Hey everyone, guess what? A friend of mine got his Elitebook 8440p just last week equipped with the Intel Core i5 540M 2.53 GHz dual core processor and not-so-well known Nvidia Quadro NVS 3100M graphics. While he’s still doing some hard disk spring cleaning and organizing data from his old Dell to be moved to their new home, he’s feeling nice enough to let me have a little spin with his new tech toy. So far, the Elitebook 8440p feels a whole lot like the Elitebook 8440w I reviewed when it first came out – including the nice, spill-proof, tactile partial-chiclet keyboard. There’s an odd change to the items above the display though: the webcam has been shifted slightly to the right (but now in a position more centralized than the 8440w’s webcam) and the HP Night Light is slightly more ‘right side’ biased than that of the 8440w.
I’ll be writing up a review on the Elitebook 8440p soon, once I spend more time with this thing; with opinions and user experience input from my friend once he starts using the notebook for real. What I can tell you so far is that gaming performance has been surprisingly underwhelming – compared to the 8440w, I had to tune down Left4Dead 2 to 1280 x 720 and Low settings in order to play at 20 FPS (8440w manages almost double the frame rate with higher settings). I’ll have to do more testing on this, maybe update a few drivers or something. EDIT: Turns out Core i5 is real picky on whether the notebook is plugged in when it comes to choosing either performance or power saving. With the charger plugged into the HP Elitebook 8440p, I managed to play Left4Dead 2 with a frame rate ranging from 24 to 40 FPS – frame rate only drops down to 10 FPS if you’re running off battery power.
HP announced four new high-end business notebooks today. The Elitebook 8440 and 8540, with their respective p-”professional” and w-”workstation” variants, are HP’s latest 14 and 15 inch notebooks respectively. The Elitebook 8440 comes with a 16:9 wide 14 inch matte display that goes up to a spectacular resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels (available as an option on the w- variant), partial-chiclet full-sized keyboard, new Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processor options, two DDR3 RAM slots, single hard disk bay and optical drive bay (optional Blu-ray available). HP Fansite has been trying out the Elitebook 8440w extensively for several weeks now and we have a review online for you to find out more.
The Elitebook 8540, on the other hand, is a 15.6 inch 16:9 widescreen (matte display standard) sporting notebook. Screen resolution options go as high as full HD 1080p (1920 x 1080) for vast on-screen working space. And the notebook has a partial-chiclet full keyboard with a built-in numeric pad on the right side. Like the smaller Elitebook 8440 series, you’ll get to choose from Intel’s latest 2010 Core i5 and Core i7 processors. What makes the Elitebook 8540 different besides its super-sized keyboard are its FOUR (!!!) DDR3 RAM slots so you can boost memory up to 16 GB and it is one of the first few notebooks in the industry to have the latest USB 3.0 ports (Elitebook 8440 apparently has USB 2.0 only).
The p- variants of the two notebooks will have Intel integrated graphics to conserve power while the more powerful w-variants will feature Nvidia workstation class graphics (including the newly announced Nvidia Quadro FX380M and Nvidia Quadro FX780M cards).
Did I mention a solid metal chassis, spill-proof keyboard, HP keyboard Night Light, 3 year warranty,VGA and Display Port out all come standard with HP’s Elitebooks. And the starting prices? Glad you asked… from their mouth-watering specifications, it’s obvious these notebooks are not going cheap but for those who can afford them, you’ll be pleased with both the low-profile business design and sheer performance of the Elitebooks (well, at least the ones with dedicated Nvidia/ATI graphics)
- 14 inch HP Elitebook 8440p starts at $1100
- 14 inch HP Elitebook 8440w starts at $1300
- 15 inch HP Elitebook 8540p starts at $1250
- 15 inch HP Elitebook 8540w starts at $1500
