This laptop, the HP Dragonfly Elite, is
my absolute favorite Windows machine, and it also is now dead. And in its
place, we have this right here, the HP Elite Book X G1A. This looks like it's
going to be a fantastic machine, but can it possibly compare to its older
brother? I don't know. All right, let's see what we have in the box.
Oh, wow. That's a big power brick. I was
not expecting one to be this large. I'm surprised that we have a 100 watt
charger here because this is quite large
and quite bulky for what is going to be a very thin machine. Oh, yes. Plug it
in. Turn it on. Do you think it's going to be pretty, Belle? Yes.
It's actually It just looks like a laptop if I'm honest. This is one heck
of a laptop looking laptop. I'm not going to tell you the price yet, but
this right here looks like a machine that could be anywhere from $700 to
quite a bit more. It does not feel like
a cheap machine, though. This is, first of all, very cold to the touch right now
because it is all metal and it feels very solid. One finger open, no problem.
And here we have our keyboard. First things that I'm noticing right here, we
have a shutter for the webcam, which I absolutely love to see. That way, you
can just know that when you're off hours time, you're not going to accidentally
still be in a team's call or something. The chassis is made out of 80% recycled
aluminum, and it is hecking stiff. I'm
going to push here. Wow. It's not very often that we're
going to break out a MacBook for comparison, but man, it is close. The HP
is not quite MacBook Pro stiff, but it's way stiffer than something like a
MacBook Air. The IO also looks very impressive. On the right, we have
Thunderbolt 4 USBA. On the left, we have
another Thunderbolt 4 USBC and HDMI 2.1.
So, you aren't going to be having any issues plugging this into kind of
whatever you want. I really love that they keep on including USB typeA on
these laptops because it is a lifesaver. the industry completely screwed up the
whole transition to type-C. The weight of the Elite Books feels a little bit
heavier. That aluminum is not going to be as light as the magnesium that was on
the Dragonfly. So, it comes in at 3.28
lb. It's not too bad, but its predecessor is 2.8. That's not going to
be backbreaking difference, but it is a difference indeed. And the MacBook for a
full comparison is 3.5. All right, let's
turn it on. Ah, nice. It has HPWolf
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let's have a look at this machine. Now, the first thing I'm noticing is this
desktop background looks really soft. Is it is that a problem with the display?
Okay, this display does look pretty good. The background was most of the
issue, but at the same time, this is not a display that is going to knock you out
of the park. It's 1920 x 1200, so it's not going to be quite like a retina
display or 4K on something like this. And you can notice the softness. Like
I'm going to open Notepad. And it's
decent enough. I would say you can kind
of from back here have a pretty good time, but if you use your computer from
like right here for whatever reason, you are going to be starting to notice that
the resolution is not the highest. But the good news is though that you can get
an OLED panel on this if you don't mind sacrificing a bunch of your battery
life. And my eyes don't deceive me either. The Labs test results for this
display are a bit on the mediocre side.
Now, it is quite bright. They advertise 400 nits, but we measured 465, which is
an excellent showing, but everything
else is not as good. There is a noticeable green tint on the display and
only managed to cover 96% of sRGB at a
time when most displays are getting close to 100 of DCIP3, which is way
wider of a color gamut. So, what you want to do on your laptop is do photo
editing or video editing or watch content in a beautiful way, this is not
going to be the laptop for you. But again, there is an OLED option. Oh, and
it also isn't a touchcreen. In fairness to HP though, for the people that I
think they're aiming this laptop at, this display is going to be very good.
What it is fantastic at is having quite low eye strain. I am not seeing anything
on here that's going to make you be fatigued after a while. And also, it has
a matte cover on it that is fantastic at
rejecting glare. Like, we have a light above my head and that's how much glare
we're getting. We can look, there's a studio light. It's of course a bit
diffused and stuff like that. Let's look at that on the MacBook. Yeah, there we
go. You can really see that. And our studio light. Yep. You're not seeing a
thing on that display. This is aimed at being a business machine though the
keyboard and trackpad have to be exceptional. So let's have a
look. Oh, that's a really good
keyboard. Okay, the Dragonfly is way better. It has a fantastic snap to it.
Whereas we come over to the Elite Book, you can hear that it's just way more
dull. So, we've we've got
the compared
to you can just hear the difference in the snap. So, HP has kind of shot
themselves in the foot here because this is by all regards an absolutely
fantastic keyboard. I'm going to give it a very solid A because I think that it
is great, but it is following up the
best laptop keyboard on the market in my opinion. So, you didn't get there, guys.
