Up on the review block today I’ve got the Hp EliteBook 8440W Notebook that’s actually called a Mobile Workstation. If you couldn’t guess by that name it’s more of a business centric laptop, but it’s powerful with a Corei7 Quad core CPU in it, and the Nvidia Quadro graphics chip as well. There are security features for business and other features like a smart card reader and biometric fingerprint reader along with a built-in business cad scanner and HPO video chat software to make meetings easier. It’s running Windows 7 Pro 64bit, and it’s the most powerful laptop I’ve had the chance to test to date. So read on to learn more..

No video for you today.. As a side note, most of these pictures were taken with the Canon PowerShot SX210 IS that I just reviewed, at least those all in this section.

So we’ll start with the box, it’s like the other HP boxes, not much special. Inside we don’t find much, this was a review unit, the retail unit of course will come with documentation etc. I did get the battery and charger.

The notebook is very nicely designed, it’s a bit heavy but it is a workstation or a full blown laptop that fairly powerful. The top is a nice looking aluminum with the HP logo in the center.

On the bottom you’ll find a dock attachment, along with several access doors and the battery compartment.

So let’s start with the left side. You’ll find a DVD drive, smart card reader, eSATA port, Ethernet and a modem actually.

Moving to the back you’ll see the battery compartment again, and there’s a SIM card slot hiding in there. On the back you’ll also find display port and VGA connections, power and the lock off to the far left.

Let’s hop to the left side where you’ll find vents, 3 USB ports, firewire, audio and an expresscard slot.

On the front you’ll find the lock for the lid and the SD card reader, but also there’s a slit right above the card reader and lock that is actually used for scanning business cards. We’ll see more about that later though…

Here’s the EliteBook open:

Above the monitor is the camera and next to that is actually a light to help you see things in the dark. The light is a feature I’ve never seen before but one I think should be on all netbooks and laptops for sure.

The monitor is nice and bright when it’s set to high, but it will automatically dim to help save the battery on the default settings. The display is clear and it looks great, colors are fine with no issue there.

Watching movies on the EliteBook is fine, it seems more than able to keep up on the DVD drive or just regular video files. There is no Blu-Ray in it, but i think you can upgrade to get one.

The keyboard is spill resistant and it has a built-in drain. Typing on it is very nice, it’s comfortable and I don’t seem to hit the touchpad while typing like i do on many laptops.

Above the keyboard you’ll find the power button and several touch style buttons for audio and quick launch.

Here it is powered on:

Along the bottom front edge are also some LEDs:

Below the keyboard is the touchpad which has buttons unlike those I’ve seen before, but they work well and they’re easy to use. Off to the right is the biometric fingerprint reader. I found using the touchpad is fine, it might look small, but if you’ve ever used a netbook then you’ll be more than accustomed to the small size, and for me I had no issues.

The EliteBook is running Windows 7 Professional 64bit and powering it on took about 45 seconds from the time you touch the button until you get a usable desktop. There’s not much at all on the desktop of the unit I received for review, just the recycle bin.

We already know it’s running Win7 Pro, but here’s the properties page and the Experience Index. It only got a 4.9, but that’s because of Aero, the CPU got a 6.9, btu it’s a Corei7 so I kind of expected it.

Here’s the device manager expanded for you:

While we’re looking at the device manager, here’s something related, CPU-Z:

So we’ve got a Corei7 CPU along with an Nvida Quadro FX 380m Graphics chip. There’s 4gigs of ram but for some reason CPU-Z couldn’t read it.

There is some stuff installed, but you can run the HP Software Setup to install more, and check for updates etc:

There’s also an HP Power Assistant to help you get the most out of your battery life.

As far as battery life, I ran battery Eater Pro to test the life of the battery. Under full load I got 1 hour and 11 minutes, but you have to remember this is under full load 100% of the time, so it’s basically the minimum run time. I recharged the battery and then I browsed the internet via wireless, I got 3 hours and 55 minutes run time. That’s not great, but it’s not bad either for such a powerful laptop.

The EliteBook does a get a little warm, but not overly so which I was surprised, I expected it to be hotter with that Corei7 in there. The top barely gets warm at all, and the bottom is manageable.

There are security features that are built-in, this is a business class laptop after all. You can enable the fingerprint reader and even the smart card reader for security.

So earlier I mentioned the business card scanner, it’s actually the camera that scans the cards. You stick the card into the little slot on the front and partially close the lid, it then takes a picture of the cad and retrieves the information.

It does a decent job of scanning the cards actually, just a few little mistakes, but I’d say it recognized about 95% of the writing on the card.

