HP Elite Dragonfly G3 Review. Leave a comment

The HP Elite Dragonfly G3 attempts to strike a balance between a stylish notebook that compromised on practicality and an ugly machine that was jam-packed with features if you wanted a business laptop.

The G3 is striking from an aesthetic perspective right away because of its elegant details and construction from magnesium and aluminum alloy. Additionally, HP’s most recent model has a 3:2 display, a new Intel Core i7 processor, and a ton of security features on the inside.

Unsurprisingly, there’s also a renewed emphasis on hybrid and at-home working with this notebook. In real terms, this means that customers will receive an excellent 5MP webcam with face tracking and noise cancellation to wow others during video calls. You’ll have to pay around $2,000 to get your hands on this impressive, versatile notebook, though, and that’s not cheap – other machines with competitive specifications are often far cheaper.

Features and Design
The Dragonfly G3 laptop has a stunning appearance. 90% of the metal in the casing is recycled, which is great news for those who want their technology to have an environmental component. The exterior is an attractive slate blue color that is somewhat similar to a deep gunmetal grey.

Thankfully, this notebook is more than just attractive. As expected from a small, slim laptop, there’s very little flex in the base and screen, and this is better than many of its competitors. The Dragonfly’s MIL-STD-810H testing guarantees that it will withstand drops, temperature changes, liquid and dust ingress, and other extreme scenarios, so we have no concerns about its ability to survive in the real world.

HP’s robust build is all the more notable when you consider that this laptop weighs 2.49 pounds and it’s only 16mm thick. The slim design means you’ll barely notice the Dragonfly in your bag, and the sturdy exterior ensures it’ll survive frequent trips between the home and office.

When compared to other products in the market, the Dragonfly’s dimensions are still remarkable. When the keyboard is included, the most recent Dell XPS 13 Plus is slightly heavier than the Microsoft Surface Pro 8, but it is still somewhat slimmer overall. Weighing more is the Apple MacBook Pro 13. The only thinnest laptop is the Asus ZenBook S 13 OLED, which will ship in early 2019. Its 14.9mm body weighs 2.43 pounds. Although appearances are subjective, HP’s laptop is competitive on the scales and can hold its own against any of those competitors.

A pleasantly compact braided monochrome cable makes even the power brick look better than the connectors that come with other machines. Merely a few elements are absent. On this, Intel vPro is not available.

Case — Strong Base, Weak Lid
The keyboard center and base are still surrounded by a sturdy, unwavering metal chassis. It cannot be said that the lid flexes and twists as easily as the lids on the LG Gram and Samsung Galaxy Books, though. When pressure is applied, the outer lid warps in the center more readily than a Spectre lid does. Because of its incredibly low weight and lack of Gorilla Glass reinforcement, the Dragonfly G3’s lid is weaker.

It’s worth noting that the Dragonfly G3 doesn’t come with any of the vibrant color options that the original 2020 launch model offered. The new color options have grown more matte and sterile in comparison. For a series called “Dragonfly”, its colors are becoming too similar to a typical EliteBook model.

Input, Camera, Build Quality
And lastly, the webcam. You get sharper, more detailed images with the 5MP (2,560 x 1,920 pixels) resolution than with most other laptop cameras, which makes sense given that both the Dell and Apple laptops have 720p lenses. Not only is the camera detailed, but it also supports Windows Hello sign-in, colors are accurate without being oversaturated, and face tracking is amazing.

The appearance filters were the only things that didn’t function well; they were grating and overt. The Surface is your only choice if you want a laptop with more imaging hardware because it has a 10MP rear-facing camera in addition to a 5MP webcam. When it comes to the Dragonfly’s keyboard, HP has excelled.

The layout is fine, with a double-height Return key and large Space bar, but not perfect – the power button is annoyingly installed next to the Delete key, and other HP business laptops have an extra column of keys to hold the Home, PgUp and PgDn keys – and there’s no sign of that here. There’s no number pad, but that’s almost a given on a small laptop. The trackpad is good, too. It’s large, uses haptic hardware to register fast, accurate clicks, and supports gestures.

Display Performance
The display has many positive aspects. With a 13.5″ diagonal and a 3:2 aspect ratio, the Dragonfly panel is taller than typical 16:9 or 16:10 screens. This is a clever design because it gives you more vertical space than most notebook displays, which facilitates viewing documents and web browsers in greater detail. That’s helpful for productivity.

The panel has a respectable maximum brightness level of 775cd/m2. Which when combined with a black point of 0.31cd/m2 results in a contrast ratio of 2,500:1. There is a lot of subtlety between the various shades. The Dragonfly has amazing low-end depth and high-end punch, and everything appears remarkably vibrant. Those are amazing figures with an instant impact on reality.
‘The Dragonfly’s delta E of 1.77 is great and the color temperature of 6,332K is similarly impressive – your eyes simply won’t detect any accuracy issues. The HP’s panel renders 99% of the sRGB color gamut at 105.3%, so it can display every shade needed by mainstream workloads without veering into the oversaturation that high volume figures can sometimes cause.

