The HP Elite Dragonfly is a corporate laptop made to please your manager—and isn’t that the best way to get ahead in the working world? With a fingerprint-resistant finish, a beautiful cerulean magnesium body, and shoulder-friendly weight, the Elite Dragonfly is sure to earn you permission to leave 15 minutes early on Friday (thanks, boss!).
Just remember, the Elite Dragonfly is designed for the boardroom, not the racetrack, so don’t expect blazing speed. What you will get is a solid configuration with some premium options; good performance, amazing battery life; and let’s not forget the truly classy design. Hmmm, maybe this is laptop is too good for your boss?
This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.
Incredibly light weight, insane battery life
The Elite Dragonfly’s main claim to fame is its weight, which approaches 2.2 pounds when equipped with the base 38-watt-hour battery. The trade-off is that paltry battery capacity. HP also offers a 55-watt-hour battery for additional cost. Personally, we’d opt for the larger battery (supplied in our review unit), which increases the weight by just 3 ounces to 2.5 pounds.
Because your boss is likely to be butter-fingered, the Elite Dragonfly also has a better chance of hitting the floor—and maybe surviving—as HP said it passes nine MIL-STD drop tests in drop, shock, and vibration.
Gordon Mah UngHP’s Elite Dragonfly is a lightweight convertible laptop (shown with optional $79 HP Active Tilt pen).
What’s inside still matters, though, and like most corporate premium laptops, the Elite Dragonfly features the top-end, 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8665U. You can view the full details of the Core i7-8665U on Intel’s ARK database, but in performance you get about 200MHz higher clocks in Turbo Boost and 100MHz higher base clocks on paper. Most important is actually the support for Intel’s vPro feature, which enables easier management of the laptop in a fleet environment, where 200 or 2,000 have to be accounted for.
The Core i7-8665U also supports Intel’s TSX-NI and Stable Platform features. Even though the latter promises better performance for multi-threaded apps, it’s supported on very few CPUs despite being introduced four generations ago with the Haswell line.
Gordon Mah UngThe 8th gen Core i7-8665U can technically hit higher clocks than the more common Core i7-8565U, but more importantly has vPro support switched on.
HP Elite Dragonfly specs and features
The Elite Dragonfly embraces its executive-laptop status, delivering a feature list that’s first-class all the way. Here are the details:
CPU: 8th-gen quad-core Intel Core i7-8665U with vPro support
GPU: Integrated Intel UHD620
RAM: 16GB LPDDR3/2133 in dual-channel mode
Display: HP offers three screen options for the Dragonfly: A 4K UHD OLED screen that hits 500 nits; a blazing 850-nit Sure View Gen 3 FHD…
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