HP EliteBook 830 G7 impresses in almost every aspect except one

HP EliteBook laptops are consistently some of the best business laptops you can find when it comes to serviceability, brightness, and portability. In contrast to competitors who like to dabble in proximity sensors or carbon fiber designs, EliteBook systems focus more on the core basics that users actually want like upgradeable RAM and WLAN and an outdoor viewable display. One particular aspect, however, continues to be well below average.

We recently tested the EliteBook 830 G7 equipped with the latest 10th gen Core i7-10810U CPU and we found multi-thread performance to be slower than every Core i7-10710U laptop in our database. The difference isn't marginal either as we're talking about a deficit of around 40 percent. Even the Dell Latitude 9510 2-in-1, which comes with the exact same Core i7-10810U CPU as our HP, is able to outperform the EliteBook by over 55 percent in CineBench benchmarks.

So, what's going on here?

The key difference lies in the poorer Turbo Boost sustainability of the CPU in the EliteBook 830 G7 when compared to most other subnotebooks running on Core U-series CPUs. When running Prime95 on the HP, for example, its CPU would boost to 3.5 GHz for only a few seconds before falling to 1.9 GHz whereas the Latitude 9510 2-in-1 would stabilize at 3.2 GHz for well over a minute when under the same testing conditions. In other words, the Dell system is able to maintain higher clock rates for longer for faster performance during "bursty" workloads.

Running CineBench R15 xT in a loop as shown below illustrates the poor Turbo Boost of the HP system. Whereas every other hexa-core Core i7 Comet Lake-U laptop in our database is able to return excellent scores during the start of the loop test, the EliteBook 830 G7 is already the lowest right from the beginning.

The HP is by no means a slow system and it still excels in most other areas like its optional 1000-nit display, but it probably shouldn't be your first option if maximizing CPU performance is of utmost importance.