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In this article, I give you my HP EliteBook 845 G7 review with specs included. This is an exciting business ultrabook, you don’t get to say that very often. Why is it exciting?

Well, this is the 7th generation and it has AMD Ryzen inside. So, that in itself is pretty cool because the performance is there, the price is lower, the heat is lower, all that sort of stuff.

It’s also built like a tank without being too heavy. You’ve got an aluminum-clad casing, not bad looking, not as sexy as something like the HP Spectre X360 consumer laptop obviously but this has a lot more ports inside and a lot of upgradeability.

HP EliteBook 845 G7 laptop starts off around a thousand dollars which for a premium business ultrabook is crazy cheap in itself. Granted, that might be a lower-end configuration than you want to go like Ryzen 3 Pro or Ryzen 5 Pro.

You can go all the way up to Ryzen 7 Pro CPU but as you go up in configurations it doesn’t get that much more expensive. For about fifteen hundred dollars you can get a really nicely configured Ryzen 7 Pro.

All these configurations have integrated Radeon graphics onboard. You can get 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a full HD touch screen display for 1500 bucks.

HP also offers this as the EliteBook 840 and that one has Intel inside and that one’s several hundred dollars more so thus the cost savings.

So, why would you not go with Ryzen? Typically it’s faster, it runs a bit cooler, and the battery life is really good. Intel version is still there for those who must have V–Pro though HP has a lot of security options for their business laptops so it kind of mitigates the need for V-Pro in some ways.

You can do things like network base restore, for example, it has BIOS guarded, it has drive encryption, all that sort of stuff. And, also you don’t get Thunderbolt 3 here because AMD doesn’t yet offer that. That started out as an Intel intellectual property. They’ll have Thunderbolt in the future but it doesn’t have that. So you just get USB-C instead.

Now, you can still use USB-C docs but there you have the reason why some folks would still go with the Intel model.

So, the HP EliteBook 845 G7 is a 14-inch ultrabook that is fast becoming the standard because footprints have gotten smaller and bezels have gotten smaller.

So they’re eclipsing 13.3 inches somewhat but there is a 13.3-inch model and that is the EliteBook 835 for those of you who do want to go a little bit smaller.

For display options on this you’re looking at full hd options on it. So there’s a 250 nits available with or without touch as far as I’m aware. And we have the better 400 nit non-touch matte display. There’s also a thousand knit hp sure guard which is a privacy display option.

So both the thousand knit and the 400 nit are pretty much full srgb. But that 250 nit option is only like 45 percent of ntsc. Which typically means only about 65 of the srgb. So that’s not as compelling. But it depends on what you’re going to use it for right.

Does have stereo up firing speakers bang on olson branded. Just like with the consumer line laptops too and they’re not bad for a business laptop. I mean you’re not going to say wow at base but they’re pretty decent. You have a 720p webcam which has become all-important these days.

And it has both windows hello ir camera and a fingerprint scanner. And by the way for that webcam there is a privacy shutter a physical shutter at the top that you can slide if you’re worried about people spying on you or whatever. Ports on this are quite good.

We might not have thunderbolt 4 but we have two USB-C ports. We have two usb a ports we have hdmi 2.0 and a 3.5 millimeter audio jack. It’s available optionally with intel 4g lte and that’s lta advanced. Um sim card slot thus nano sim card slot if you go with that option there.

So again compared to something like the dell XPS 13 or the hp spectre x360 you’re looking at a lot of connectivity. Which is something we would hope to see from a business laptop. But i can see why it crosses over to small business people or just everyday people who are actually still looking for that.

And where do you see the upgradability of the internals too. We actually have ram slots in this which is just about unheard of of course. An m.2 SSD that’s upgradable as well socketed wi-fi cards so nice. By the way this competes with the ThinkPad t14s which is also AMD ryzen.

And as a result of that and hp knows that they do things like they have their own version of the eraser stick pointer that the trackpoint pointer that think pads have in case you happen to be migrating over. And the keyboard on this is quite good in tactile.

I know hp works really hard on having a good keyboard it doesn’t look or feel like the thing pad keyboard. And it’s not super deep travel but the tactile feel of it the feedback all that sort of thing makes for very pleasant typing on it.

We have a Microsoft precision trackpad made by Synaptics on board with optional nfc embedded in it. And it’s good except for it’s so darn slippery my fingers just skate all over it. Especially in wintertime when your skin tends to be a bit drier and not tacky at all that is what it is yeah.

