HP ProBook 450 G9 reviewed: 15.6-inch laptop features long battery life thanks to efficient Core i7-1255U

The 9th generation of HP ProBook 450 has not brought many changes, going by its exterior. The laptop still features a robust case in plain silver colorway, made out of aluminum and plastic. The design gives you input devices with genetics of HP's higher-end laptops, which is praiseworthy.

Because of the power-efficient Intel Core i7-1255U, the ProBook lasts 10 hours while surfing the Web. Competing AMD-based systems with similar battery capacities do not fare better. On the performance front though, the ProBook 455 G7, while being two generations behind on paper, is faster than the 450 G9 in multi-core applications. HP tends to limit the processors of its ProBooks to 15 watts, and at a power consumption this low, even AMD Ryzen 4000 processors are faster than Alder Lake-U, not to mention Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 6000 chips. As if the 15 W limitation wasn't severe enough, the ProBook's performance gets halved when running on battery power.

In other words, HP fails to extract the potential of Intel's latest energy-efficient U series, for which the long-term TDP would have to be set to about 28 watts (see review of the Spectre x360 13.5). We can increase the TDP manually and improve the performance remarkably, but the cooling system won't like it, so we do not recommend doing so. Nevertheless, the power-efficient Intel processor stays fairly cold and noise emissions are low as well, so much so that one'd be forgiven for thinking this is a passively cooled laptop.

The 15.6-inch 16:9 Full HD display sadly was very dim (218 nits). Luckily, SKUs with a different display option promising 400 nits and low power consumption exist. In terms of ports, the ProBook does without Thunderbolt and SD card reader, but at least it has the RJ-45 jack. The former is characteristic of entry-level devices, even though the ProBook includes many mid-range features.

Our test configuration featuring an Intel Core i7-1255U, 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and the 250 nits FHD display (non-touch) is available for US$1,129 in the States or £1,055 in the UK, and in Australia, you can get it for AU$1,885. The AMD-based model comes in at roughly the same price, at least in the States.

More details and a wide range of benchmarks await your attention in our full review of the HP ProBook 450 G9.