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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jonjonjonj - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
"Insert" (destroyer of worlds)i pop the insert key off of every keyboard i have ever owned and stick some folded up paper under it and pop it back on. no more word destroying for me! i also love how you slap the word business class on something and charge more for it. no wonder companies love serving enterprises.
arthur449 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Thanks for the laugh.There's nothing like typing a few sentences while glancing at documentation to the side and realizing that Insert has been happily gobbling up your words.
This seems like a lot to pay for a laptop with good cooling.
kenyee - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
An HP Elite used to mean a nice high-res IPS screen, 4 memory slots, and a fast graphics chip :-PThis is like a jewelry laptop...pretty to look at (not even that pretty w/o a hires screen) but not useful for regular work :-)
policeman0077 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
fit a 1600*900 panel in it....Penti - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Maybe it's not that bad, it's an ultraportable with two damn SO-DIMM's! In a small formfactor, that's pretty sweet in of it self. I don't like the trend with like one soldered channel plus one DIMM. Ultrabooks aren't very good here.Costs a lot customized though. Good to see business/corporate geared things though. You can even have it (with Core i5-3427U at least) vPro enabled, and it has DisplayPort, docking ports etc. I guess you could always buy if using it as a personal computer for yourself at about 1000 USD and put in another RAM-stick and change out the HDD to an SSD and get a decent machine. How would this with 8GB SO-DIMM, 250GB SSD for 1300 compete against the ultrbooks?
XnoX - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Also, what the review can't tell you is the actual price an enterprise would pay for these (usually around 60% of listed price).Penti - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Of course and it's about 1000 USD preconfigured with a 48Wh battery where this review model is only using a 30Wh battery (i.e. smaller than a Surface RT). Custom config for an large enterprise would obviously come down too. Simply because they want to win as a supplier. You already have a 25% rebate at HP to begin with with customized machines, so for an large corp the price isn't ridiculous and is less than 2000 with SSD, 8GB RAM and i7 cpu. A Dell or some other brand might be a better fit for many though.PR0927 - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
I'm confused why this article doesn't say what's so obvious - that this laptop is an utter PoS and isn't worth the cost, by any means.Frankly the conclusion is WAY too kind.
There is literally not a single good thing about this laptop compared to its competition. Price, screen, form factor, specs, battery life - you name it, it sucks. Hard.
ACSK - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
I deal with 100-1000s of notebooks on a monthly basis, and by far and away HP has the highest fail rate (has been that way since maybe 06 or 07?). I wouldn't buy this if it was netbook priced. Dell's notebook reliability is actually really good (do seem to have some power / battery issues on current models), and Lenovo's is also fairly good. But for ultra-compact notebooks, I'd recommend people look at Panasonic's J10. Fujitsu's T580 or Q702 are also pretty decent - I haven't had personal experience with them, but I've never seen high fail-rates with Fujitsu's in the past or currently.Beenthere - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
In the opening this line makes no sense at all:"...The essential gap that's materialized has been between the fast decaying netbook market (its death spurred on by Intel's Atom coupled with the high price of Brazos), ..."
When did Brazos become expensive? They are dirt cheap and sell by the MILLIONS as a result.
Secondly why would ANYONE buy this review PC when they could have a Trinity 17w CPU powered 11" that would embarrass this Intel powered mini and it would cost hundreds less? The only people who would buy these types of over-priced, under performing laptops are people too lazy to educate themselves.
There certainly is a market niche for 11" minis but they will be AMD powered if people do anything with them other than word processing.