The affordable HP EliteBook 745 G3 ($1,049 as tested) is a general purpose business laptop aimed at budget-conscious business buyers. But the cost savings aren't worth the trade-off in performance and features. It's competent, but no aspect really stands out, and negatives include a subpar display and performance that lags behind similar systems in just about every area. You do get a good I/O port selection, and the physical build is solid (particularly the keyboard and speakers), but there are simply better options for business. The Lenovo ThinkPad T450s remains our Editors' Choice for its full feature set, touch screen, hot-swappable battery, and faster hardware. The Lenovo ThinkPad E450 and the Acer TravelMate P645-SG-79QV are also worthwhile, affordable alternatives to consider. 

Design and Features
The EliteBook 745 G3 bears a pretty basic design, with no aesthetic flourishes. The plastic body is silver on the lid and keyboard deck, and black on the bottom half of the laptop and around the display. It measures 0.74 by 13.3 by 9.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.33 pounds, a decent weight for a 14-inch system. To compare, the same-screen-size Dell Latitude 14 5000 Series (E5450) measures 0.9 by 13.2 by 9.1 inches and weighs 3.98 pounds, while the Lenovo ThinkPad T450s measures 0.83 by 13 by 9 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.5 pounds. 

The 14-inch display on this system features a 1080p (1,920-by-1,080) resolution, but it's pretty underwhelming. There's a thick bezel around the screen and the anti-glare technology makes the view a bit dull, the display doesn't get very bright, and desktop text is a bit blurry. Colors aren't particularly vibrant, and if I hadn't seen the specs beforehand, I probably could have been convinced the resolution was 720p. The Aspire E5-573G-57HR and Aspire E5-573G-7034 feature the same resolution for several hundred dollars less, and image quality is better. Like those systems, there is no touch-screen support here, but there are configurations available that include it. 

The backlit keyboard feels good, with balanced key travel that's not too short or too long. The touchpad is reliable and smooth, and there are two sets of Left and Right click buttons, set along the top and bottom of the touchpad. This adds convenience, especially if you want to click something quickly with your thumbs between typing. There's a fingerprint scanner on the right side of the keyboard deck. The Bang & Olufsen speakers are good quality, offering enough sound to fill a room at full volume without distortion, despite their unassuming appearance.

Port selection is good. The left side is home to a USB 3.0 charging port, a VGA port, and a Smart Card slot. On the right side, there's a USB-C port, a USB 3.0 port, a DisplayPort, an Ethernet port, a headphone-microphone combo jack, the Power connector, an SD card slot, an external SIM expansion slot, and a media card reader. The lack of HDMI might be inconvenient at times, but with the alternatives on board, the EliteBook should have you covered in most cases.

For storage, you get a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), which is modest, but is mostly in line with what's offered by competitors. The consumer-focused Aspire features a roomy 1TB hard drive (slower than an SSD), and even budget laptops like the Toshiba Satellite C55DT-C5245 and the IdeaPad 100-14IBY offer 1TB and 500GB hard drives, respectively, but comparable business systems all stick around the 256GB mark. The EliteBook integrates dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. HP supports the laptop with a three-year limited parts and labor warranty.

Performance
The EliteBook 745 G3 is equipped with a 2.1GHz AMD Pro A12-8800B APU, Radeon R7 graphics, and 8GB of memory. The system delivered serviceable performance on the PCMark 8 Work Conventional productivity test, with 2,277 points. That's behind the less expensive and consumer-focused Aspire E5-573G-57HR (2,473 points), and even further behind other business systems like the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 15 (2,508 points), the Dell Latitude 14 5000 Series (E5450) (2,670 points), and the ThinkPad T450s (2,937 points).

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Multimedia scores aren't bad. The EliteBook 745 G3 finished the Handbrake encoding test in 3 minutes 1 second, the Photoshop test in 5:44, and scored 208 points on CineBench. Overall, this was faster than the Yoga 15, but slower than the Aspire and the other business systems, putting it toward the back of the pack for completing media projects. The EliteBook was among the lower scorers on the 3D and gaming tests, scoring 5,293 on 3DMark CloudGate and 584 on Fire Strike Extreme. Most business-oriented systems aren't suited to substantial gaming, but even the inexpensive Aspire laptop features a fairly capable discrete graphics card, and was able to hit a playable 30 frames per second (fps) on Medium-quality settings Heaven and Valley gaming tests, while this and the other business systems fell short.

Battery life is average. The EliteBook's battery lasted 6 hours 51 minutes on our rundown test, longer than the ThinkPad Yoga 15's 5:42, but shorter than the ThinkPad T450s (7:31), the Latitude 14 (8:09), and the long-lasting Acer TravelMate P645-SG-79QV (9:10).

Conclusion
The EliteBook 745 G3 is a basic business laptop that's perfectly serviceable, but fails to stand out. Its performance lags behind competitors, and it's not really offering a top value price to make up for it. The keyboard is high quality, and you get plenty of port options, but the display leaves something to be desired, and there isn't much storage. It includes useful features like the fingerprint scanner, but the durable Editors' Choice Lenovo ThinkPad T450s is worth the extra expense, as it brings both enterprise features and performance, and you're not really getting a huge savings at $1,049 for the EliteBook. If you're buying for a business, the extra cost can be offset through depreciation rules and faster turnaround time.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.