The webcam isn’t bad, it’s a bit washed out, but it’s clear and it works well really. Included on the laptop is HP SkyRoom that is basically a video chat service:

Specifications:

HP EliteBook 8440w Mobile Workstation Notebook

Lightweight. Heavy Hitter. HP’s thinnest and lightest mobile workstation for engineers, developers, graphic designers and power users who need workstation graphics with ISV certifications and a 14.0-inch diagonal display.

Processor: Intel Core i7-620M Processor (2.66 GHz, 4 MB L3 cache)
Operating system: Windows 7 Professional 64
Ram: 4gb ddr3
Display: 14.0″ diagonal LED-backlit HD+ anti-glare
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M graphics with 512 MB gDDR3
Internal drives: SATA II (7200 rpm) 320 GB
Optical drive: DVD-ROM; DVD+/-RW SuperMulti DL LightScribe; Blu-ray R/RE DVD+/-RW SuperMulti DL

Ports:
3 USB 2.0
1 eSATA/USB 2.0 Combo
1 external VGA monitor
1 DisplayPort
1 1394a
1 stereo microphone in
1 stereo headphone/line-out
1 AC power
1 RJ-11
1 RJ-45
1 docking connector
1 secondary battery connector

Slots
-1 Express Card/54
-1 Smart Card Reader
-1 Secure Digital

Audio:
High definition audio; Integrated stereo speakers; Integrated dual-microphone array; Touch-sensitive controls for volume up, volume down, and mute; Stereo headphone/line out; Stereo microphone/line in

Integrated camera: Optional 2 MP webcam
Keyboard: spill-resistant keyboard and drain
Input devices: Touchpad with scroll zone, two pick buttons

Starting at: $ 1,425.00
as reviewed: $1,649.00

In this comparison I’ve got both netbook and laptops.
Acer Aspire 5738
Gateway LT 2016U
MSI Wind U230
HP ProBook 5310M
HP MINI 5102

Let’s start with ATTO, the disk drive in the EliteBook is a Seagate 320gb 7200Rpm drive.

The the Acer Apsire 5378 also comes with a Hitachi, the HP comes with a Toshiba and the Gateway comes with a Western Digital and the MSI Wind12 comes with a Seagate. The Wind12 and Aspire 5378 both have 320gb drives while all three others are 160gb drives.

You’ll notice the hard drive bounces around a lot, well that because there’s a lot of stuff running in the background. A lot of it is HP related things that you could turn off as you might not need them all of the time.

Next is the Physical Disks test and the File Systems Tests from SiSoft Sandra. For all the Sandra tests I used the new SiSoft Sandra 2010 portable Edition.

Physical Disks Test:
Drive Index :
Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Random Access Time :
Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.
As the test measures raw performance it is independent on the file system the disk uses and any volumes mounted off the disk.
Drive Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the highest read or write speed across the whole disk. Thus the higher the better.
Access Time: is the average time to read a random sector on the disk, analogous to latency response time. Thus the lower the better.

So it look to be a fast drive in the EliteBook, which is of course what we want.

Next up is the File Systems Test:
File Systems Test:
Drive Index :
Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Random Access Time :
Results Interpretation : Lower index values are better.
This is not the raw disk performance that other benchmarks test – but the speed of the volume itself that depends on many more factors like file system, operating system cache, position on disk, etc. Thus this is the performance you get at the file system level.
Drive Index: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. The Drive Index is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC. A larger number means better performance. The weighting of the results is not equal it represents the distribution of different files sizes as used on these devices (obtained through field research).

Here again the EliteBook comes out on top…

Next up is CrystalMark which tests the entire systems:

Nice results from the EliteBook in this test. The ProBook is a full sized laptop and so is the Acer Aspire 5738, and it just blows them away..

Next is Cinebench 10. It tests two things, the CPU and the Graphics, we’re just focusing on the Graphics test:

The second test measures graphics card performance and is run inside the 3D editor window. The project file used can test all graphics cards that support the OpenGL standard. In this scene, only the camera was animated. This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed.

Scores:
HP EliteBook 8440w: 3840
Gateway:272
MSI Wind12 U230: 1414
Acer Aspire 5378: 3818
HP ProBook: 1033
HP Mini Executive 5102: 222

Here’s the screenshots:

Next is SiSoft Sandra CPU Multi-Media Benchmark.

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Benchmark the (W)MMX(2), SSE(2/3/4), AVX processor units.
Results Interpretation
Multi-Media Integer (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better integer performance.
Multi-Media Single/Double Float (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better floating-point performance.

