ATEN HP EliteBook 840 G7 14" Laptop - Core i5 1.6GHz CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Pro

Product Information

The displays on these two laptops look similar although the EliteBook 930's 13-inch, 1080p panel had a cleaner white balance out of the box compared to the slightly murky yellow hue on the EliteBook 840 G7's 14-inch, 1080p display. With either panel, you can expect a sharp, vivid picture you'll appreciate in video chats with your boss or when you're streaming TV shows after you punch out for the day. We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, and it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better. We expect all systems with SSDs to post excellent scores of around 5,000 on this test, and that's certainly the case here. Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day. The entry-level EliteBook 840 G7 reviewed here runs on a 10th-generation Intel Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD storage. The screen is an FHD IPS panel with a modest 250 nits of brightness. More expensive models offer Core i7 CPUs, more RAM and storage, and brighter screens (up to 1,000 nits). Image: HP Inc

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. It shows the EliteBook 840's small advantage over the Latitude and X1 Carbon systems, while the X13 is clearly in a different league. Transferring files won't take long on these EliteBooks thanks to their speedy SSDs. The 840 G7's 512GB NVMe PCIe SSD took 52 seconds to convert a 25GB multimedia file equating to a transfer rate of 574.9 megabytes per second. The smaller model was a tad slower at 433.9 MBps. I maintain that those are good times, but only the 14-inch EliteBook topped the category average (566.4 MBps) and even it lost out to the X1 Carbon (1,044.7 MBps) and Latitude 7410 (574.9 MBps). EliteBook 830 and EliteBook 840 G7 graphics I won't go into detail on every app HP includes, but it's worth spotlighting a few. For instance, HP Workwell prompts you to exercise at times and gives you insight on your work patterns. I get it HP, this lifestyle ain't healthy. According to our colorimeter, the EliteBook 830 G7's panel covers 79% of the DCI-P3 color gamut whereas the EliteBook 840 G7's screen captures 78%. The Latitude 7410 has a more vivid display, at 83%, while the ThinkPad X1 Carbon's 1080p panel is duller (78%). The premium laptop average is 83%.

The EliteBook 830 and EliteBook 840 G7 are a pair of business laptops with very few shortcomings

With six processor cores, the EliteBook's Core i7 CPU makes short work of the basic productivity tasks for which the laptop is intended. I never experienced lag or sluggishness while browsing the web and installing apps, in many cases simultaneously. I did frequently hear the cooling fan spool up, however, even while no apps were open. HP says it has redesigned the EliteBook 840's thermal management system to reduce fan noise, but it’s definitely still noticeable. These results closely match those of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file. It's a timed test, and lower results are better. In contrast to its poor gaming graphics performance (which is entirely expected for a business laptop), the EliteBook 840 has excellent battery life, even among its peers. To test battery life, we loop a locally stored 720p video with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out. The EliteBook 840 lasted for more than 19 hours in this test. That's short of the 24 hours that the Latitude 9410 2-in-1 managed, but it still trounces the two ThinkPads and even beats HP's own estimate of 18 hours. Interestingly, the X13 did not perform well on this test, though the rest of the results closely match the previous two benchmarks, with the EliteBook 840 in first place. Graphics and Battery Life Testing

I typed at 115 words per minute with a 94% accuracy on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, results that are just short of my usual 119-wpm, 95% accuracy averages. While the EliteBook 840 can handle basic graphics output without breaking a sweat, it's not up for 3D gaming, as our graphics benchmarks clearly show. The first, 3DMark, measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores, and it's clear that only the ThinkPad X13 in this group offers passable performance. Before I joined the tech-journalism ranks, I wrote on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and Big Data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, I also have a master's degree in journalism and French Studies from New York University.HP EliteBook 840 G7’s IPS panel has a Full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles, high maximum brightness (457 nits), and a very good contrast ratio. Also, it doesn’t use PWM for brightness adjustment and covers 97% of the sRGB color gamut. Moreover, our Gaming and Web design profile, improves the color accuracy, in compliance with the sRGB standard. This means all of the professionals, whose work is dependant on color accuracy will be satisfied. The maximum measured brightness is 457 nits (cd/m2) in the middle of the screen and 431 nits (cd/m2) average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 9%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen and at maximum brightness is 6400K (average) – slightly warmer than the 6500K optimum for sRGB.

I hope this is the last laptop I review with UHD graphics. A new era of integrated graphics, led by Iris Plus and Iris Xe, means the UHD graphics in the EliteBook 830 and EliteBook 940 G7 just won't cut it when new models arrive. Those are good if unremarkable runtimes. Dell's Latitude 7410 (10:56) and the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (10:45) both broke the 10-hour mark and the category average (10:01). EliteBook 830 and EliteBook 840 G7 webcam Here, we see another great product from HP. It has a great build quality and premium, lightweight chassis, thanks to the mainly aluminum build. And while its speakers are not the loudest out there, we found them deep, and they have better dynamics than most of the Windows laptops out there. The bottom panel on the 13-inch model reached 99 degrees Fahrenheit after we played a 15-minute, 1080p video. Fortunately, the center of the keyboard (90 degrees) and the touchpad (79 degrees) stayed below our 95-degree comfort threshold.Intel Core i7-10510U, Windows 10 Pro, 14.0-inch 1,920 x 1,080 anti-glare 400 nits non-touch screen, Intel UHD Graphics 620, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD