Pop quiz, business-laptop shoppers: What’s the difference between the HP EliteBook 840 G8 and the HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8? The Aero is a bit more expensive (starts at $1,639; $2,679 as tested) but a bit lighter: 2.5 pounds versus 2.92, thanks to magnesium rather than aluminum construction. That may tempt execs who hate a heavy briefcase, but it’s no lighter than the Editors’ Choice award–winning Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, which we’ve described as one of the two best laptops in the world and which costs $482 less as tested. (Though note that our X1 Carbon had a minutely slower CPU and lacked the HP’s mobile broadband.) The EliteBook Aero is an attractive and well-equipped slimline with security features that IT departments will love, but it falls just short of Editors’ Choice honors.
Four Screens, One Resolution
Fourteen-inch business notebooks that qualify as ultraportables are rare enough to be appealing. HP boasts that the EliteBook 840 Aero G8 is trimmer than the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s (2.83 pounds) and the Dell Latitude 7420 (2.7 or 2.89 pounds, depending on whether you get the carbon-fiber or aluminum version), though it’s not the lightest choice available—the Asus ExpertBook B9450CEA is just 2.2 pounds.
The $1,639 base model makes do with an Intel Core i5 processor, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel non-touch screen with low rated brightness (250 nits). For $2,679, our test unit flaunted an 11th Generation quad-core chip (the 3GHz Core i7-1185G7), 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, a 400-nit display, Qualcomm 5G LTE as well as Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, and Windows 10 Pro.
There are two other screen options, one a touch panel and one with HP’s Sure View Reflect privacy filter to thwart seatmate snooping, but all four displays have full HD (1080p) rather than higher 4K resolution.
The sleek, silvery Aero measures 0.7 by 12.7 by 8.5 inches, more or less matching the Latitude (0.68 by 12.7 by 8.2 inches) and slightly bigger than the ExpertBook (0.59 by 12.6 by 8 inches), which has narrower top and bottom screen bezels; the Asus boasts a 94% screen-to-body ratio, while the HP settles for 85%. The webcam centered above the display supports face recognition, and there’s a fingerprint reader on the palm rest, giving you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello.
Two USB 3.1 Type-A ports (one able to charge mobile devices) join an audio jack, a security lock slot, and a SmartCard slot on the laptop’s left side. There are two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right, along with the nano SIM slot, an HDMI video output, and a round power connector. The last went unused on our test system, since its shirt-pocket-sized AC adapter had a USB-C cable. Like the X1 Carbon, the EliteBook has no SD or microSD card slot.
Formidable Features
HP put HP WorkWell, a pop-up that reminds you to take occasional exercise breaks, in the Windows startup menu, presumably to help you feel that your laptop cares about your health. The other dozen house-brand utilities are more pertinent, including HP QuickDrop to transfer files from your phone and HP Sure Click Secure Browser to load websites in virtual machines. The BIOS is protected from tampering, and the machine can send you alerts or lock itself down if someone removes the bottom cover; Tile software works with the Bluetooth-based subscription service to find a lost or stolen laptop. The Core i7-1185G7 also has Intel’s vPro IT management and deployment features.
Sound from the speakers flanking the keyboard is fairly loud and impressively clear, with a bit of boom or echo at top volume but sharp highs and even some bass; it’s easy to make out overlapping tracks. HP Audio Control software provides speaker and microphone noise cancellation and an equalizer with movie, music, and voice presets. The webcam features the usual soft-focus 720p resolution but captures well-lit and colorful images with little static.
The classic 16:9 aspect ratio of the the non-touch IPS screen is starting to look a little old-fashioned in this age of taller 16:10 and 3:2 laptop panels, but there’s much to appreciate in the rich, well-saturated colors with ample brightness and contrast. Viewing angles are broad, and details are satisfactorily sharp; white backgrounds look clean. The screen tilts almost all the way back, so you should have no trouble finding a happy angle.
The backlit keyboard has a pleasantly snappy typing feel without making too much noise. It earns points for dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, though the top-row function keys (including Escape and Delete) are tiny, and the cursor arrow keys are arranged in HP’s usual finger-frustrating row—half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right—instead of the correct inverted T. There’s both a ThinkPad-style keyboard pointing stick and a two-button touchpad that glides and taps smoothly and takes just the right amount of pressure for a quiet click.
Testing the EliteBook 840 Aero G8: A Slimline Business Brawl
Besides the Dell Latitude 7420 and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9, I compared the Aero’s benchmark performance to two other 14-inch notebooks, the small business–focused Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 and the mainstream Acer Swift 3X. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s seminal image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The laptops finished close together in PCMark 10, all soaring past the 4,000-point score that indicates excellent productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Docs. The HP didn’t set the world on fire in our CPU benchmarks, but delivered a more than respectable if not record-setting result in Adobe Photoshop.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics are more respectable than previous generations, but all these systems are far off the pace set by gaming laptops with discrete GPUs. Their entertainment options tilt toward casual gaming, Netflix, and Spotify rather than Devil May Cry 5 or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The EliteBook ties the Latitude and quits a couple of hours before the Carbon, but its battery life is more than impressive. So is its class-leading screen brightness, though we’re disappointed there’s no 4K display available.
Competing for the Corner Office
HP makes first-rate business laptops, and the EliteBook 840 Aero G8 is no exception. It’s an excellent, lightweight productivity partner with available 5G as well as Wi-Fi 6 connectivity (though we suggest that Wi-Fi 6E support, too, would have been nice).
It doesn’t knock the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 from its Editors’ Choice award perch, but the 840 Aero goes toe to toe with the Latitude 7420 (which briefly seized our top award from the Carbon Gen 8) and other excellent alternatives. Its steep price makes us hope your firm can negotiate a volume discount, but the company that deploys this notebook has lucky employees indeed.
