WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.080 This laptop, the HP Dragonfly Elite is my absolute favorite Windows machine and also 00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:14.640 is now dead. And in its place, we have this right here, the HP Elite Book X G1A. This looks 00:00:14.640 --> 00:00:20.160 like it's going to be a fantastic machine, but can it possibly compare to its older brother? 00:00:20.960 --> 00:00:24.320 I don't know. All right, let's see what we have in the box. 00:00:25.040 --> 00:00:31.920 Oh, wow, that's a big power brick. I was not expecting one to be this large. I'm surprised 00:00:31.920 --> 00:00:37.840 that we have a 100 watt charger here, because this is quite large and quite bulky for what is 00:00:37.840 --> 00:00:43.200 going to be a very thin machine. Oh yes, plug it in, turn it on. Do you think it's going to be pretty 00:00:43.200 --> 00:00:51.120 bell? Yes. It's actually, it just looks like a laptop. If I'm honest, this is one heck of a 00:00:51.120 --> 00:00:56.720 laptop looking laptop. I'm not going to tell you the price yet, but this right here looks like a 00:00:56.720 --> 00:01:04.400 machine that could be anywhere from $700 to quite a bit more. It does not feel like a cheap machine 00:01:04.400 --> 00:01:10.160 though. This is first of all very cold to the touch right now because it is all metal and it 00:01:10.160 --> 00:01:17.360 feels very solid. One finger open, no problem. And here we have our keyboard. First things that 00:01:17.360 --> 00:01:23.520 I'm noticing, right here we have a shutter for the webcam, which I absolutely love to see. That way 00:01:23.520 --> 00:01:28.160 you can just know that when you're off hours time, you're not going to accidentally still be in a 00:01:28.160 --> 00:01:34.800 team's call or something. The chassis is made out of 80% recycled aluminum and it is hecking stiff. 00:01:35.280 --> 00:01:41.920 Push here. Wow. It's not very often that we're going to break out a MacBook for comparison, 00:01:41.920 --> 00:01:48.640 but man, it is close. The HP is not quite MacBook Pro stiff, but it's way stiffer than something 00:01:48.640 --> 00:01:54.400 like a MacBook Air. The IO also looks very impressive. On the right, we have Thunderbolt 4 00:01:54.400 --> 00:02:01.760 USB-A. On the left, we have another Thunderbolt 4 USB-C and HDMI 2.1, so you aren't going to be 00:02:01.760 --> 00:02:07.040 having any issues plugging this into kind of whatever you want. I really love that they keep 00:02:07.120 --> 00:02:13.840 on including USB type A on these laptops because it is a lifesaver. The industry completely screwed 00:02:13.840 --> 00:02:19.360 up the whole transition type C. The weight of the Elite books feels a little bit heavier. That 00:02:19.360 --> 00:02:24.800 aluminum is not going to be as light as the magnesium that was on the Dragonfly, so it comes in at 00:02:24.800 --> 00:02:33.280 3.28 pounds. It's not too bad, but its predecessor is 2.8. That's not going to be back breaking 00:02:33.280 --> 00:02:41.040 difference, but it is a difference indeed. And the MacBook for a full comparison is 3.5. 00:02:41.040 --> 00:02:45.840 All right, let's turn it on. All right, let's have a look at this machine. Now, the first thing 00:02:45.840 --> 00:02:51.680 I'm noticing is this desktop background looks really soft. Is it? Is that a problem with the 00:02:51.680 --> 00:02:56.880 display? Okay, this display does look pretty good. The background was most of the issue, 00:02:56.880 --> 00:03:00.800 but at the same time, this is not a display that is going to knock you out of the park. 00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:08.400 It's 1920 by 1200, so it's not going to be quite like a retina display or 4K on something like this, 00:03:08.400 --> 00:03:16.160 and you can notice the softness. Like I'm going to open notepad. And it's decent enough, I would say. 00:03:16.160 --> 00:03:22.320 You can kind of from back here have a pretty good time, but if you use your computer from like right 00:03:22.320 --> 00:03:27.200 here for whatever reason, you are going to be starting to notice that the resolution is not 00:03:27.200 --> 00:03:32.800 the highest. But the good news is, though, that you can get an OLED panel on this if you don't 00:03:32.800 --> 00:03:37.440 mind sacrificing a bunch of your battery life. And my eyes don't deceive me either. The lab 00:03:37.440 --> 00:03:44.320 test results for this display are a bit on the mediocre side. Now, it is quite bright. They 00:03:44.320 --> 00:03:52.160 advertised 400 nits, but we measured 465, which is an excellent showing. But everything else is 00:03:52.160 --> 00:03:59.440 not as good. There is a noticeable green tint on the display, and it only managed to cover 96% of 00:03:59.440 --> 00:04:07.440 sRGB at a time when most displays are getting close to 100 of DCI P3, which is way wider of a 00:04:07.440 --> 00:04:13.440 color gamut. So what you want to do on your laptop