This laptop, the HP Dragonfly Elite is my absolute favorite Windows machine and 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
bell? 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.
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
USB-A. On the left, we have another Thunderbolt 4 USB-C 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 type A on these laptops because it is a lifesaver. The industry completely screwed
up the whole transition 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 pounds. It's not too bad, but its predecessor is 2.8. That's not going to be back breaking
difference, but it is a difference indeed. And the MacBook for a full comparison is 3.5.
All right, let's turn it on. All right, 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 by 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 lab
test results for this display are a bit on the mediocre side. Now, it is quite bright. They
advertised 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 it only managed to cover 96% of
sRGB at a time when most displays are getting close to 100 of DCI P3, 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 no LED option. Oh, and it also isn't a touchscreen. 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 in 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 got the
compare 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 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 force touch 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 AI9
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 gigabytes of 8000 megatransfer per second RAM,
which is going to be quite rapid, but also not replaceable. A 1TB Kyoksia NVMe SSD, MediaTek
Wi-Fi 7. I would much prefer if it was not MediaTek because they're not the most stable in my
experience, but 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 Ultron 9 285H in the Lenovo IdeaPad. 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, 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 CrabRave 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 HP sounds pretty good until you hear our 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 pretty clearly 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 five megapixel webcam, which can record a 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 Philips headscrews
later, all of which are captive. I love to see that and we are in. Now the repair ability 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 74.5 watt 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.