Living With the HP EliteBook 840 G9

This year's version of HP's EliteBook 840 (G9) follows in the footsteps of last year's 840 Aero G8, its predecessor, and the larger EliteBook 865 I recently reviewed. As HP's midrange enterprise 14-inch offering, it's a solid enterprise notebook with all the features you'd expect, very good performance, and the addition of HP's unique Wolf Security features. In short, it's an enterprise notebook designed to do the job, and do it well, but it's not flashy.

Measuring 12.42 by 8.82 by 0.76 inches and weighing 3.2 pounds (3.8 pounds with the included 65-watt charger), the EliteBook 840 isn't as light or sleek as HP's 13-inch Elite Dragonfly G3 or Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10. But it's still easy to carry for a mid-range laptop—relatively thin and light, with an aluminum design that feels sturdy.

One big change from last year is the move to a more modern 14-inch display with a 16:10 ratio, up from the 16:9 ratio used on the G8 and previous models. The unit I tested has a 400-nit 1920-by-1200 display, and there are lower-brightness, touch, and SureView Reflect privacy screen versions as well. There are no higher-resolution displays.

The EliteBook 840 has a decent selection of ports. The left side has an HDMI connector, a powered USB-A port, and two USB-C/Thunderbolt connectors that can be used for charging; the right side has a headphone/mic jack, another USB-A port, a lock slot, and a SIM slot for an optional modem. Ideally, I'd like to see a USB-C port on both sides, to make it a bit more convenient to plug in the charger, but otherwise, it's a very good combination. As with most laptops in this class this year, it supports Wi-Fi 6E; and there's an option for an Intel 5000 series 5G modem.

(Credit: HP)

For videoconferencing, it offers a 5MP camera that seemed very similar to that of the EliteBook 865. I thought it looked quite good, and software controls in the included myHP app had options for appearance filtering, lighting adjustment, and an auto-framing feature. As usual, I didn't use these much, but they all seemed to work. There's a physical switch for a webcam cover. It has two front-facing mics with AI noise reduction technology, and two bottom-side speakers; the sound quality was good, though not exceptional.

Like other members of this year's EliteBook family, the 840 comes with HP's Wolf Security, which protects the machine with a self-healing BIOS and a root of trust. It also comes with SureClick, a private browser that runs web pages inside isolated virtual machines to protect your machine from malware. This remains a very interesting idea, although I've yet to find a lot of enterprise shops that enforce this, and most people will likely run standard browsers.

The version of the EliteBook 840 G9 I tested had an Intel Core i7-1280P processor (Alder Lake), a 28-watt processor which has six performance cores and eight efficient cores, with a total of 12 threads. It has a base clock of 1.8 GHz, and a maximum boost clock of 4.8 GHz, with Intel's Iris Xe Graphics with 96 execution units, along with support for Intel's vPro management.

This is the highest-end 28-watt processor in Intel's 12th Generation line; I've seen it in a couple of other competitive notebooks. In basic tests, it scores on the high end of Intel-based machines; though in graphics, in particular, machines based on the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro, such as the EliteBook 865 I tested, do better. As with every machine I've tested lately, it feels quite speedy for things like web browsing or word processing.

For my more demanding tests, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance. Converting a large video in Handbrake took 1 hour, 23 minutes—better than any other Intel-based small laptop I've tested and close to the 1 hour, 16 minutes I saw on the Ryzen-based EliteBook 865. Running a large portfolio simulation in MatLab took 29 minutes, 23 seconds, the best score I've seen from a thin-and-light laptop.

On a very large spreadsheet model, it completed the test in 37 minutes, just slightly behind the Elite Dragonfly, which had the fastest time I've seen. This is an area where the Intel machines outperformed the Ryzen-based ones, possibly because Excel doesn't really take advantage of more than a couple of cores. 

Battery life was quite good. The EliteBook 840 has a 51-watt-hour battery, and I got 11 hours and 26 minutes on PC Mark's Modern Office battery test. Not the best I've seen, but quite sufficient.

Overall, the EliteBook 840 G9 seemed solid and performed well. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the highest-end enterprise notebooks. You'd have to move up to the EliteBook 1000 or Dragonfly series if you wanted HP's Presence Aware feature that automatically locks the screen when you walk away. The 1000 series is a bit thinner and lighter yet, with a magnesium chassis.

But the price seems competitive. HP says the unit I tested with a Core i7-1280P processor, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD, and 5G modem should sell for $1,609, though the closest model I see on HP's website as I write this is $1,809. A more basic unit with a Core i5-1240P, 256 GB SSD, and no 5G modem is at $1,129.

In short, the EliteBook 840 G9 is not a notebook that will stand out, but it is one that will do the job, and do it well.