is do photo editing or video editing or 00:04:14.160 --> 00:04:19.200 watch content in a beautiful way. This is not going to be the laptop for you. But again, 00:04:19.200 --> 00:04:25.040 there is no LED option. Oh, and it also isn't a touchscreen. In fairness to HP, though, for the 00:04:25.040 --> 00:04:31.200 people that I think they're aiming this laptop at, this display is going to be very good. What it 00:04:31.200 --> 00:04:37.200 is fantastic at is having quite low eye strain. I am not seeing anything on here that's going to 00:04:37.200 --> 00:04:43.200 make you be fatigued after a while. And also it has a matte cover on it that is fantastic at 00:04:43.200 --> 00:04:49.360 rejecting glare. Like we have a light above my head. And that's how much glare we're getting. We 00:04:49.360 --> 00:04:55.120 can look, there's a studio light. It's of course a bit diffused and stuff like that. Let's look at 00:04:55.120 --> 00:05:00.400 that on the MacBook. Yeah, there we go. You can really see that in our studio light. Yep, you're 00:05:00.400 --> 00:05:05.840 not seeing a thing on that display. This is aimed at being a business machine, though. The keyboard 00:05:05.840 --> 00:05:14.400 and trackpad have to be exceptional. So let's have a look. Oh, that's a really good keyboard. 00:05:18.400 --> 00:05:24.400 Okay, the Dragonfly is way better. It has a fantastic snap to it. Whereas we come over to 00:05:24.400 --> 00:05:29.360 the Elite Book, you can hear that it's just way more dull. So we've got the 00:05:29.360 --> 00:05:33.120 compare to 00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:43.520 you can just hear the difference in the snap. So HP has kind of shot themselves in the foot here 00:05:43.520 --> 00:05:49.360 because this is by all regards an absolutely fantastic keyboard. I'm going to give it a very 00:05:49.360 --> 00:05:56.320 solid A because I think that is great. But it is following up the best laptop keyboard on the 00:05:56.320 --> 00:06:03.120 market, in my opinion. So you didn't get there, guys. What you can replace, though, is this 00:06:03.120 --> 00:06:08.560 trackpad down here, although I don't know why you would want to because it is great. It is glass 00:06:08.560 --> 00:06:13.680 topped. And although it is not force touch, which is a bit unfortunate, I can forgive it because 00:06:13.680 --> 00:06:20.000 the click feel is fantastic. It is large. And I just like it. It feels really good. I'm also going 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:24.240 to give the trackpad an A. Although that said, I think at the price point of this machine, 00:06:24.800 --> 00:06:30.720 they could have got force touch in there. Although this does not have quite like gaming laptop power, 00:06:30.720 --> 00:06:35.280 it is quite a competent little machine. And here we have the AMD Ryzen AI9 00:06:36.240 --> 00:06:45.920 HX Pro 375 with Radeon 890M. That is quite a mouthful, but it does have 12 cores, 24 threads. 00:06:45.920 --> 00:06:52.560 It is quite a fast little guy. We also have 32 gigabytes of 8000 megatransfer per second RAM, 00:06:52.640 --> 00:07:00.720 which is going to be quite rapid, but also not replaceable. A 1TB Kyoksia NVMe SSD, MediaTek 00:07:00.720 --> 00:07:06.720 Wi-Fi 7. I would much prefer if it was not MediaTek because they're not the most stable in my 00:07:06.720 --> 00:07:12.480 experience, but well, maybe we'll see if you can change it out later. And of course, the Radeon 00:07:12.480 --> 00:07:18.960 890M for the graphics. The graphics in this are quite good. And we tested it compared to Intel's 00:07:18.960 --> 00:07:26.800 Core Ultron 9 285H in the Lenovo IdeaPad. And it turns out that it's a wash between the two. 00:07:26.800 --> 00:07:32.960 In Cyberpunk, AMD gets quite a big league. In Rocket League, they are pretty much identical 00:07:32.960 --> 00:07:40.480 in performance. And in Dota 2, Intel absolutely sweeps it with plus 33% performance. So it's a 00:07:40.480 --> 00:07:44.560 toss-up of which one's going to be faster. Intel AMD, I don't know, depends on the game. 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:50.720 What is not going to be a wash, though, is the NPU. On the Intel side, they intentionally made the 00:07:50.720 --> 00:07:58.400 NPU smaller for a larger GPU in order to match AMD, whereas AMD just has a big NPU and a good GPU, 00:07:58.400 --> 00:08:04.400 because this right here has 55 tops of performance, meaning you can do all your co-pilot stuff if 00:08:04.400 --> 00:08:10.160 you actually like AI for whatever reason. I like to think of it as onboard machine learning hardware. 00:08:10.160 --> 00:08:16.160 Let's have a listen to CrabRave here. This does have Poly Studio speakers, but I suspect it's not 00:08:16.160 --> 00:08:19.840 going to be able to keep up with our MacBook, even though they're the same size and it looks 00:08:19.840 --> 00:08:27.920 like they dedicated very similar amounts of space to their speakers. Oh, sounds pretty good. 00:08:30.400 --> 00:08:34.000 It's clear and loud, although it does not have a whole lot of bass. Let's listen to the Mac. 00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:36.960 Oh, that's way better. 