Competition in the 14-inch business laptop segment has long been fierce, with Dell and Lenovo regularly adding new features and slimmer sizes to perennial favorites like the Latitude and ThinkPad. HP’s answer to these laptops is the EliteBook 840 G7 (starts at $1,254.76; $2,199 as tested), updated for the seventh generation with a smaller chassis, an improved keyboard, and longer battery life. It’s not quite as impressive as the latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, but it’s an excellent alternative.
Svelte, With Thin Display Borders
The EliteBook 800 series comes in two screen sizes: the 13.3-inch EliteBook 830 and the subject of this review, the 14-inch EliteBook 840. Once upon a time, ditching an inch of screen real estate was a requirement to make a laptop portable enough to slip in and out of your briefcase or handbag through a day of travel or meetings. That’s no longer as important as it once was, not only because many businesspeople aren’t traveling these days but also because 14-inch laptops have become much smaller.
Case in point: The EliteBook 840 G7 is a svelte 2.95 pounds, 10 percent lighter than its G6 predecessor. The borders around the display are also up to 34 percent thinner, resulting in a petite chassis that measures 0.7 by 12.7 by 8.5 inches (HWD).
Those dimensions compare well with the competition, though they’re not quite as impressive as those of the X1 Carbon Gen 8, which measures 0.59 by 12.7 by 8.5 inches and weighs 2.4 pounds. And IT departments can go even lighter by branching out to other manufacturers. The Asus ExpertBook B9450, for one example, weighs just 1.91 pounds and claims to be the lightest 14-inch business laptop available.
Weighing in at under three pounds is still quite an achievement compared with predecessors from just a few years ago, and the EliteBook also manages to be easy on the eyes. Its tapered edges evoke the design of classic ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air, and as an added benefit, they make the display lid easy to open with one hand. The light silver aluminum finish will look great in a conference room, and it’s decidedly more modern than the staid but iconic black carbon-fiber finish of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
The aluminum construction also enables the EliteBook 840 to withstand the bumps and jolts that befall nearly every business laptop user. Based on internal testing, HP estimates the anodized aluminum surface can withstand up to 20,000 abrasion cycles before it starts to show wear and tear.
A Peek Inside
The design improvements help justify the EliteBook 840’s lofty list prices—comparable consumer-focused ultraportables like the HP Spectre and Dell XPS lines start below $1,000. Much of the EliteBook’s expense is also due to its enterprise-class processor options, some of which include vPro remote management and security features critical to wrangling fleets of laptops. The base configuration offers an Intel Core i5, while our review unit is kitted out with the top-of-the-line Core i7-10810U with vPro, six cores, 12 threads, and base and turbo clock speeds of 1.1GHz and 4.9GHz respectively.
Other configurations for the EliteBook 840 range from 4GB to 64GB of DDR4 2666 memory and between 128GB and 1TB of solid-state storage. Our tester includes 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, a sweet spot for most users. All versions use Intel UHD Graphics, which can easily handle web browsing and other common business tasks, but aren’t suited to 3D games or multimedia editing workflows.
In addition to Intel’s vPro management options, the laptop comes with other management and security features, like HP’s Sure Start protection against BIOS hackers. Some configurations are also compatible with the industry-standard DriveLock encryption that guards against physical tampering with the boot drive. Accessing the drive and other internal components for legitimate purposes like upgrades is actually quite simple, thanks to four easily accessible screws that hold the bottom cover in place.
A Refined 14-Inch Screen
Unlike the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, the EliteBook 840 lacks the option for a 4K screen. The display it does offer is well-suited to business use, though. It sports full HD resolution (1,920 by 1,080 pixels), and I found the 400-nit rated maximum brightness to be perfectly viewable even in a sunlit room. I also appreciate the anti-glare finish, which reduces distracting reflections in brightly lit conditions. Note that the 400-nit panel is an upgrade; the base model has just 250 nits, which probably isn’t adequate in most office environments. Touch support is also optional; our review unit lacks it.
HP also offers the EliteBook 840 with an optional integrated screen privacy filter, which combines increased 1,000-nit brightness with reduced viewing angles to prevent people from snooping over your shoulder. Integrated privacy filters are also available on Lenovo and Dell business laptops, but in almost all cases they reduce image quality, so we don’t recommend them unless you’re exceptionally worried about people nearby glimpsing sensitive information.