As expected the EliteBook performs very well here.

Next up we’ve got SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic Test:

Results Interpretation : Higher index values are better.
Benchmarks the ALU and FPU processor units
Results Interpretation
Dhrystone (MIPS) – higher results are better, i.e. better integer performance.
Whetstone (MFLOPS) – higher results are better, i.e. better floating-point performance.

That Corei7 works very well…

Next is the Cache and Memory Test:

Benchmark the processors’ caches and memory access (transfer speed).
Results Interpretation
Cache/Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth.
Speed Factor (MB/s) – lower results are better, i.e. less difference between processor cache speed and memory speed.

Again the EliteBook leads the pack..

Next is the Memory Bandwidth test:
Benchmark the memory bandwidth of your computer
Results Interpretation
Integer Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth.
Float Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster memory bandwidth.

The memory in the EliteBook seems to be some good stuff..

next is the Memory Latency Test:

Benchmark the latency (response time) of processors’ caches and memory
The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks (i.e. how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) as it is dependent on the processor clock speed.
The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed.
Results Interpretation:
Latency: Lower is better
Speed Factor: Lower is better

Lower scores are better, and the EliteBook falls about the middle here.

Finally we have the x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 from TechArp

Simply put, it is a reproducible measure of fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It’s nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other.

Results for HP EliteBook 8440w:
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 47.48 fps, 3900.68 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 48.60 fps, 3900.68 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 47.99 fps, 3900.68 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 47.70 fps, 3900.68 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 13.52 fps, 3971.57 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 13.62 fps, 3972.05 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 13.37 fps, 3971.66 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 13.54 fps, 3970.56 kb/s

results for the Gateway LT:
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 7.00 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.97 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.99 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.97 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.58 fps, 3971.00 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.58 fps, 3971.39 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.59 fps, 3971.57 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.58 fps, 3971.93 kb/s

Results for the MSI Wind12 U230:
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 16.09 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 15.45 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 16.32 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 16.26 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 3.69 fps, 3971.95 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 3.87 fps, 3971.12 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 3.85 fps, 3971.38 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 3.86 fps, 3970.44 kb/s

Results for the Acer Aspire 5738
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 29.49 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 25.99 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 29.76 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 29.25 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.62 fps, 3971.05 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.97 fps, 3970.71 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 7.27 fps, 3971.37 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 7.31 fps, 3971.33 kb/s

Results for the Hp ProBook 5310m:
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 31.59 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 31.54 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 31.46 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 30.98 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 7.77 fps, 3971.94 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 7.80 fps, 3971.84 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 7.80 fps, 3970.77 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 7.79 fps, 3971.91 kb/s

Results for HP Mini Executive 5102:
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 6.84 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.89 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.90 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 6.93 fps, 3899.26 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.55 fps, 3970.67 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.55 fps, 3971.74 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.55 fps, 3970.52 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 1.56 fps, 3970.84 kb/s

I also ran it on my Corei5 750 computer:
————————–
encoded 1442 frames, 63.64 fps, 3901.21 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 64.67 fps, 3900.68 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 64.07 fps, 3901.21 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 63.98 fps, 3900.68 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 19.67 fps, 3971.81 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 19.76 fps, 3971.25 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 19.61 fps, 3972.15 kb/s
encoded 1442 frames, 19.53 fps, 3970.28 kb/s

In this test the EliteBook actualy comes close to my Corei5 Desktop, it’s not bad though, very good performance.

Conclusion:

There’s no doubt the HP EliteBook 8440w is a powerhouse of a laptop, it’s got a many great features for business, but I think even regular users will appreciate them as well.

The 8440W looks nice, it’s heavy, but not very really, I expected it to be heavier honestly considering it’s a high end laptop. The battery life isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either, but it’s better than I expected for such a powerful laptop.

One small issue I have is all of the stuff running in the background, most of it is HP related things that don’t need to be running unless you use the app, but I guess by default they’re running to make life easier for users who may not know better. Those of use who are more tech savvy will be able to turn things off and set it how we want it, and that’s strongly advised to do so.

Overall the HP EliteBook 8440w is a great product, you might think it’s expensive but for what’s in it I think it’s priced about right.

Pros:
+Fast and powerful
+Looks nice and well made
+Runs fairly cool
+Decent security features included
+Lots of expansion ports

Cons:
-Battery life not the greatest
-Lots of stuff running in the background slows things down a little
-Webcam is a bit washed out

Grades:
Overall
Design
Performance

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