Review HP EliteBook 8440p

Content:

1. Briefly about the main

2. Characteristics

3. Equipment

4. Appearance

- body

- keyboard

- touchpad

- display

5. Performance

6. Noise and temperature

- system temperature

- noisiness

- temperature

- acoustics

7. Battery

8. Functionality

9. General impressions

10. Pros and cons

1. Briefly about the main thing:

Those who are interested in laptops for constant work everywhere and everywhere need not only a screen and a keyboard, but also a powerful and productive laptop based on an Intel Core i5-520M processor. HP EliteBook 8440p will try to prove his love to you.

This review presents one of the most inexpensive EliteBooks. This device has a limited potential: a processor, lack of an integrated video card and a high-quality screen. Why, then, did the model aim at the EliteBook name? What is so unusual about this device differs from its competitors? Should you buy a laptop for customers who demand “everything at once” from the models? This review will reveal the secrets of the notebook from HP and answer all the questions asked.

2. Characteristics:

3. Package Contents:

The complete set of the laptop consists of:

* Charger

* Battery

* Discs with software

* Documentation

* Docking stations

4. Appearance:

Housing

Lately, manufacturers have been making their notebooks lighter and thinner, but this is partly the case with HP. The device looks thick and awkward only at first glance. 3.1 centimeters is the highest point in a laptop, and the model weighs under 2.4 kilograms. It is foolish to say that users are not interested in weight, but in this case the manufacturer took the side of reliability and stability.

If you try to use force against a laptop, you quickly notice that the model is made with high quality and reliability: the device is not only impossible to twist, but also somehow physically deform it. It was not possible to push the panels on the working surface, nothing happened with the main body, and the strength of the display lid can be called sensational. It was only possible to twist the case a little in the corners. The silvery surface held on to the last and squeezed through only in selected places, but it did not work out the entire area.

The secret lies in the fact that the cover, the work surface where the hands rest and the decorative strip above the keyboard layout are made of high quality aluminum. This surface is cool to the touch, resistant to scratches and unwanted damage. The hinges holding the display are also made of metal and fit tightly with the main unit. No damage or pulling out can damage them. Thanks to this, you do not have to worry about protecting your screen.

Although the case is heavy, it was possible to lift the laptop lid with one hand. This is helped by a large metal button, which allows you to raise the lid by half a centimeter, and then open everything with just one hand.

Battery manufacturers also paid attention. Removing it is as easy as shelling pears: just press one button, it will jump straight into your hands.

Keyboard

The keys on the keyboard layout are close together and have solid travel. Some are very annoyed by this, while others really like such a solid move. We found a number of advantages in the keyboard, which are considered ideal among keyboards: the performance of the manipulator is very high and the response travel does not cause complaints to manufacturers. The keys on the keyboard layout cannot boast of the same clearance as on the desktop variants, but some keys have exactly that clearance (15 millimeters).

The keys are pleasant to press, which contributes to a comfortable typing experience. The cursor keys are separated from the main mass, which makes a pleasant impression on the ergonomics of the manipulator.Your fingers automatically find keys in the keyboard layout, even if you're not looking at it. The only sacrifice for a good keyboard is giving up the number pad. As for me, this is not a significant loss. The position and page keys remain on the right edge of the keyboard. Those who need a number block can activate it on the letter keys with the FN + Num key combination.

Touchpad

A simulator of a mouse manipulator consists of two parts: the touchpad itself with two control keys and a pointstick. The latter is located under the spacebar above the touchpad itself. Absolutely all control keys are rubberized with a clear stroke and noiselessness, which makes the control of these keys doubly pleasant. There is a little knocking when typing, but the working speed and quality of work smooths out a small flaw.

The touchpad itself is not particularly large, but clear and of high quality using both vertical and horizontal scrolling. The mouse device also supports multitouch.

Display

The Elitebook 8440p has a 14 ”HD Ready display with 1366x768 dot matrix scanning. The screen is covered with an anti-reflective coating. HD Ready fully reveals itself only when you need to use upscaling. However, a fly in the ointment was found in a barrel of honey. The function starts to work with deterioration in quality when zooming in above 768 pixels. Buyers are scared off by this low resolution, so they buy other devices, both from the same HP and from other competing manufacturers.

As a desktop home laptop, the screen is 100% complete. The anti-reflective coating may be good, but the contrast ratio of the screen does not exceed 140: 1 with a black value of 1.49, which is very poor. Not satisfied with the small color space either. This is an indication that this laptop is not suitable for professional image adjustments.

The model lacks HDMI. It has been replaced with a VGA display port. The buyer can connect an external TFT display with a matrix resolution of up to 2500x1600 pixels. Intel HD graphics use HDMI, but then the manufacturer would have to fork out for that license as well.

The LED backlight has a manual brightness adjustment function. At the bottom of the screen there is also a sensor that adjusts the brightness of the ambient backlight. The smart sensor itself will determine what the brightness of the screen should be in relation to the illumination of the room or the environment in which you are. This feature works really well. In sunlight, the brightness rises to its maximum. For tests, we had to disable this sensor with the FN + F11 key combination. At the output, we got an average result of 212 cd / m2. Illumination can be called even and without sudden changes.

The anti-reflective coating of the display outdoors works under certain conditions, since the standard brightness of the screen matrix is simply not enough for good visibility. It is realistic to work in the shade, in cloudy weather or in low solar activity. The image below shows a situation where beams are shining on the screen at a right angle. It is not difficult to guess that it is impossible to work in such conditions.

For consumer needs, a laptop requires good viewing angles on all sides so that you can look from any position, but at the same time, so that there are no overexposures and obvious color distortions. In office devices, this is very rarely adhered to. We were hoping for a good result from an elite-class laptop, but unfortunately we were disappointed. The device showed an average result.

