HP EliteBook 8460p: Everything But The Screen

Battery, Noise, and Heat

One of the nicer things about business-class notebooks is that, frankly, they're too expensive and too important for the manufacturers to be cheap about their assembly, battery optimizations, and cooling. As a result, they often sport much better battery life than their consumer-oriented kin, and even without the benefit of a hybrid graphics solution the EliteBook 8460p still posts impressive numbers.

While relative battery life while surfing the internet isn't great, and HP's quoted eight hours of running time sounds fairly generous, the 8460p still manages to pull five hours of useful running time surfing the internet and an impressive four hours during our H.264 test. Even without Optimus, the EliteBook 8460p manages to be both moderately powerful and frugal with its power consumption. The K53E provides slightly better battery life with a slightly smaller battery (and a larger LCD as well), but in terms of overall styling and quality there's no question about which is the better laptop. Of course, it's also about $250 more expensive, but that's the price of quality these days.

Thermals

The 8460p does run a hair toasty on the processor. While the underpowered 6470M doesn't have too much trouble maintaining a reasonable temperature, core temperatures on the Core i5-2520M are on the warm side. Thankfully, you'll see that these hot internal temperatures don't translate to the rest of the notebook.

Peak temperatures of the 8460p's exterior are excellent. Neither palm rest gets particularly warm and the aluminum shell seems to do a fine job of dissipating the system's heat. What's more impressive is the fact that it just doesn't get that hot on your lap either. There's a single hot spot near the exhaust, but even that is reasonable. In fact, the usual problem spot in the center of the notebook remains fairly cool.

Of course, this does come at a cost. Under heavy load the fan definitely spins up audibly, though the notebook is as silent as it should be while idling. This isn't the worst fan noise we've heard but it's definitely loud enough to make its presence known.