When it comes to performance no surprise AMD ryzen does well here. We have the ryzen 7 pro option. There’s also the ryzen 5a the ryzen 3 probably you wouldn’t want to go with so much anyway. Ours is eight-core the ryzen 5 pro is a six-core CPU.

And performance is above intel particularly above intel 10th generation that it competes with. 11th generation we’ll talk about a little bit where intel cpu performance doesn’t go up that much but their graphics performance does.

But anyway very performant on this does a bit better in benchmarks than intel sometimes more than a bit better. So that’s definitely a plus. I the heat on this is well managed as well. It’s not particularly immense cooling on it it’s just that ryzen’s a bit more power-efficient.

Smaller process and all that sort of thing. So enthusiastic about this yes i definitely am. So when it comes to the AMD Radeon integrated graphics here that’s more built to compete with intel 10th gen. The new iris xc graphics are faster.

Now you’re not going to be buying this ultrabook probably for gaming anyway are you. And for things like handbrake and coding which typically often use the CPU more than the GPU you’re still going to see better performance on this ryzen versus the intel counterpart even in the 11th generation.

But if you are doing some photoshop tasks that sort of thing intel iris xe will sometimes outperform ryzen’s integrated graphics. But overall it’s a win Verizon and costs less and less heat and thus less noise. This is not a loud laptop ever not even running benchmarks.

You can get it with up to 32 gigs of ddr4 3200 megahertz ram. Again two sockets we’ll show you those. M.2 ssd hp typically uses quite fast ssds in their higher end business laptops and no exception here. Very good performance out of that.

So it’s all sounding pretty good right and certainly for the price it is pretty solid what about battery life. Well ryzen’s typically pretty good at that. And we have a 53 watt hour battery which is a good capacity very solid for a laptop this size. Uh you can get it with a 45 watt or a 65 watt charger.

Your choice of barrel pin connector or usbc depends if you want to leave both your USB-c ports open. Hp forgot to send us the charger so i can’t show it to you so just to see what it looks like but hey it’s a charge not the most exciting thing.

Battery life on this is quite good and they claim something like 17 hours or something like that. You know not real world scenario typically. But we did see 10 to 11 hours of real world use. And that means a mix of productivity tasks office some social media some streaming a video a little bit of photoshop photo editing that sort of stuff.

A little zoom video calling with the display set at 200 nits of brightness. And we have that 400 net panel mind you. So um that’s good stuff that’s great. I might not beat an m1-based MacBook pro or something like that but still it’s quite good.

Well you know you could say they don’t make them like they used to but in this case they do and that’s actually a good thing. To get inside of here just five Phillips head screws nothing obscure and then lift from you can lift your finger right here and then pull the lid off and there’s our metal lid and that’s the underside of it.

So delightfully easy to get into which we would expect from a business laptop. Oh hey presto you look inside and there’s actually stuff you can upgrade that usually with ultrabooks everything’s soldered on. Particularly the ram is soldered on.

Sometimes even the wi-fi. Well in this case here’s our intel wi-fi card it is socketed that’s the ax-201 wi-fi six card. And if you wanted to get the optional 4g ltea card here’s the line for it right here and this is where the other socket is and that would go right in there.

But what’s under these little mysterious covers here with a little bit of heat tape that we’re going to pull off so you can see. Carefully remove the heat tape or set it aside and here two ram slots. Yay awesome that. So that’s why they’ll sell to you with a maximum of 32 gigs of ram if you get two 16 gig modules.

So awesome to see that there underneath this heat shield. And underneath the other heat shield with a familiar form factor that’s where our m.2 SSD is. Ours came with a fast nvme ssd again available up to one terabyte in capacity.

Though there are two terabyte drives on the market. I suppose if you want to upgrade it yourself afterwards. And fairly compact for a 53 watt hour battery this one really doesn’t take up all that much space. But there’s our battery right there.

And the stereo speakers that are up firing surrounding the keyboard are located here and here. That’s the underside of the modules. So that’s the hp EliteBook 845 g7 and with AMD ryzen inside I have to say it’s a winner. The price for a business laptop with a premium aluminum chassis great rigidity all that sort of thing and hp is certainly doing a good job of competing with the Lenovo thinkpad line and we’re really happy to see ryzen options.