Above the display, there’s a 720p webcam that produces average video quality. I noticed a bit of noise and artifacts when using the camera in a room with plenty of natural light filtering in through the windows. HP notes that the EliteBook 840’s camera has an exceptionally wide field of view at about 86 degrees, which can help viewers pick up more of your body language and show off more of your wall decorations. But many people would still prefer the increased image quality that comes from a higher-resolution sensor, something that is still unfortunately rare even on premium business laptops.
The EliteBook’s webcam has a privacy shutter, and our review unit also comes with optional IR sensors next to the camera lens that enable Windows Hello face recognition. Password-free logins are also possible using an optional fingerprint reader mounted below the laptop’s keyboard.
One Comfortable Keyboard
The EliteBook 840’s backlit keyboard and touchpad are remarkably comfortable. HP frustratingly continues to place the cursor arrow keys in a row rather than a more intuitive inverted T, but otherwise I find the keyboard’s switches to be quite stable and the touchpad to offer a satisfyingly solid clicking experience. The laptop also has a pointing stick mounted in the keyboard, but I find it to be far less accurate than the red TrackPoint of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
The keyboard’s function row includes the usual brightness and audio controls. There’s also a handy microphone mute button as well as a wild-card key (F12) that you can customize to launch the file, app, or website of your choice.
Two speaker grilles flank the HP’s keyboard, offering loud audio volume but rather weak bass. You’ll easily be able to hear the person on the other end of your conference call, but listening to music or watching movies could prove to be less than satisfying. That’s a shame, since many people use their business laptops for more than just work.
Around the sides of the EliteBook 840, you’ll find plenty of ports. There are two USB-C ports, up from just one in the previous generation, and they can both be used to charge the laptop as well as to connect Thunderbolt 3 peripherals. There are also two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a headphone/microphone combo jack, and a full-size HDMI port. The right edge of the laptop also includes a nano SIM card tray for the optional LTE modem that works with either AT&T or Verizon. LTE-equipped versions of the EliteBook 840 also support eSIM.
Other optional wireless connectivity includes an NFC sensor for transferring data to and from Android devices. There’s also an optional reader for the smart cards that some IT departments issue to their users for added security. Meanwhile, standard wireless connections include 802.11ax Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6) and Bluetooth 5.
With a three-year warranty, the EliteBook 840 is better supported than most consumer laptops, which typically come with one-year warranties. Longer warranty periods are the norm for premium enterprise laptops, so it’s nice to see HP including one here, though it’s undoubtedly baked into the list price. Many customers who purchase in volume will likely have access to customized service contracts and pricing that isn’t publicly available.
Testing the EliteBook 840 G7: A Productivity Powerhouse
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.
On most of our benchmark tests, the EliteBook 840 showed similar proficiency, edging out the quad-core processors in the similarly priced versions of the Dell Latitude 7410 and Latitude 9410 2-in-1. It also edged out the Core i5 in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, although that machine is slightly less expensive in the $1,900 version we tested. However, the EliteBook can’t hold a candle to business laptops equipped with the latest AMD Ryzen Pro processors. Even the midrange Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U in the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 we tested recently offers better performance in a laptop half as expensive as the EliteBook 840. You can see the configurations of each of these systems in the chart below.
As with some ThinkPad models, the EliteBook 800 series is also available with Ryzen Pro processors instead of Intel chips. Businesses who don’t need Intel-specific features and are seeking the best available computing performance may want to seek out the Ryzen Pro-powered EliteBook 845, whose other features are mostly identical to the EliteBook 840. (See how we test laptops.)
Storage, Content Creation, and CPU Tests
Our main productivity benchmarks are PCMark 10 and PCMark 8, which are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. The ThinkPad X13’s advantage is immediately apparent here, with the EliteBook 840 and the other systems grouped closer together a few hundred points lower. Note that anything above 4,000 on this test typically indicates excellent performance, however.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Our other synthetic graphics test is Unigine Superposition. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the company’s eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess. Anything below 30 frames per second on this test suggests the machine isn’t suited to running demanding AAA games, although browser-based time wasters or forgiving titles like Minecraft should run just fine.
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.
A Stalwart Enterprise Laptop
There’s a lot for IT departments and business execs alike to admire about the latest EliteBook 840. Excellent battery life, a stylish, compact exterior and a powerful Core i7 are among its many strengths. There are plenty of wireless and physical connection options, too, and the comfortable keyboard and touchpad should help you get through a long day at the office or working from home.
Still, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers many of these features in an even thinner and lighter package, helping it keep its Editors’ Choice award and our top recommendation for flagship business laptops.
