HP Elite Dragonfly G3 Review

You may think of it as just a spindly bug, but entomologists will tell you the dragonfly is perhaps the world's most successful predator: Its near-360-degree vision, unbeatable agility (including up to 9G's of acceleration), and ability to predict where its prey is going give it a 95% kill rate that tigers and sharks would envy. Just ask HP, which puts the Dragonfly name on its lightest, most premium business laptops and workstations. While earlier models were convertibles, the Elite Dragonfly G3 is a clamshell ultraportable. It's pricey (starts at $1,999; $2,686 as tested), but its impressive battery life, full complement of ports, and squarish 13.5-inch, 3:2 aspect ratio display make it a tempting alternative to the likes of the Dell XPS 13 Plus and the Apple MacBook Air M2.

The Design: Renewed and Recycled 

Available in Slate Blue or Natural Silver, the Elite Dragonfly G3 has a sleek chassis crafted from partly recycled magnesium and aluminum with what HP calls “rounded pillow corners.” (They make it easier to open with one hand.) Its taller screen makes it a bit deeper at 0.64 by 11.7 by 8.7 inches, but at 2.2 pounds it's half a pound lighter than the Apple and Dell ultraportables, matching the soon-to-be-reviewed Gen 2 version of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano. The laptop has passed MIL-STD 810H tests against road hazards like shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures; there's some flex if you grasp the screen corners but none if you press the keyboard deck.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The $1,999 base model combines an Intel Core i5-1235U processor with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,280-pixel IPS touch screen. Our $2,686 review unit has a non-touch display with the same resolution but steps up to a Core i7-1265U (two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 12 threads) and adds 5G mobile broadband to the standard Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth. 

HP offers two other display choices: a 1,920-by-1,280 version of HP's Sure View Reflect panel with privacy filter, and a 3,000-by-2,000-pixel OLED screen for users who crave the richest colors and highest contrast. All models rely on Intel's Iris Xe integrated graphics. Windows 11 Pro is preinstalled.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

While the XPS 13 and MacBook Air have only Thunderbolt 4 ports (the Dell doesn't even have a headphone jack), the Elite Dragonfly G3 has a much handier array. There's one USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port on each side, but the left edge also has an HDMI video output (and the SIM card slot), while the right side adds an audio jack and a USB 3.1 Type-A port as well as a security cable lockdown notch.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Style and Security 

It would have been nice to see the OLED panel, but the standard display is almost as impressive, with ample brightness and good contrast. Viewing angles are broad, and colors are rich and well saturated. Fine details are clear. Best of all is the screen's squarish 3:2 aspect ratio, which lets you see more of a document or webpage with less scrolling; it's a view that's easy to get used to and makes old-school 16:9 widescreens look squashed.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A 5-megapixel webcam blows away cheap 720p cameras, capturing ultra-sharp 2,560-by-1,440-pixel 16:9 or 2,560-by-1,920-pixel 4:3 stills and videos. Images are colorful and reasonably well-lit, with an HP Presence utility offering automatic framing and lighting adjustment and blurring the background if you like. A keyboard button, not a sliding shutter, toggles the webcam for privacy. Two top-edge microphones feature automatic noise reduction and voice leveling that keeps you audible as you move around within three meters of the PC. 

Both webcam face recognition and a fingerprint sensor (it replaces the right Control key on the bottom row of the keyboard) are available for password-free Windows Hello logins. An Auto Lock and Awake function uses the webcam to secure and restart the system as you leave and return. The Elite Dragonfly G3 also boasts HP's Wolf Security suite with AI-based malware protection, Sure Click execution of apps and webpages in virtual-machine containers, and BIOS corruption defense with settings and operating system recovery over an office network.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

I'll never accept HP laptops' placement of the cursor arrow keys in a row, with hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-sized left and right, instead of the proper inverted T. But otherwise, the Dragonfly's backlit keyboard is snappy and comfortable, with decent travel and feedback. A large, buttonless touchpad takes just a gentle press for a quiet click. 

Two top-firing tweeters and two bottom front-firing woofers produce loud and clear sound with crisp highs and midtones and even a bit of bass; sound isn't distorted or harsh even at top volume, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. HP Audio Control software provides dynamic, music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer. Other house-brand utilities range from HP Quick Drop to swap files with your phone to HP Easy Clean to disable the keyboard, touchpad, and (if present) touch screen for a couple of minutes while you apply a disinfecting wipe.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Testing the Elite Dragonfly G3: Five Heavy-Duty Lightweights Face Off

For our benchmark charts, we compared the Dragonfly Elite G3's performance to that of not only the Dell XPS 13 Plus and the Apple MacBook Air M2, but also two 2.5-pound, 14-inch ultraportables: the VAIO SX14, and the Editors'-Choice-and-every-other-award-winning Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10. You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Beyond those, three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. 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 ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. 

Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). While Adobe Photoshop itself seemed to run fine, our usual automated extension PugetBench for Photoshop benchmark repeatedly crashed on the Dragonfly and isn't included in the charts.

The HP performed capably in these tests, easily clearing the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for the likes of Word and Excel, though its 15-watt Core i7-1265U mobile processor couldn't keep up with the 28-watt P-series chips in the Lenovo and Dell. It's not suited for strenuous, workstation-level apps, but faultless for the everyday tasks for which it was designed. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Neither the Elite Dragonfly G3 nor any other productivity-focused ultraportable is a speedy gaming machine; its after-hours pastimes are casual games and streaming media, not CGI combat or virtual reality. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) 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. 

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 Apple and HP are in a class by themselves when it comes to battery life; the Dragonfly shows remarkable stamina for a 2.2-pound portable and will easily get you through a full day of work or school without looking for the nearest AC outlet. The appeal of its 3:2 aspect ratio display is its roomy view with reduced scrolling, not the glorious colors of the XPS 13's high-res OLED panel, but it's bright and easy on the eyes. (Again, Dragonfly buyers can opt for an OLED screen if they have the dough.)

A Great Grab-and-Go Companion 

If it cost a few hundred bucks less, the HP Elite Dragonfly G3 would earn Editors' Choice honors and join the X1 Carbon as our favorite ultraportable—it offers an attractive, tall display, solid performance, great battery life, and a full set of ports in a remarkably trim 2.2-pound package. If you can afford it and especially if you need mobile broadband for connectivity where there's no Wi-Fi, it's a near-perfect pick.