HP EliteBook 1040 G3 review

HP’s EliteBook 1040 G3 also proves that there are also stylish business notebooks. Its aluminum housing is milled from one piece, which makes it very solid, torsion-resistant and high-quality despite its low overall height (16 mm). It should not have been thinner either, because otherwise, as narrow interfaces as the two USB 3.0 ports, once USB 3.1, HDMI, the SD card reader and the docking port no place. The thicker LAN and VGA connections are included as an adapter. On wireless interfaces, the EliteBook 1040 offers G3 LTE, WLAN-ac, Bluetooth 4.2 and NFC. Safety-conscious users are delighted by the TPM module, the fingerprint scanner and the HP BIOSphere self-healing BIOS with HP SureStart. The built-in Bang & Olufsen loudspeakers ensure good music.


Water-repellent keyboard and glass touchpad


On the illuminated keyboard, it is excellent to write: the keys are large and the key stroke just right. In addition, it is water-repellent and has a drain for spilled liquid. Only the slightly sharp edge of the otherwise very good glass touchpad was a bit unpleasant. In our test configuration, an Intel Core i5-6300U (2.2 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 3.0 GHz), 8 GB DDR4 RAM and a 256 GB SSD were responsible for the performance. Windows 7 Professional (64 Bit) and Windows 10 Pro (64 Bit) are available as the operating system for the first time. HP uses an anti-reflective and very bright 14-inch display on the EliteBook 1040 G3, which displays images in full-HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels). In performance comparison with the other luxury notebooks, the ever-very quiet EliteBook 1040 G3 was good overall.


Conclusion


2,726 points marked the highest value in the PCMark 8 - also because of the fast Sandisk SSD. Your read rate of 486.3 MB / s is quite good for an SSD with m.2-SATA-III interface. In the Cinebench R11.5 a good 2.63 CPU points were achieved - but in this comparison test the worst value. The competitors had all the significantly stronger Core i7-6500U installed. For the same reason it occupies the last place in the 3DMark Cloud Gate despite a good 5.209 points. In the PCMark 8-battery test, it could score the longest running time: 5:26 hours.


Business users are allowed to access the HP EliteBook 1040 G3. It combines the high quality and functional requirements of the business world with the beauty of home-user ultrabooks.