The HP EliteBook 840 G8 has one huge advantage over most other business laptops, but it comes at a cost

It's no secret that Core i7 Iris Xe offers tremendous performance advantages over the older UHD Graphics 620 or Iris Plus series. If you're running the GPU at full power, however, fan noise will typically be very loud. For example, running games on the Iris Xe-powered ADATA XPG Xenia or Dell XPS 13 9310 would raise fan noise to 40 dB(A) or 37 dB(A), respectively.

The latest 14-inch EliteBook from HP addresses the loud fan noise when running high processing loads by lowering the fan noise ceiling significantly. Our own tests with a microphone 15 cm away from the EliteBook 840 G8 shows fan noise topping out at only 30 dB(A) against a silent background of 24 dB(A) when running games on the High Performance Windows profile. When considering that the decibel scale is logarithmic, the quieter fan in the EliteBook is very noticeable when compared to any other laptop with similar Core i7-1165G7 or i7-1185G7 options.

Dive deeper into the performance of the EliteBook, however, and you'll find that the surprisingly low fan noise ceiling comes at the cost of processor performance. Turbo Boost would last for just a couple of seconds before stabilizing at just 2.1 GHz when running Prime95. Raw multi-thread performance would therefore be slower than a number of other Core i7-1185G7 laptops by as much as 20 percent including the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen2. In other words, EliteBook 840 G8 users would be giving up a bit of processor performance for the much quieter fan noise.

We would love to see HP implement a fan noise ceiling toggle. Users would then be able to manually raise the fan noise ceiling for faster performance if desired.