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日本HP EliteBook 860 G9 – Top 5 Pros and Cons
Premium office devices have been increasing in quantity, as manufacturers keep pouring money into the segment, despite it being rather a niche, as we doubt most people would spend more than a grand for an office device. Previously, we talked about how HP is slowly modernizing its notebooks, so today we want to show you one of its recent examples. The EliteBook 860 G9 is the first 16-inch business laptop that the company offers, coming with a wide hardware selection and a good display for both office and color work.
Today we present you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the HP EliteBook 860 G9.
HP EliteBook 860 G9: Full Specs / In-depth Review
3 reasons to BUY the HP EliteBook 860 G9
1. Design and build quality
The EliteBook is purely made from aluminum alloy, which gives it an elegant appearance. The silver finish will fit every occasion and every office, while the minimalist appearance is backed up by a debossed HP logo in the color of the lid. The laptop is quite portable, considering the large display on the front, weighing only 1.76 kg and having a profile of 19.2 mm. The laptop feels even thinner in hand, mainly due to the rounded corners. The lid and base are quite strong, not giving in to our attempts at flexing it.
2. Battery life
On the inside, we find a 76Wh battery pack, which does quite well in our battery tests, lasting for 23 hours of Web browsing, or 13 hours and 31 minutes of video playback. It is quite uneven and the test doesn’t really equal daily usage, but the laptop should last for a whole day of work, if not more. Now, we conduct the battery tests with the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.
3. Display quality
The front houses a 16-inch FHD+ display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. We like the trend of taller panels, as it allows you to house more apps simultaneously. The display itself is great, reaching 509 nits of brightness while having a very high contrast ratio of 1740:1. The panel covers nearly the entire sRGB color gamut (92%) while reaching great accuracy levels with our Design and Gaming profile, making it ideal for design work.
Here are the results of our tests with both the stock settings (left) and with our profile applied (right). The dE value gets lowered to 1.2, down from 5.8, which is a sizeable improvement.
Buy our profiles
Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for HP EliteBook 860 G9 configurations with 16.0″ BOE NE160WUM-N61 (BOE0A02) (WUXGA, 1920 x 1200) IPS.
*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].
Read more about the profiles HERE.
In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.
Office Work
Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.
Design and Gaming
This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.
Health-Guard
Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.
Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount
2 reasons NOT to buy the HP EliteBook 860 G9
1. Performance
The laptop is offered with several Alder Lake CPUs, mainly from the U-series and P-series. We tested a configuration with the Core i7-1255U and to be frank, it didn’t perform well. In fact, it scored lower than the Core i5-1245U inside the Dell Latitude 7530.
Taking a look at the stress test results and we can quickly see why that is, as the Core i7 boosts its speeds for a short amount of time, after which it slumbers down and runs at below 2.00 GHz on both the P-cores and E-cores. The 500$ cheaper HP 15 produces similar results, albeit the EliteBook boost for a further 20-seconds.
| Intel Core i7-1255U (15W TDP) | 0:02 – 0:10 sec | 0:15 – 0:30 sec | 10:00 – 15:00 min |
|---|---|---|---|
| HP EliteBook 860 G9 | 3.23 GHz @ 2.57 GHz @ 85°C @ 41W | 3.09 GHz @ 2.46 GHz @ 86°C @ 38W | 1.82 GHz @ 1.58 GHz @ 57°C @ 16W |
| HP 15 (15-dw4000) | 3.19 GHz @ 2.42 GHz @ 69°C @ 40W | 1.90 GHz @ 1.49 GHz @ 57°C @ 17W | 1.91 GHz @ 1.49 GHz @ 56°C @ 17W |
2. Touchpad
While we did buy our laptop from a store, we found a pretty big issue with the touchpad, which should rarely happen with devices this expensive. While the unit is covered in glass, which is the only right choice in this price range. However, it manages to skip and jump all over the screen, making it very difficult to work with. We tried tinkering with the drivers, but it was to no avail. Even in the BIOS, the issue persisted, so it might be a firmware or a hardware issue. On the other hand, the keyboard is one of the better ones that we’ve seen, with long key travel, clicky feedback, a backlight, and a whole NumPad, for you to crunch numbers with.
