R11.5 scores, though. For comparison, an Intel Core i7-8550U has an average score of 1.8 in single-core and 6.1 in multi-core. We assume that the actual scores could have been 1.15 for single-core and 3.22 for multi-core in case of the SD835 but we will wait for Ultrabookreviews' clarification on that. PCWorld, however, reports that they could not install Cinebench on the NovaGo (the version was not indicated).

Microsoft Edge seems to a preferred browser for the Snapdragon-powered laptops as evident by the browser tests. Chrome has always been a bit taxing even on moderately powerful PCs so its lower scores are not surprising. The notebook, being passively cooled, is fully silent and devoid of any electronic noise. The temperatures seem to hover around a comfortable 33 degrees in the middle even under load.

