HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8

A premium laptop with a premium price, but it’s worth paying if users will appreciate the quality

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PRICE Range starts at £899 (£1,079 inc VAT) from hp.com

As we mention in our review of the HP ProBook, the EliteBook is HP’s premium range of laptops. That means you can buy in the confidence of receiving the best components, a three-year business warranty, a premium all-metal chassis and a few additional luxuries along the way.

The drawback of all these extras is cost: the range starts at £899, which is almost £200 more than the Dynabook Tecra A40 despite offering exactly the same core components. That is, an 11th gen Core i5-1135G7 processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. There’s little to choose between them in terms of speed, with the EliteBook quicker in some benchmarks but slower in others.

Our test machine also had the benefit of 16GB of RAM, twice that of the Dynabook, but it’s easy to access this laptop’s innards and slip in an extra SODIMM if you buy an 8GB version. You can also replace the SSD, which is surprisingly slow compared to its rivals. This only showed itself when we were copying across large amounts of data from an external SSD, though, and even then it’s a few seconds of extra waiting so hardly life-changing.