HP EliteBook 2170p Ultraportable Review: Business Class, But Business Savvy?
by Dustin Sklavos on November 30, 2012 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- HP
- EliteBook
- Ivy Bridge
- Laptops
Display Quality
As is customary with these smaller notebooks (and notebooks in general these days), it should come as no surprise that the display on the HP EliteBook 2170p is pretty terrible. HP at least enjoys a matte finish on their display, but at the 11.6" form factor we're actually very close to tablet territory. A higher quality option on the 2170p would at least have been appreciated.
The display on the ASUS ZenBook Prime UX21A is pretty much how a small form factor display should be done. HP's is poor quality by almost any standard, with dismal gamut, accuracy, and contrast. The panel is actually worse than the already poor one from AU Optronics in the Acer Aspire V5-171, albeit not by much.
Battery Life
Unfortunately, while the poor battery life was more excusable on the Acer, the HP EliteBook 2170p suffers badly from its chintzy 4-cell, 30Wh stock battery. HP also offers a 6-cell, 48Wh battery, but you'll see efficiency in the 2170p really could be a lot better.
Normalized battery efficiency is very iffy, but raw running time with just the 4-cell battery is unacceptable. For web surfing, you get roughly three hours of productive use at 100 nits. That means you'll need the 6-cell battery if you want to use the 2170p off the mains for any period of time, as it just doesn't have the juice to keep going.
Heat and Noise
Thankfully, the one place where the HP EliteBook 2170p seems to really excel is in heat and noise management. The thick chassis may be a bit unwieldy for an ultraportable, but it does allow the notebook enough real estate to handle its thermals without getting too loud or too hot.
The i7 never goes above 75C on a core, which is frankly just fantastic for any notebook. Fan noise is also minimal, if constant, but it makes me wonder if HP couldn't have possibly tuned the fan to run a bit slower and coax at least a little more juice out of the battery. Like I said, the fan is never particularly audible, but it's obvious they have some thermal headroom to work with.
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ACSK - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Yup - same thing for wireless cards.Penti - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
mSATA uses SATA so it should accept everything it does accept on any other SATA-port shouldn't it?Penti - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
I.e. whats really preventing any one is that the WWAN slot isn't an mSATA slot and has no SATA-connection at all. You have to get by using a 2.5" SSD.SunLord - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Whats the black circle thing in between the g, h, and b keys?Voldenuit - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
That's the nub mouse (also known as a Trackpoint, although that term is technicalluy trademarked by IBM/lenovo).When done well (like on thinkpads), it's one of the best pointing devices on a laptop. When done poorly (dell latitudes, hp, some toshibas, a few vaios), it can be horribly infuriating.
bji - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
Even on thinkpads they are annoying. It's a legacy pointing device sitting in the middle of the keyboard looking ugly and tripping your fingers. The world has moved on to multi-touch pads, and they are much, much, MUCH better than the nubs of yesterday.Tchamber - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
That should be a mouse joy stick, we don't see this much at all these days, but once you get used to it it's very efficient.Subyman - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Wow, $2000+ for no SSD and 4GB of ram? I've heard of the Apple tax, but never the HP tax.Voldenuit - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
This is known as the Autonomy Accounting writeoff tax.Olympus wrote off $2Bn for accounting fraud, and has been charging customers up to $100 for lens hoods, so maybe hp needs to inflate their margins too?
r3loaded - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
My steps for reaching the comments were as follows:1) Click on article in Google Reader because it had "EliteBook" in the title.
2) Jump to the Display section of the review, scan the first paragraph and glance at the graphs.
3) Go straight to the comments to describe the facepalm I'm currently doing while typing this comment out.