HP EliteBook Ultra G1q Review

While we learn the naming of HP’s EliteBook business laptops — the 600 to 800 and 1000 series increase in features, functionality and price — something new arrives: the EliteBook Ultra G1q ($1,699 as tested). Indeed, “new” seems too mild a word: the 14-inch slimline isn’t just another Word, Excel, and PowerPoint platform but a Microsoft-anointed Copilot+ PC with an AI-ready Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM processor instead of a familiar Intel or AMD one. . chip inside. The Ultra G1q is an excellent and capable corporate laptop, but at least until more AI apps appear, it doesn’t offer compelling advantages over HP’s (or Lenovo’s or Dell’s) mainstream x86 systems.

Configuration and Design: Corporate and Consumer Cousins

Suppose you’re a small-office entrepreneur rather than an enterprise IT manager. In that case, you should know—except for a different color and a tenth of an inch thinner—the EliteBook Ultra G1q is a near-identical twin to the HP OmniBook X 14 reviewed a while back but costs $500 more. The surcharge buys you business-class support (a three-year parts and labor warranty, though on-site service is extra) and managed software led by HP’s famous Wolf security suite.

Our $1,699 test unit—repeatedly discounted to $1,595 on HP.com at the time of this review—has Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 processor (with Adreno graphics and Hexagon Neural Processing Unit), 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state NVM NV-xt drive, and a 2,240-by-1,400-pixel IPS touch screen. The Windows 11 Pro system passes MIL-STD 810H torture testing against travel hazards such as shock and vibration; You’ll feel almost no flex if you grip the corners of the screen, even if you put a little pressure on the keyboard deck.

Clad in attractive “atmosphere blue” aluminum, the EliteBook Ultra G1q measures 0.44 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches and slips under the ultraportable line at 2.97 pounds. The all-time champion 14-inch business laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, is 0.59 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches and half a pound lighter.

Thin bezels surround the 16:10 aspect ratio display, which, while not 180 degrees flat, tilts back quite a bit. A 5-megapixel webcam with IR face recognition for Windows Hello login (there’s no fingerprint reader) and a sliding privacy shutter centered above the screen.

The HP has two USB Type-C ports on the left side—a 40Gbps USB4 and a 10Gbps USB-C 3.2 on the front. A Drop-Jo USB 3.2 Type-A port joins a headphone/microphone jack on the right. The AC adapter is a USB-C connector Without an HDMI port, you’ll need a DisplayPort adapter to plug in an external monitor, and you won’t get a flash-card slot or LTE or 5G mobile broadband options. Built-in Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 radio handle wireless connectivity.

Using the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q: A preview of upcoming attractions

While the webcam can capture 2,880-by-1,620-pixel stills, its video calls are limited to 1440p resolution, putting it above cheaper 720p and even most laptops’ 1080p cameras. Its images are sharp, reasonably well-lit and quite colorful, with virtually no noise or static. Windows Camera’s Studio Effects are some of the best AI hardware available to date, doing a remarkably good job of auto-framing or blurring the background (or even making it look like a watercolor painting), and HP bundles it with a Poly Camera Pro app. Even fancy fine-tuning.

The HP’s IPS touch screen doesn’t look exceptionally bright in everyday use, though it did exceed 300 nits in our device test below. The screen’s colors are rich and well-saturated, its white backgrounds are clean rather than dirty, and its details are clear, with no pixelation visible around the edges of characters. Contrast is high and viewing angles are wide on the display, although the touch glass shows room reflections.

Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers is reasonably loud, not overly loud, and subtly crisp, if a little hollow. You’ll hear a hint of bass and it’s easy to make out overlapping tracks. The laptop’s pre-installed MyHP software includes AI noise reduction for conference calls, though it doesn’t make any perceptible difference to music playback.

The backlit keyboard automatically loses points for having the typical HP layout, with half-height up and down arrow keys stacked between full-size left and right instead of placing the cursor controls on a proper inverted T. Fn key in the absence of original Home, End, Page Up and Page Down keys. On the plus side, the keys have a crisp, tappy, albeit shallow typing feel, and the plus-sized buttonless touchpad glides smoothly with a comfortable click.