00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:46.960 Wow. Yep, the HP sounds pretty good until you hear our MacBook. Wow, that's a, 00:08:48.160 --> 00:08:52.720 there's a lot more stage, there's a lot more bass. The highs still sound pretty clear. 00:08:54.000 --> 00:09:01.360 Yeah, they're pretty clearly loud. I would say that's a pretty good showing for HP, 00:09:01.360 --> 00:09:06.960 but it is not going to be tangling with the best in the market. One thing that is very nice about 00:09:06.960 --> 00:09:12.320 this HP compared to the Mac though, is that there's no stupid notch and there also is quite a nice 00:09:12.320 --> 00:09:19.040 little webcam. Up here we have a five megapixel webcam, which can record a 1440p and I cannot tell 00:09:19.040 --> 00:09:23.760 if the webcam is at fault, but I look green and sickly. I'm pretty sure that's a problem with 00:09:23.760 --> 00:09:29.440 our display and the fact that it has a bit of a green tint to it. That said though, this webcam 00:09:29.440 --> 00:09:35.440 is doing a fantastic job. It is exposing for my face fantastically. We can see a really bright 00:09:35.760 --> 00:09:41.200 light here, really dark stuff over here. It doesn't care. It is exposing for me. It looks nice and 00:09:41.200 --> 00:09:46.640 sharp. Can move around here. Is it going to figure it out? It did. Moving around even more, just 00:09:46.640 --> 00:09:52.640 directly into some studio lights. My face is still perfectly exposed. It's not having any issues 00:09:52.640 --> 00:09:56.720 and maybe the microphone's pretty good. You guys can be the judge of that. I didn't mention it before, 00:09:56.720 --> 00:10:02.800 but we did ask HP if the color space and the display accuracy are what they expected and they 00:10:02.800 --> 00:10:09.040 said it is within their specs. So you might get one that looks like this. Four Philips headscrews 00:10:09.040 --> 00:10:16.720 later, all of which are captive. I love to see that and we are in. Now the repair ability itself 00:10:16.720 --> 00:10:22.880 is not the best, but HP does get a whole bunch of points for publishing on YouTube a full repair 00:10:22.880 --> 00:10:28.720 guide for this thing. So everything that can be repaired, you can repair or at least in theory 00:10:28.720 --> 00:10:34.560 you know how to do it. In here it looks like we can replace our SSD and that's about it. The 00:10:34.560 --> 00:10:41.200 Wi-Fi card sadly is soldered down. The RAM as we expected is underneath here somewhere soldered 00:10:41.200 --> 00:10:46.880 down. Can't replace that. The real reason why we're in here though is the battery. Despite this 00:10:46.880 --> 00:10:53.680 being quite a small laptop, HP has managed to put a 74.5 watt hour battery into this thing, 00:10:53.680 --> 00:11:00.080 which netted us a bit over 11 hours of battery life, which is very impressive for something with 00:11:00.080 --> 00:11:07.600 that powerful of a processor, although no GPU. We can also see the woofers right here and there's 00:11:07.600 --> 00:11:13.040 not a whole lot more that we can do in here. Now I've alluded to it before, but we need to talk 00:11:13.040 --> 00:11:20.880 about the price. What we have right here as spec is a $2,200 machine. Now it is built for businesses, 00:11:20.880 --> 00:11:25.120 so if you're buying a whole bunch of them, I'm sure HP will give you a bit of a deal. 00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:31.120 And also I think that these are the kind of laptops that go on sale quite a bit. But at $2,200, 00:11:31.120 --> 00:11:35.200 this is the sort of machine that I would recommend you have your employer buy for you, 00:11:35.200 --> 00:11:40.720 instead of maybe purchasing it for yourself. That said though, there's a lot to like with 00:11:40.720 --> 00:11:46.960 this laptop. Build quality is fantastic. Keyboard, trackpad, also fantastic. The IO is quite good. 00:11:47.600 --> 00:11:52.000 It's just the screen and the price are not quite where they need to be. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:56.960 So do I think that the Elite Book is a good replacement for the Dragonfly? Honestly, 00:11:57.680 --> 00:12:04.160 I think so. The Dragonfly was also way too expensive, if we're honest. And although you are 00:12:04.160 --> 00:12:10.560 giving up the magnesium, this Elite Book is quite a good machine. And you do have to remember with 00:12:10.560 --> 00:12:16.480 these business laptops that you're also paying for things like dual BIOS, the support that comes 00:12:16.480 --> 00:12:23.520 with it in theory. And also me liking you for watching this video. So huge thanks for watching, 00:12:23.520 --> 00:12:28.080 hit like, get subscribed, and I hope you guys have a great old day. See you later.