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The HP Elite Dragonfly is a lightweight business convertible, which is offered in addition to the familiar EliteBook series. The focus of the business convertible is definitely the mobility with SKUs tipping the scale at under 1 kg (~2.2 pounds). Our test sample, however, is equipped with the larger 4-cell battery, so the weight is lifted to a little more than 1.1 kg (~2.4 pounds). The combination of the larger battery and the low-power display on our test unit should be the best option for long battery runtimes.
HP says there are no limitations in terms of business features, despite the low weight, and this affects the choice of processors. Intel’s Ice Lake CPUs do not support vPro, so the manufacturer still uses familiar Whiskey Lake models. In combination with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD storage, customers get sufficient performance as well as mobile Internet thanks to the integrated LTE module.
You can choose between three different touchscreens, but all of them have a glossy surface. The default panel is 1080p with 400 nits brightness, which is also used by our test model. Then there is a very bright FHD touchscreen (1000 nits) with SureView privacy filter as well as a 4K screen with 550 nits. We cannot say much about the picture quality of the options at this point, but they should consume more power.
The subjective picture impression of our panel (AUO5E2D) is very good and there is not much grain, even on bright areas. We can confirm the advertised luminance of 400 nits at two spots with an average results of around 390 nits. Thanks to the low black value (0.22), you also get an excellent contrast ratio of more than 1800:1. There is no PWM for the brightness control and you can only notice screen bleeding at the maximum luminance in combination with a completely black image, but this should not be noticeable during your day-to-day use. The response times, however, are pretty slow, and there is visible ghosting.
Processor – HP uses Whiskey Lake with vPro
HP offers different ULV processors for the Elite Dragonfly, including CPUs with support for Intel’s vPro technology. Our test model is powered by the Whiskey Lake Core i5-8265U with four cores and sufficient performance for daily office tasks. HP offers models with newer Comet Lake CPUs, but they should not be noticeably faster because the TDP configuration of the Elite Dragonfly is very conservative, which in return has a positive effect on the system noise (but more on that later).
The Turbo Boost is very limited and the performance is noticeably reduced after a little while. The four cores run at 2.9-3.0 GHz (26W) for about 15 seconds, but the clock drops to 2.4 GHz (17.5W), 2.3 GHz (16W), and 2.2 GHz (14.5W) during one single Cinebench Multi run. During the second run, the value levels off at 4x 2.0 GHz (12.5W), so we are already under the typical 15W mark for Intel’s ULV processors. The performance is at least stable on battery power.
This means the Elite Dragonfly cannot convince within the comparison group and is sitting in last place, so it is hardly the right choice for CPU intense workloads. There are no Ice lake CPU options (with much faster iGPUs) due to the missing vPro support.