The Ultra G1Q’s implementation of HP Wolf Security isn’t as deep as seen on other EliteBooks and ZBooks. Still, it offers deep-learning-enhanced malware detection and credential protection that combats phishing attacks. It’s a valuable plus, although I’m not sure it’s “worth $500.”

HP EliteBook Ultra G1q Testing: Crossing Four Lines

Benchmarking for Windows on Arm is still an inexact science, but we put the Ultra G1q up against three other Snapdragon systems and the latest Acer Swift Go 14, an x86 dark horse. The HP OmniBook X 14 has similar hardware. The EliteBook, while the two 13-inch entries from Microsoft—the Surface Laptop and the Surface Pro tablet—feature a slightly faster (at least in theory) Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 processor.

Productivity testing

As we’ve explained in other Snapdragon X Elite reviews, many of our common performance tests—led by UL’s Office Productivity Rating PCMark 10—are not currently Arm-compatible, so we’re relying primarily on processing scores. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning.

We also run the new, Arm-optimized versions of Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench 6.3, and we use HandBrake 1.8 (instead of our usual x86-only release 1.4) to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Except for lagging in Cinebench 2024, the EliteBook Ultra landed in the middle of the pack. We’re not sure we’d choose either of these systems for intensive, workstation-class video editing or 3D rendering, but they’re ready for everyday office applications and light multimedia content creation.

AI test

Benchmarks for artificial intelligence applications are rarely toothsome, but UL’s Procyon AI computer vision test leverages several AI inference engines that perform machine-vision tasks using popular neural networks. It is best used to compare Arm systems to each other because it is tested differently on x86 machines (CPU, GPU and NPU are tested separately).

Another Geekbench test simulates real-world machine learning tasks to measure overall AI performance. We run two of its estimation back-end subtests, which stress the GPU (via DirectML) and the CPU, respectively.

As expected, with AI testing in infancy, our results were inconclusive. The Microsoft Portable’s Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E-80-100 chip has zero AI advantage over the HP twins’ X1E-78-100, while the Swift Go laptop’s AMD Ryzen CPU proved particularly competitive in Geekbench tests. (The Geekbench AI test is not optimized for Snapdragon X Elite.)

Graphics test

We usually run a pair of x86 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, but here, we use two versions of two different Arm-compatible benchmarks from that graphics test suite. Wild Life Unlimited (1440p) and Unlimited Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan Graphics API to measure GPU speed. 3DMark Steel Nomad’s Regular and Lite subtests focus on commonly used APIs for game development such as Metal and DirectX 12 to evaluate gaming geometry and particle effects.

We did not see anything specific here, other than varying results on the less demanding version of each subtest. We’ve game-tested Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU elsewhere, finding it quite decent for casual gaming if not on par with discrete GPUs in high-end gaming laptops. These business- and productivity-oriented portables aren’t meant for hard-core gaming or workstation graphics tasks, but will display everything you need to get the job done.

Battery and display test

We test the battery life of each laptop and tablet by playing a locally stored 720p video file (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 testing by turning off Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting.

To measure display performance, we used a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure the laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamut or palette the display can display—and its 50 % and peak brightness in nits (candela per square meter).

Even lagging behind its sibling by an hour and a quarter, the Elitebook showed remarkable battery life: you won’t have to worry about getting through a full day of work or school as well as an evening of streaming entertainment. Its display isn’t as brilliantly bright as Surface System screens but offers excellent brightness and color for everyday use.

Verdict: A promising debut for the Snapdragon X in the office

Some of Copilot+ PC’s hitherto scarce features, such as clever webcam effects, whet our appetite for future goodies. While we wait, we can’t award the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q an Editors’ Choice award because it’s no different from the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, HP Dragonfly G4, and other business slimlines with more ports and available mobile broadband. However, we are keeping an eye on it.