hey everybody it’s lan seidman we’re taking a look today at another lightweight laptop this is from hp this is their elitebook 840 aero g8 and this one comes in at 2.48 pounds or 1.12 kilograms and we’re going to take a closer look at this in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this is on loan from hp so we’re done with this it goes back to them all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approve what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about now the price point on this comes in at around twenty two hundred dollars as configured this one is a higher end configuration i think you can probably get in the door for around sixteen hundred dollars now these are business oriented laptops and they give you a ton of configuration options to choose from on it all of them though weigh the same and they all have a 14 inch 1080p display running at a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and it’s funny i’ve been looking at nothing but 16 by 10 laptops lately which have a slightly taller display and this one is definitely looking a little narrow to me these days given where i see the industry going but maybe they were trying to hit a certain form factor here with the more narrow 16 by nine aspect ratio not a bad display though this one is their 400 nit option this is not a touch display but they do have touch options available they have lower cost displays that run a little dimmer and they have a higher cost display that runs brighter and also has the hp privacy shield to make it so nobody can see anything from the sides on it but not a bad display but again i kind of prefer the 16 by 10 these days now inside it
has an i7 1185 g7 processor that’s one of the new intel chips with the iris xe evo graphics on board this makes this laptop good for casual video and photo editing along with some light game playing as well you can actually run aaa titles on these thin and light laptops these days and we’ll take a look at some of the graphical performance out of this in a little bit this has upgradeable memory and storage so it comes equipped at least in our review loaner model with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 ram it’s in dual channel configuration so we currently have two sticks of eight you can upgrade it to 64 gigabytes if you want just by putting in new memory modules by unscrewing the bottom panel here and you can also upgrade the storage on this our review loaner came with a 512 gigabyte nvme ssd but you can swap it out for a larger one if you want now these are made out of magnesium which is why they’re so lightweight but it has a good amount of rigidity to it so it feels pretty well constructed one thing to note though is that the display does require two hands to open because if you pull the display up here it takes the keyboard with it so you will have to brace the base uh to lift up the display here to get in but you can see how that facial recognition feature works there now the webcam isn’t bad on this one although it’s only running at a 720p resolution you can see what it looks like there there is a shutter mechanism here at the top to cover up the lens if you want some privacy so you can put that in place without having to put tape on the top of your laptop it’s certainly adequate for doing web conferences and that sort of thing and again our unit came with the optional facial recognition feature there are a number of ports on this one so let’s take a look at what we’ve got on the left hand side here we have a kensington lock two usb a ports
these are running at usb 3 speeds and then you have a headphone jack over here you also have a slot here for those security cards that many in corporate and government environments use on the other side we’ve got two thunderbolt 4 ports these are full service ports so these can power the laptop in addition to providing data devices in and out and video out and of course you can use the higher performance thunderbolt devices if you want but it’s also compatible with usbc and then you’ve got an hdmi output here this is an hdmi 2.0 so it’ll run at 4k at 60 hertz along with the video output that you can get out of both of these and they also have a barrel connector here so you can connect up an hp power supply that has a barrel on board and keep those two slots free just know that the power supply it comes with will occupy one of the usb ports and if you’re looking to connect to cellular networks there is an option for 5g and 4g connections and if you choose that option the sim card tray will be here on the right-hand side below the thunderbolt ports it’s on a spring-loaded tray though you don’t have to stick in a little paper clip to get that card in and out so you may just want to be careful you don’t accidentally pop that sim card tray out when you’re on the road with it the keyboard here is not the best it’s types okay but the keys are on the smaller side i usually like slightly larger keys these are almost chiclet style but they do have good travel to them and they are backlit now one thing we noticed about the power button is that it’s located along with the rest of your keys it’s not off to the side somewhere and if you hit the power button just quickly like by accident nothing happens it won’t respond to an inadvertent push you have to hold it down for that power button to get engaged and it was nice to see that they thought about what might happen if they put the power button in with the rest of the keyboard you’ll notice here in the middle that there is a pointing nub this is something that used to be on every laptop back in the day but mostly now just on the think pads this one has a concaved nub here which actually grabs your finger quite nicely it’s got some a little traction on it as
well so your finger doesn’t slip out and i found it to be a pretty good little pointing device you have a mouse button for the nub here so you’ve got a left and right mouse button i would have liked to have seen a third button in the middle for fast scrolling but i found the nub here to perform quite nicely below it is a track pad and this works as you would expect it’s a click pad it’s very accurate no issues that i could see with it not bad at all it looks like it’s got a nice glass top to it as well the speakers are upward firing they have the bang olufsen branding sounds pretty good actually not a lot of bass but the sound is very crisp and clear i think it’s going to be great for web conferences and anything spoken word and actually music didn’t sound all that bad on here either but of course people may want to connect up their own headphones for the best audio quality and then of course you’ve got a fingerprint reader down here in the lower right hand corner this is an option that our review loaner had on board now the battery life on this one should be good for about 11 hours or so just note though that you need to keep the display brightness down and stick to basic operations like word processing email and video watching if you’ve got one of the brighter display options running it at full brightness or close to it will certainly eat into the battery a bit more and if you are doing things like video or photo editing or gaming that of course will eat into the battery life more significantly all right let’s take a look and see how well it performs we’ll begin with the basics here some web browsing will visit the nasa.gov