Up to 60 degrees horizontally, we did not notice any distortions, but the text immediately begins to fade when it exceeds 40 degrees, the text becomes unreadable, of course, unless a very large font is used. As the eyes deviate up to twenty degrees horizontally and vertically, the picture begins to change colors abruptly, which is not an ideal indicator. Scrupulous and demanding users will be overwhelmed by poor vertical stability.Unfortunately, this EliteBooks model is not a great TFT desktop solution.

5. Performance:

The device is equipped with a good and efficient Intel Core i5-520M processor and a clock speed of about 2.4 GHz.

The miscalculation of the configuration is the amount of RAM. Here it is only two gigabytes, but for the level of such a model, the amount of memory had to start at no less than four gigabytes. There is an opportunity for the buyer to add the amount of RAM himself. To do this, you need to completely remove the small cover from the bottom panel and then you will get access to one RAM slot. If you do not understand anything about the improvements of laptops, then do not do it yourself, but give it to someone who will do it professionally and efficiently.

The 520M, codenamed Arrandale, has two cores on board with a preset frequency of 2.4 GHz, but you can legally overclock it to 2.93 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost. Hyper-threading technology overclocks and affects 4 cores (2 physical and 2 virtual), which increases the performance in programs that require the processor to support multithreaded tasks. However, it should be noted that the processor reaches its maximum frequency only if the process uses only one core for its work. Do not forget that turbo acceleration also affects virtual cores.

Performance depends not only on the processor, but also on the RAM with the video card. This device was tested by the PCMark Vantage benchmark. The overall score was 5770 points, which indicates that the laptop is a strong office computer.

In short, the device shows itself to be quite strong with powerful computing performance and a good processor that surpasses previous technical solutions.

I would like to talk about the hard drive. The Winchester on the laptop has a fast 7200 rpm hard drive from the manufacturer Seagate with a capacity of 250 GB. The drive is faster than the average hard drive. There is only one drawback: the hard drive is very noisy and you have to live with it. The noise can be slightly reduced by placing the device on top of a rubberized surface.

6. Noise and temperature:

System noise

We were not satisfied only with the use of the hard drive, as it buzzed loudly. When working on the Internet, writing text documents and in other applications where a hard drive was not required, everything was at the highest level. When the cooling system was activated, the laptop made a little noise, but quickly returned to its original state.

Surprisingly, when the processor was activated at full power, the noise of the cooling system did not increase much. The difference between the volume of cooling in a stressful situation and a normal one differed by only 7 dB. At the maximum speed of the cooler, you can hear a slight crackling sound caused by the passage of air through the cooling pipes.

Noisiness

Temperature

What can I say, the cooling does so well that during stress tests we were unable to raise the temperature higher than 33 degrees Celsius. Near the power button, given the close proximity of the processor, the temperature stopped at 32 degrees. This is phenomenal for a stress test.

The lowest temperature is only shown when idle. Indeed, during two hours of idle operation, the air warmed up by no more than 24 degrees, and the case did not heat up above 27 degrees. The device heated up to 40 degrees in idle time, and at maximum stress caused by the program - 69 degrees.

We can say that this cooling is exemplary for other notebook manufacturers.

Acoustics

The only complaint about the acoustics is the lack of bass and emphasis on midrange, while the sound is dull, but the situation is corrected by the clear sound and loudness of the speakers. This will be enough for undemanding users.In a situation where we connected external acoustics to the laptop, we found a slight improvement in quality and a complete absence of any noise. Normal result.

7. Battery:

The device uses a large battery, which allows it to withstand five hours of battery life while browsing the web. Until recently, such indicators were set only on especially resource-efficient processors.

When watching a DVD movie, the device lasted about 166 minutes autonomously in medium illumination and turned off wireless interfaces. We managed to programmatically achieve a maximum runtime of up to 466 minutes. This is about 8 hours of continuous waiting. If you need the most autonomous laptop, then 8 hours is a cool figure. And if this is not enough for you, then you can really connect a 12-cell battery to the laptop, which will add another 10 hours to the stand-alone idle operation.

8. Functionality:

For those who do not have the concept of "functionality" in the last place, they will appreciate the presence of all kinds of interfaces for a laptop. Among other connectors, the following can be distinguished: FireWire, an almost obsolete modem port, an eSATA connector. With the ExpressCard54 slot, you can add the missing interfaces. Unfortunately, there is a VGA video output for external displays, although we expected to see HDMI.

On the left side there are 3 connectors for the standard USB 2.0, as well as FireWire, next to the ExpressCard54 slot. The audio jacks for microphone and headphone are located below the above slot.

The front edge is left clean without any connectors, since the emphasis was placed on the right side. FireWire is built in next to eSATA, the latter allowing for faster data transfer rates from external hard drives. The speed is comparable to the same devices located inside and connected via a SATA connector.

There are also two card readers, where one is used for SD and MMC drives and is located on the front side of the case, and the other is for SmartCards on the right side.

The 12-cell battery, which we talked about just above, can be attached to the bottom of the device. Most interestingly, the standard battery remains inside and thus the total runtime can reach up to 18 hours in idle mode.

9. General impressions:

HP EliteBook 8440p - we have analyzed for you a complete review of this laptop and will briefly summarize. The average price for this device is around $ 1,400. This is a big price for a business model, but do not forget that the device is packed with the latest technology trends: Core i5, high-performance video card, record-breaking battery, all kinds of interfaces, and much, much more. The device also has drawbacks, but about them a little further in the text. I can say that the best price at this time for this laptop in Ukraine is provided by the online store F.ua.com.ua. If you are still going to take this most productive business laptop, then buy in this store.