Pros & Cons
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- Speedy performance
- Handsome 2.8K OLED touch screen
- Robust Wolf security
- HP finally arranges the arrow keys properly
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- Expensive
- 10 ounces overweight
- No mobile broadband option or SD/microSD card slot
- Dubious AI hype
HP EliteBook X G1a Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 1 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Business |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 0.52 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches |
| Graphics Processor | AMD Radeon 890M Graphics |
| Native Display Resolution | 2880 by 1800 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro |
| Panel Technology | OLED |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 64 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 120 |
| Screen Size | 14 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 12:28 |
| Touch Screen | |
| Variable Refresh Support | Dynamic |
| Weight | 3.3 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
It's HP's prerogative to sell different laptop brands, but you must feel for IT managers. What are they supposed to make of HP's new enterprise lineup? What's the difference between the EliteBook X G1a, EliteBook X G1i, and EliteBook Ultra G1i? Don't take our word for it, but the X models look like they replace the EliteBook 1000 series, while Ultra models supplant the Dragonfly models. (The G1a and G1i indicate AMD- and Intel-powered systems, respectively.) At any rate, the EliteBook X G1a (starts at $2,099; $2,749 as tested) is a fast, attractive notebook that edges ahead of the recently reviewed Dell Pro 14 Premium and joins the legendary Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 as a C-suite-worthy, Editors' Choice award-winning business laptop.
Configurations and Design: Fit for the Fortune 500
Like other business laptops, the 14-inch EliteBook X G1a looks pricey if you're perusing the vendor's website, but it's usually discounted in bulk buys negotiated by IT departments. The laptop starts at $2,099 with AMD's Ryzen AI 7 Pro 360 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS display. (Ryzen Pro chips have AMD's equivalent of Intel's vPro manageability tech for fleet managers.)
For $2,749, our test unit steps up to the 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375 CPU, a hefty 64GB of memory, 1TB of storage, and a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED touch panel. It also has Windows 11 Pro and three years of parts and labor coverage (but pickup and return rather than on-site service). That compares favorably to the Dell Pro 14 Premium, which was $70 less as tested but with only half the RAM and a lower-resolution IPS screen.
Though no burden in a briefcase, the HP misses our three-pound ultraportable cutoff at 3.3 pounds. And even if it's a tad hefty, the HP is also definitely hardy. Its 0.52-by-12.3-by-8.5-inch (HWD) matte aluminum frame has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests for travel hazards like shock, vibration, and temperature extremes. You'll feel virtually no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
A face recognition webcam with a sliding privacy shutter and a fingerprint reader built into the power button give you two ways to skip passwords with Windows Hello. The camera can perform presence-detection tricks such as dimming the screen if you look away, blurring it if an onlooker appears behind you, and waking the system as you approach. According to HP's stats, thin bezels give the machine a 90.8% screen-to-body ratio.
Happily, the EliteBook includes more than only Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, like some of its rivals limit you to. To be sure, you'll find two, one on each side. But the one on the left is joined by a 10Gbps USB Type-A port and a Kensington nano security-lock slot, with the one on the right accompanied by an HDMI monitor port, a plain USB-C port, and an audio jack. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth connectivity come standard, but HP doesn't sell a 4G or 5G mobile broadband option.
Display and Keyboard: On the Keys, Pigs Fly and Cows Come Home
I've written 200 reviews damning laptop keyboards for arranging their cursor arrow keys in "an HP-style row"—half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right—so the EliteBook X G1a heralds the millennium. The arrow keys, though small, are all the same size and in the correct inverted T layout. I know, I stared for minutes before I believed it.
The keyboard is brightly backlit and has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (no Fn+Arrow shenanigans). The key travel first struck me as too shallow. However, after I adopted a lighter (and quieter) touch, it felt comfortably snappy with responsive feedback. This isn't my favorite laptop keyboard ever, but it's definitely my favorite HP one. A decently sized, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly, the lower corners giving a precise, muffled click.
Speakers flanking the keyboard pump out fairly loud, impressively crisp sound. Perhaps a tad harsh at top volume, the audio has a welcome touch of bass and clear, driving instrumentals and vocals. It's easy to make out overlapping tracks. The myHP utility toolkit provides auto, music, movie, voice presets, and an equalizer with noise reduction.
The webcam captures up to 1440p videos and 2,880-by-1,800-pixel stills that are well-lit and colorful, with sharp details and no noise or static. It supports Windows Camera's Studio Effects, including auto-framing and background blur. Still, you'll get more options from myHP's Poly Camera Pro—not only backgrounds and filters but a name-and-email watermark, meeting recording, and resolution up to 4K (though most conferencing platforms lack the bandwidth).
IPS panels with 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution are fine for base models, but anyone getting a 14-inch laptop without a 2,880-by-1,800 OLED screen is doing themselves a disservice. HP's is gorgeous, with ample brightness and sky-high contrast for inky blacks, blazing white backgrounds, and every hue in between. Colors pop like poster paints, and details are razor-sharp. The screen's viewing angles are wide; however, the touch glass picks up reflections as usual. Working with the EliteBook next to my desktop PC, the former's Windows Spotlight wallpaper looks like a digital picture frame.
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The EliteBook X introduces HP AI Companion, a beta suite that requires an HP account and includes a settings and support assistant, a snip-and-search tool, and an Analyze app that promises to compare, summarize, and "create a secure virtual expert" from your documents. I'm more impressed by HP's trademark Wolf Security (a set of weapons against malware, ranging from OS recovery to deep-learning threat analysis) and the HP Sure Click sandboxed browser.
Performance Testing: It's Ryzen AI 9 HX FTW
In addition to the Dell Pro 14 Premium, our benchmark comparisons include two other 14-inch business notebooks, both Lenovo Editors' Choice award winners: the enterprise-favorite Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition ($1,999 as tested) and the small-office-oriented Lenovo ThinkPad X9 14 Aura Edition ($1,519.01 as tested). The last slot in our charts goes to a consumer model that shares the EliteBook's Ryzen AI silicon, the Acer Swift AI 14 AMD ($1,299.99 as tested).
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive. Maxon's Cinebench 2024 renders a complex scene using the company's Cinema 4D engine. Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Then we have HandBrake 1.8, a video editing tool we use to benchmark how long it takes to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. And Geekbench AI is one of the first AI processing benchmarks.
In other reviews, we've found that AMD's Ryzen AI 9 is a barn-burner of a CPU. It showed off its near-workstation-class prowess in the HP, crushing our processing tests and cruising to leading Cinebench and HandBrake scores. The EliteBook was competitive in every other benchmark, taking second place consistently. The ThinkPad X9 was a plucky performer despite being a Core Ultra 5 in a gang of 7s and 9s. These results show an HP laptop that's faster than most we've compared it with and one that's ready to ace the next project.
Graphics Tests
We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.
These notebooks were built for office apps, not games, and none of their integrated graphics can compete with a discrete GPU. But the EliteBook and its peers are fine for basic image editing and video streaming.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears 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.
To gauge display performance, 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 HP's battery life isn't bad enough to put on our Pros and Cons list—it's enough for a full day's work plus an evening of Netflix—but it's uncompetitive with today's ultraportables (the Dell more than doubled it). By contrast, its display joins the other OLED panels at the head of the laptop class.