What you can replace, though, is this trackpad down here. Although, I don't
know why you would want to because it is great. It is glass topped and although
it is not force touch, which is a bit unfortunate, I can forgive it because
the click feel is fantastic. It is large and I just like it. It feels really
good. I'm also going to give the trackpad an A. Although, that said, I
think at the price point of this machine, they could have got four such
in there. Although this does not have quite like gaming laptop power, it is
quite a competent little machine. And here we have the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro
375 with Radeon 890M. That is quite a mouthful, but it
does have 12 cores, 24 threads. It is
quite a fast little guy. We also have 32 GB of 8,000 mega transfer per second
RAM, which is going to be quite rapid, but also not replaceable. A 1 TBTE
Kioxia NVMe SSD. MediaTek Wi-Fi 7. I
would much prefer if it was not MediaTek cuz they're not the most stable in my
experience, but oh well, maybe we'll see if you can change it out later. And of
course, the Radeon 890M for the graphics. The graphics in this are quite
good and we tested it compared to Intel's Core Ultra 9 285H in the Lenovo
Idea Pad and it turns out that it's a
wash between the two. In Cyberpunk, AMD
gets quite a big league. In Rocket League, they are pretty much identical
in performance. And in Dota 2, Intel absolutely sweeps it with plus 33%
performance. So, it's a toss-up of which one's going to be faster, Intel, AMD, I
don't know. It depends on the game. What is not going to be a wash, though, is
the NPU. On the Intel side, they intentionally made the NPU smaller for a
larger GPU in order to match AMD, whereas AMD just has a big NPU and a
good GPU because this right here has 55 tops of performance, meaning you can do
all your co-pilot stuff if you actually like AI for whatever reason. I like to
think of it as onboard machine learning hardware. Let's have a listen to Crab
Rafe here. This does have Poly Studio speakers, but I suspect it's not going
to be able to keep up with our MacBook, even though they're the same size. And
it looks like they dedicated very similar amounts of space to their
speakers. Oh, sounds pretty
good. It's clear and loud, although it does not have a whole lot of bass. Let's
listen to the Mac. Oh, that's way
better. Wow. Yep. The HB sounds pretty
good until you hear a MacBook. Wow. That's a There's a lot more stage.
There's a lot more bass. The highs still sound pretty
clear. Yeah, they're about equally
loud. I would say that's a pretty good showing for HP, but it is not going to
be tangling with the best in the market. One thing that is very nice about this
HP compared to the Mac though is that there's no stupid notch. And there also
is quite a nice little webcam. Up here we have a 5 megapixel webcam which can
record at 1440p. And I cannot tell if
the webcam is at fault, but I look green and sickly. I'm pretty sure that's a
problem with our display and the fact that it has a bit of a green tint to it.
That said though, this webcam is doing a fantastic job. It is exposing for my
face fantastically. We can see a really bright light here. Really dark stuff
over here. It doesn't care. It is exposing for me. It looks nice and
sharp. Can move around here. Is it going to figure it out? It did. Moving around
even more. Just directly into some studio lights. My face is still
perfectly exposed. It's not having any issues. And maybe the microphone's
pretty good. You guys can be the judge of that. I didn't mention it before, but
we did ask HP if the color space and the
display accuracy are what they expected and they said it is within their specs.
So, you might get one that looks like this. Four Phillips head screws later,
all of which are captive. I love to see that. And we are in. Now, the
repairability itself is not the best,
but HP does get a whole bunch of points for publishing on YouTube a full repair
guide for this thing. So everything that can be repaired, you can repair, or at
least in theory, you know how to do it. In here, it looks like we can replace
our SSD. And that's about it. The Wi-Fi
card sadly is soldered down. The RAM, as we expected, is underneath here
somewhere. Soldered down. Can't replace that. The real reason why we're in here,
though, is the battery. Despite this being quite a small laptop, HP has
managed to put a 74.5Wh hour battery into this thing, which netted us a bit
over 11 hours of battery life, which is very impressive for something with that
powerful of a processor, although no GPU. We can also see the woofers right
here. And there's not a whole lot more that we can do in here. Now, I've
alluded to it before, but we need to talk about the price. What we have right
here as spec is a $2,200 machine. Now, it is built for
businesses. So, if you're buying a whole bunch of them, I'm sure HP will give you
a bit of a deal. And also, I think that these are the kind of laptops that go on
sale quite a bit. But at $2,200, this is
the sort of machine that I would recommend you have your employer buy for
you instead of maybe purchasing it for yourself. That said though, there's a
lot to like with this laptop. Build quality is fantastic. keyboard, trackpad
also fantastic. The IO is quite good.
It's just the screen and the price are not quite where they need to be. So, do
I think that the Elite Book is a good replacement for the Dragonfly? Honestly,
I think so. The Dragonfly was also way
too expensive if we're honest. And although you are giving up the
magnesium, this Elite Book is quite a
good machine. And you do have to remember with these business laptops
that you're also paying for things like dual BIOS, the support that comes with
it in theory, and also me liking you for
watching this video. So, huge thanks for watching. Hit like, get subscribed, and
I hope you guys have a great old day. See you later.