HP EliteBook 840 G9 Review

Setting aside its ZBook mobile workstations and ultralight Dragonfly line, HP's EliteBook 800 models are the firm's second-best business laptops (between the 600 and 1000 series). The EliteBook 840 G9 (starts at $1,129; $1,609 as tested) sits smack in the mainstream of 14-inch, clamshell corporate notebooks. This laptop is packed with up-to-date features like a slightly taller 16:10 (instead of 16:9) aspect ratio display, Wi-Fi 6E, and 5G mobile broadband. HP's 840 G9 doesn't upstage Lenovo's legendary ThinkPad X1 Carbon as our favorite business laptop, but it's a trim and terrific enterprise option.

Ready for the Corner Office 

On HP.com, the cheapest EliteBook 840 G9 is $1,129 with a 12th Generation Intel Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive. Four screen choices are available, all IPS panels with 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution: non-touch or touch with a modest 250 nits of brightness, a sunnier 400-nit non-touch screen, and one of HP's Sure View Reflect panels with an integrated privacy filter. Disappointingly, you can't get a sharper 4K or OLED display.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

For $1,609, our Windows 11 Pro test unit steps up to a faster Core i7-1280P chip (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads) with Intel's vPro IT manageability tech, a 512GB SSD, and Intel 5G Solution 5000 connectivity for desolate places without Wi-Fi coverage. Extras include a SmartCard slot as well as both a fingerprint reader and face-recognition webcam to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello. The laptop also features HP's Wolf Security bundle, including BIOS and AI-based malware protection along with Sure Click sandboxing of online apps and websites.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

This aluminum-clad EliteBook measures 0.76 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches, and it just clears our ultraportable cutoff at 2.99 pounds. Among other 14-inch business systems with 16:10 screen aspect ratios, Lenovo's X1 Carbon is an eighth of an inch thinner and half a pound lighter (2.48 pounds), while the Acer TravelMate P6 is lighter still at 2.2 pounds.

Thin bezels border the sides of the screen, with slightly thicker bars above and below. A sliding shutter covers the webcam lens when you want some privacy, and a microphone mute key is included on the top row. Ports include two USB4 ports with Thunderbolt 4 support on the left flank, along with an HDMI monitor port. The laptop features one 5Gbps USB 3.2 Type-A port on each side plus an audio jack, a nano SIM slot, and a security-cable lockdown notch on the right. HP's compact AC adapter has a USB-C connector.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

HP Gets the Keyboard Right 

Beyond even the recently growing 1080p standard, HP's webcam captures up to 2,560-by-1,440-pixel (16:9 aspect ratio) or 2,560-by-1,920-pixel (4:3) stills, as well as 1080p or 1440p videos. Images produced by the camera are reasonably well-lit and colorful, with minimal static. The myHP utility's HP Presence enhancements include a backlight and low-light adjustment, as well as framing tools for your head, head and shoulders, or upper body—depending on how much of your shirt or blouse you want to show.

Speaking of shirts, what appears in my reviews more often than torn bodices do in romance novels? Complaints about HP laptops arranging the cursor arrow keys in a clumsy row instead of the handier inverted-T layout. The EliteBook's arrow keys are only half-size but are—amazingly—properly placed.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Even better are the dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys in a ThinkPad-style arrangement at the top right for the first two and lower right for the latter. The backlit keyboard has a shallow but reasonably snappy typing feel, and typing on it is audible but not too noisy. The laptop's decently sized, buttonless touchpad glides and clicks smoothly.

Sound from the bottom-firing speakers isn't exactly symphonic, but it's loud and sharp enough for any business use, as well as for enjoying streaming movies or music. These speakers produce very little bass to speak of, but the audio isn't harsh or tinny even at top volume, and it's easy to make out overlapping tracks. HP Audio Control software provides music, movie, and voice modes, as well as an equalizer. Finally, AI-based speaker and mic noise reduction, and sound calibration for supported headsets, are also available here.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

I'm sad that the EliteBook doesn't match most rivals in supporting a high-res screen option, but the 1,920-by-1,200 display is perfectly crisp and quite bright. Colors are rich and well-saturated, contrast is decent, and viewing angles are wide. White backgrounds are clean, helped by the ability to tilt the screen back as far as you like, and I can't see any pixelation around the edges of letters on websites and in emails.

Testing the HP EliteBook 840 G9: The High End of Mainstream 

For our benchmark charts, we're comparing the HP to four other 14-inch slimline laptops, including the premium Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 (starts at $1,439; $2,249 as tested) and the more affordable Acer TravelMate P6 (starts at $1,299.99; $1,499.99 as tested). The Dell Latitude 9430 2-in-1 (starts at $2,169; $2,994 as tested) is a business convertible, while the Lenovo Slim 9i (starts at $1,249; $2,070 as tested) is a consumer showpiece with a 4K OLED display.

Productivity Tests 

Our primary performance benchmark, 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 a laptop's storage load time and throughput.

Three more 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). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

HP's EliteBook 840 G9 finishes first or second in every event, showing more than ample power for everyday apps (scoring half again the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) and even enough muscle for some mild digital content creation, though it's not up to workstation-class CGI rendering or data science. 

Graphics Tests 

For visual testing, we benchmark 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.

Lenovo's sleek Slim 9i laptop leads the pack with the HP close behind, but all these notebooks' Intel integrated graphics fall way short of the 3D performance you'll see from the discrete GPU of a gaming laptop or workstation. They're fine for casual gaming and streaming media, but not meant for high-speed shoot-'em-ups or particularly heavy-duty visual content creation. 

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. 

For display testing, we use Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation. That means 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).

No complaints here, as the EliteBook shows more than enough unplugged stamina for a full day's work—plus an evening's Netflix or YouTube entertainment. Bested only by the Dell Latitude in this test lot, this makes the EliteBook ideal for workers who frequently travel.

Unfortunately, this EliteBook's screen can't match the vivid hues of the Slim 9i's OLED panel in color coverage. However, the screen is more than colorful enough for business apps, and it's actually brighter than its rated 400 nits—again, beat only by the Dell Latitude.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: A Sleek Silver Slab for the Enterprise 

If you can live with a merely fine screen instead of a show-off OLED or 4K display, it's hard to fault HP's EliteBook 840 G9. This business laptop includes everything from 5G mobile broadband to a high-res, AI-enhanced conferencing camera, along with highly competitive performance and additional security. The only question in our minds is how HP can top it with the would-be EliteBook 1000 series, and whether it can earn our Editors' Choice award next time.