HP’s leading Copilot+ business laptop now provides the whole x86-based Windows experience, with an ultra-efficient Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor. While the benefits of a Copilot+ PC for business remain to be seen, the AI-ready EliteBook Ultra G1i (starting at $2,419; $2,909 as tested) offers lengthy battery life and smooth performance. Plus, with its slick, atmospheric blue color scheme, the EliteBook Ultra is an elegant corporate accessory that now comes with complete app support and HP’s industry-leading Wolf Security suite. While we still point to the Editors' Choice-award-winning Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition as the work laptop to beat, consider this EliteBook close on its heels.

Design and Configurations: Same Chassis, New Chips

The EliteBook Ultra G1i is HP’s premium business laptop, designed for on-the-go executives. It’s nearly identical to the HP OmniBook Ultra G1q, with additional software and security support provided by its x86-based Intel processor options.

The test unit I've reviewed is the $2,909 top-end model with an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V "Lunar Lake" processor featuring integrated Intel Arc 140V graphics and a built-in neural processing unit (NPU) with 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of AI power. Because Intel’s Lunar Lake chips have memory soldered on the CPU package, the laptop features 32GB of RAM that cannot be changed. A 1TB SSD and a 14-inch 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED touch display round things out.

At the time of publishing, this configuration was on sale on HP's online store for just $1,999. Your pricing mileage may vary by the day. HP has multiple configuration options for the EliteBook Ultra G1i, with more budget-friendly Intel Core Ultra 5 226V or Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor choices available.

In terms of design, the EliteBook Ultra G1i has the same sleek, modernist chassis as the Qualcomm Snapdragon version launched last year. The Intel version even comes in the same luxe, atmospheric blue. HP has rounded the edges of the EliteBook and kept the glossy inset HP logo on the front cover, in keeping with its modernist aesthetic.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The EliteBook Ultra’s sense of luxury is also reflected in the thin bezels around the 14-inch, 16:10-aspect-ratio OLED display, which tilts back to a nearly flat position. Combined with a 9-megapixel IR webcam (ideal for Windows Hello secure sign-ins) and a sliding privacy shutter, it provides all the modern conveniences of a business laptop with just a bit of minimalist flair.

HP's laptop is firmly in the ultraportable class, measuring 0.48 by 12.4 by 8.6 inches and weighing just 2.63 pounds. In comparison, Lenovo’s flagship ultraportable business laptop, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, measures 0.56 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches and is quite a bit lighter at 2.17 pounds.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

As for the physical connectivity, the EliteBook Ultra G1i features two USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right side with a 40Gbps signaling rate, and a third Thunderbolt 4 connection on the left-hand side. A drop-jaw-style USB 3.2 Type-A port and a headphone/microphone jack round out the left-side port array. This setup means you need to use DisplayPort to plug in an external monitor to one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

For wireless connectivity, the EliteBook Ultra features built-in Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 technology.

Display and Audio: A Glossy OLED Panel Goes a Long Way

The EliteBook Ultra’s 9MP webcam can capture video at 1440p, making it crisper than most laptops’ 1080p cameras. The default webcam feed is well-lit, with only minimal graininess and no color bleed. You can do some additional fine-tuning of your webcam setup with the built-in Poly Camera Pro app and the enhanced Copilot+ Windows Studio Effects for automatic framing or better background blur.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

HP's 14-inch OLED touch screen isn’t the brightest on the market, though it did come close to 400 nits in our lab test, which is better than most OLED panels. Naturally, the EliteBook smashed through the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts, giving the kind of lush color and high contrast you expect of a flagship laptop. Unfortunately, the high-gloss display is prone to reflections and can easily suffer from glare.

The laptop's back-mounted speakers are crisp and loud enough to fill a room, though the sound can seem a bit hollow. It’s more than capable of handling a video call or virtual presentation, but it is probably not the best choice for music streaming. You can also use the built-in AI noise cancelling through the MyHP app for clearer sound in your next virtual meeting.

Keyboard and Touchpad: Decent Inputs Overall

The backlit keyboard has the standard HP layout. The keys have a firm, crisp typing feel, even if the half-height up and down arrow keys can be a pain to get used to. The oversized, buttonless touchpad glides easily and has a satisfying click.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Finally, like other EliteBook models, the EliteBook Ultra G1i features HP’s enhanced Wolf Pro Security with deep-learning-enhanced malware detection and credential protection as an added value.

Performance Testing: Do You Want Intel or Qualcomm Inside?

HP sells the EliteBook Ultra with all three major processor options: AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm. To find out which processor powers the best business laptop, we pitted the EliteBook Ultra G1i against its Qualcomm counterpart, the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q ($1,699 as tested), the AMD-powered Asus ProArt PX13 ($1,699.99 as tested), and two other well-reviewed Intel enterprise machines, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition ($1,999 as tested) and the Dell Pro 14 Premium ($2,679.27 as tested).

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

UL’s PCMark 10 is our primary system benchmark, which puts a system through its paces in productivity tests like web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheets. The PCMark 10 Full System Drive subtests also measures a PC’s storage throughput.

We augment those test scores with three more CPU-centric tests. Maxon’s Cinebench 2024 uses the Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene and measure single-core and multicore CPU performance. Primate Labs’ Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular CPU tasks like PDF rendering, speech recognition, and machine learning. Last, we see how long the video encoding tool HandBrake 1.8 takes to convert a 12-minute video from 4K to 1080p resolution.

We round out our productivity benchmark suite with PugetSystems’ PugetBench for Creators testing utility, which rates the PC’s image editing performance by automating various operations in the popular Adobe Photoshop 25. (Note that the EliteBook G1q is incompatible with PCMark and this last benchmark, though it does support several Adobe apps. It's missing from those charts.)

The EliteBook Ultra G1i ranked in the middle of the pack for most benchmarks except HandBrake, where it lagged behind most of its competitors. However, the laptop scored well over the 4,000-point PCMark 10 baseline for reliable general productivity. These results indicate an effective system for everyday work that might fall short on specific high-intensity tasks like content creation.

Graphics Tests

We challenge each reviewed system’s graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular (4K) and Light (1440p) subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. A fifth test, Solar Bay, emphasizes ray-tracing performance.

The EliteBook Ultra G1i’s Intel Arc 140V integrated graphics tile is on the more powerful side for a mobile system-on-chip. With the exception of the Wild Life tests, the EliteBook Ultra was near the front of the pack for the various graphics benchmarks—impressive results for an ultrabook, even if they're not record-breaking benchmarks. (The Asus laptop naturally dominated these comparisons with its discrete GPU.)

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).

As battery life is one of the key factors of a laptop, it can be the make-or-break metric for a decent machine. The EliteBook Ultra G1i fell well behind other ultraportable business laptops despite more than 16 hours of battery life. Still, that is more than enough battery life to get through a workday. This laptop also rates for its lush, vibrant OLED display, which was among the top end for color coverage and brightness.