Those great benchmark results mean the HP works well in a wide variety of situations. It’s bright enough for indoor and outdoor use and has the vibrancy to make media look fantastic. Its colors are accurate to do a great job with mainstream content creation like light photo editing. Your everyday browsing will look bold.

The speakers do a tremendous job by producing loud, well-balanced and detailed audio – easily good enough for music and media and easily the match of any rival.

The Dragonfly G3’s display also has the HP Sure View privacy filter, which works very well – press F2 and people on either side of you simply won’t see the display. The only downside here is a slight lack of brightness.

Sadly, though, the HP’s display can’t go beyond those everyday work and creative situations. It only produced 72.7% of the Adobe RGB color space and 74.9% of the DCI-P3 gamut, which isn’t high enough to work in either color space.

And while the HP’s resolution of 1,920 x 1,280 is great for everyday workloads. The Dell is available with a higher resolution if you pay more and the Apple, Asus, and Microsoft machines provide higher resolutions out of the box . The former two have wider gamuts. Those are more suitable if you want a sharper display for creative work.

The new model is longer than the outgoing Dragonfly Max by over 20 mm due to its new 13.5-inch form factor. It is thankfully not any heavier at 1.2 kg despite the larger volume. Perhaps unsurprisingly, dimensions are almost identical to the recent 13.5-inch Spectre x360 13.5.

Connectivity — Thunderbolt 4 Support
Port options are essentially the same as on the Dragonfly Max but rearranged for the better. The two USB-C ports, for example, are now along on the left and right edges of the laptop instead of only along the right edge to allow for charging on either side of the laptop.

There is no integrated SD card reader yet again as HP is pushing its own wireless QuickDrop software solution. QuickDrop works well enough for smartphones, but dedicated camera users who rely on SD cards remain out of luck.

Performance
The HP Elite Dragonfly G3 can be configured with a number of different CPUs. Our review sample arrived with a Core i7-1255U – one of the first chips we’ve seen from Intel’s new wave of low-power laptop CPUs.

The i7-1255U has a base power limit of just 15W and can boost to 55W. It’s designed to replace familiar parts like the Core i7-1165G7. This processor has two P-cores with hyper-threading alongside eight single-threaded E-cores. The P-Cores have base and boost speeds of 1.7GHz and 4.7GHz, while the modest E-Cores run at 1.2GHz and 3.5GHz.

The i7-1255U has Intel Iris Xe graphics with 96 execution units with a peak speed of 1250MHz. The chip has 12MB of L3 cache.
That’s a respectable specification for a low-power CPU, but this is one of the weaker parts from the new range. The i7-1260P, for instance, has four P-cores, a marginally faster GPU and more L3 cache with TDPs of 28W and 64W. AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800U is another low-power contender thanks to eight multi-threaded Zen 3+ cores and a 2.7GHz base clock. If you’d like more information about the i7-1260P and 6800U, we’ve already taken a deep dive into those parts.

The new CPU sits alongside 16GB of DDR5 memory and a 512GB WD SN530 SSD with mediocre read and write speeds of 2,436 MB/s and 1,818 MB/s. Those SSD results are good enough to keep the Dragonfly feeling responsive. They’re unimpressive in the overall scope of things.

In Cinebench R23’s single- and multi-core benchmarks the Dragonfly scored 1,552 and 5,796. Those are reasonable figures: both easily beat the i7-1165G7 used in the Surface Pro 8, and they’re fast enough to enable slick everyday computing, loads of browser tabs and some light photo-editing.

The i7-1260P though is far faster, especially in the multi-core run. The AMD Ryzen 7 6800U is miles better in multi-core tests, too. The low-power i7-1255U couldn’t gain ground elsewhere. In the PCMark 10 Application test the i7-1255U scored 10,803. Which beat the older Intel chips and AMD’s new silicon but falls behind the i7-1260P.

Wrap Up
In the context of Windows ultraportables. The HP Elite Dragonfly G3 offers better battery life than most machines, and the HP impresses elsewhere. It’s got lots of practical business features inside a svelte, good looking, and robust enclosure. The 3:2 display offers good vertical space, incredible contrast and accurate sRGB colors.

The keyboard is intuitive, the speakers are great, and the 5MP webcam is crisp and versatile. And while that Intel CPU can’t keep up with other chips, it’s still got the power for everyday computing. If you want to get HP Elite Dragonfly G3 visit Aedkit.com.