homepage and see how fast everything pops up as you can see it is very fast and responsive as we would expect out of an i7 processor from this generation we’re also running on my wi-fi six network here and we also took a look at one of my 1080p 60 videos on youtube running in google chrome and one thing we noted as you can see here is that it was dropping a bunch of frames i’m not sure if this might be a driver issue we did update the intel video drivers to check and see if that might improve things i disabled some of the antivirus but it was still dropping frames every once in a while and that’s not something we’ve seen in quite a while here reviewing some of these newer laptops so i’m not sure what’s going on here but i suspect it’s something related to the display driver and on the browserbench.org speedometer test we got a score of 206 which is definitely on the higher end of the laptops we have tested so as we saw with that test on the nasa.gov homepage a few minutes ago the
performance doing the basics like web browsing word processing and other things are going to be really fast and responsive here on this system let’s take a look now and see how it plays games so we’re going to start off here with red dead redemption 2 this is running at 1080p at the absolute lowest settings and we’re getting about 30 frames per second here it’s definitely dipping below that occasionally but the game is very very
playable and this is something we’ve seen on other tiger lake chips from this generation if you want a more smooth experience i would say run it at 720p on this laptop but it appears to be running quite nicely also of note the fan noise on this laptop is very minimal even when you’re running a very intense application like this so even though you’ll hear the fan it’s not all that noisy even when you’re playing a game like this it is very very minimal all right here we’ve got the witcher 3 running at 1080p at the lowest settings and we’re getting between 30 and 40 frames per second here not bad we are getting a couple little lag hits here and there but i think it might be due to the external drive we’re running it from but overall not bad here in another game that is quite playable on this thin and light laptop all right let’s check out no man’s sky here this one is running at 1080p at the standard settings and just like many of these other recent intel laptops we’ve looked at we’re getting about 30 frames per second here let’s put this thing on the ground and see how the frame rate looks when we hop out of the ship but generally this is the kind of performance we’ve been seeing out of these new intel chips and you can really play a lot of current games at reasonable frame rates here usually around 30 frames per second at a full 1080p and like other games you can get a little bit more performance out of these if you bump down the resolution to 720p but all in a very playable experience here on a laptop that does not have a discrete gpu and on the 3dmark time spy benchmark test we got a score of 1571 that puts this
slightly behind the dell xps 13 that came in a little bit better on that but as you can see it was good enough to play some of the games that we demoed a few minutes ago we also ran the 3d mark stress test which measures how well the computer does under a heavy sustained load over a long period of time there we got a failing grade of 89.6 percent passing is 97 and that tells me you’ll probably see some thermal throttling when you’re running games for long periods of time you might see the performance drop off occasionally and that’s because the system may have to drop its performance a bit to keep itself cool the fan as i mentioned is very quiet on this you can see the intake here at the bottom and i suspect that because the fan is so quiet there might be a few trade-offs when you’ve got the system placed under heavy heavy load for a long time and as a business laptop i’m not sure this was really designed as a game playing machine so just be prepared you might see a few knocks in performance here and there but it is good enough for casual game playing it’s just not something i would recommend as a primary gaming device you can of course buy a really nice and heavy gaming laptop with a fancy gpu for the same price as this one or less but of course it’s not going to be as thin and light as this one all right one last thing to take a look at and that is its linux performance we booted up ubuntu 21.04 here and as you can see everything booted up just fine it detected all of the hardware properly including the video the audio the wi-fi and bluetooth everything seems to be working very quickly and responsively here it actually feels just as good in linux as it does in windows so overall this is not a bad business laptop i do wish though that it had a 16 by 10 display just because that’s becoming kind of the norm now
across many of these higher end laptops you are of course paying for the lightweight form factor here but you’re not giving up all that much performance to get that lightweight the battery life is good i do wish the keys were a little bit bigger uh but by and large it feels like a pretty nicely put together system now if you are looking for something lightweight that costs less we did look at the hp pavilion aero recently that’s running with one of the newer amd processors and that doesn’t perform quite as well as this one playing games but it’s pretty close and it weighs about the same but costs a lot less so you may want to take a look at that one and incidentally the pavilion arrow also has a 16 by 10 display that’s going to do it though for this look at the elitebook arrow and until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters chris allegretta tom albrecht jim callagher hot sauce and video games and brian parker if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
