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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
46 Comments
View All Comments
Dustin Sklavos - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
Brazos netbooks go for a minimum of $400-$450. Brazos should be hitting the same market Atom did, but it's not, and it's encroaching on space occupied by systems with faster Intel chips.Penti - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
I agree that they can't compete against the price point of Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge based Intel chips. Remember those are sub 100 USD chips already. Or barely above 100 USD for low-end Ivy.Hondo, Jaguar core based Kabini or Samara will probably find it's way into some tablets and hybrid tablets, as it's not hard to compete against the price point of those devices though.
AMD's problem is largely that there just isn't any good AMD builds from the OEM's too. For the business segment like this product is geared to there just isn't anything to compete with Intel's full blown vPro/iAMT management solution.
On AMD there isn't even anything to compete with the Core i5 based Acer Aspire V5-171-6422 for 520 USD when it comes to 11.6" notebook. The 17W Trinity is also pretty weak overall. For the same money as they have appeared to be in the market you get Core i5, Ivy based stuff. Even if an AMD solution could hit the 450 mark Core i3's or Pentium/Celeron Intel stuff will be down to about 400.
You end up having something like Samsung NP535U3C compete against a Intel based NP530U3C and the price point between them aren't just gonna matter.
The 300 USD netbook market will just not exist. Except for 300 USD specially rebated notebooks.
AMD needs to get new chips out to compete in this space, as is they also is beaten by last gen Intel chips in price/performance. They obviously need to design a chip that performs well in notebooks and not designed for 4P servers with almost 20MB cache per chip. You can add performance enhancing stuff with L3 cache or whatever but the base performance with minimal amount of cache needs to be good first, it's a general computing processor after all.
batguiide - Sunday, December 9, 2012 - link
Sharea website with you ,
( socanpower.ca)
Believe you will love it.
laptop battery,CPU fan,AC power adapters.DC power adapters and laptop keyboard.
I bought two. Cheap, good quality, you can
go and ship with there.
john12345p - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link
You also reviewed HP folio 9470m. Among these two HP 2170p and HP Folio 9470m, which one is ultimately the better one? These are the only two that the IT at work is offering, so need to choose one among the two. Which among these two is better? Which one is ultimately more preferable? Which one ultimately sucks less? :-)HP - Friday, June 27, 2014 - link
I'm not a fan of the new Elitebook series. The previous Elitebook series was better especially in terms of durability and looks -- 6930p, 2540p for reference. The 21/25xx appear over-cooked. The readily accessible internals through the base turns me off slightly. Why should anyone need to get to the internals that quickly? There's not much more to do there once you've done the memory or disk upgrade, which will probably only be one or two times in the usage lifespan of the machine.The machine does indeed feel bulky, rather wide I should say because of the full blown, wide keyboard. Glad I wasn't the only one having misgivings about the new Elitebook series.
nicemachines - Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - link
I bought one for like $140 used on ebay. Come to find out that the upper memory slot doesn't work in mine. I noticed in your pictures that you don't have a memory stick in your upper slot, WTF?