Just when we learn the nomenclature of HP’s EliteBook business laptops—rising in features, performance, and price from the 600 through 800 and 1000 series—comes something new: the EliteBook Ultra G1q ($1,699 as tested). Indeed, “new” seems too mild a word: The 14-inch slimline is not just another Word, Excel, and PowerPoint platform but a Microsoft-anointed Copilot+ PC with an AI-ready Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm processor instead of a familiar Intel or AMD chip inside. The Ultra G1q is a classy and capable corporate laptop, but at least until more AI apps appear, it doesn’t bring compelling advantages over HP’s (or Lenovo’s or Dell’s) mainstream x86 systems.Configuration and Design: Corporate and Consumer Cousins Suppose you’re a small-office entrepreneur instead of an enterprise IT manager. In that case, you should know that—except for being a different color and a tenth of an inch thinner—the EliteBook Ultra G1q is the near-identical twin of the HP OmniBook X 14 reviewed shortly before this but costs $500 more. The surcharge buys you business-class support (a three-year parts and labor warranty, though on-site service is extra) and managerial software led by HP’s famed Wolf Security suite.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Our $1,699 test unit—repeatedly discounted to $1,595 on HP.com during this review—combines Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 processor (with Adreno graphics and the Hexagon neural processing unit), 16GB of memory, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 2,240-by-1,400-pixel IPS touch screen. The Windows 11 Pro system has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests against travel hazards such as shock and vibration; you’ll feel almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners, though a bit if you press the keyboard deck.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Clad in attractive “Atmosphere Blue” aluminum, the EliteBook Ultra G1q measures 0.44 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches and slips under the ultraportable line at 2.97 pounds. The all-time champion 14-inch business laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, is 0.59 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches and half a pound lighter.
Thin bezels surround the 16:10 aspect ratio display, which tilts quite far back, though not 180 degrees to flat. A 5-megapixel webcam with IR face recognition for Windows Hello logins (no fingerprint reader here) and a sliding privacy shutter is centered above the screen.The HP has two USB Type-C ports on its left flank—a 40Gbps USB4 in front of a 10Gbps USB-C 3.2. A drop-jaw USB 3.2 Type-A port joins a headphone/microphone jack on the right side. The AC adapter is a USB-C connector. With no HDMI port, you’ll need a DisplayPort adapter to plug in an external monitor, and you won’t find a flash-card slot or LTE or 5G mobile broadband option. Built-in Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 radios handle wireless connectivity.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Using the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q: Previews of Coming Attractions While the webcam can capture 2,880-by-1,620-pixel stills, its video calls are limited to 1440p resolution, giving it a leg up on cheap 720p and even most laptops’ 1080p cameras. Its images are sharp, reasonably well-lit, and quite colorful, with virtually no noise or static. Windows Camera’s Studio Effects are some of the few benefits of AI hardware available to date, doing a noticeably better job of automatic framing or blurring the background (or even making it look like a watercolor painting), and HP bundles a Poly Camera Pro app with even fancier fine-tuning.HP’s IPS touch screen doesn’t look exceptionally bright in everyday use, though it exceeded its rated 300 nits in our instrument testing below. The screen’s colors are rich and well-saturated, its white backgrounds are clean instead of dingy, and its details are clear, with no pixelation visible around the edges of letters. Contrast is high and viewing angles are broad on the display, though the touch glass catches room reflections.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers is reasonably loud, if not all that loud, and finely crisp, if just a bit hollow. You’ll hear just a hint of bass, and it’s easy to make out overlapping tracks. The laptop’s preinstalled MyHP software includes AI noise reduction for conference calls, though it makes no perceptible difference in music playback. The backlit keyboard automatically loses points for having the typical HP layout, with half-height up and down arrow keys stacked between full-size left and right instead of putting those cursor controls in the correct inverted T. Worse, you must pair those arrows with the Fn key in the absence of real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. On the positive side, the keys have a snappy, tappy, albeit shallow typing feel, and the plus-size buttonless touchpad glides smoothly with a comfortable click.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Ultra G1q’s implementation of HP Wolf Security isn’t as deep as seen on other EliteBooks and ZBooks. Still, it provides deep-learning-enhanced malware detection and credential protection that fights phishing attacks. It’s a valuable plus, though I’m not quite sure it’s “$500 valuable.”Testing the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q: Crossing the Line Four Abreast Benchmarking for Windows on Arm is still an inexact science, but we’ve pitted the Ultra G1q against three other Snapdragon systems and one x86 dark horse in the form of the latest Acer Swift Go 14. The HP OmniBook X 14 has identical hardware to the EliteBook, while two 13-inch entries from Microsoft—the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro tablet—flaunt a slightly faster (at least theoretically) Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 processor.
Productivity Tests As we’ve explained in other Snapdragon X Elite reviews, many of our usual performance tests—led by UL’s office productivity rating PCMark 10—are not currently Arm-compatible, so we’re relying primarily on processing scores. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We also run the newer, Arm-optimized versions Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench 6.3, and we use HandBrake 1.8 (instead of our usual x86-only release 1.4) to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Except for trailing in Cinebench 2024, the EliteBook Ultra landed in the middle of the pack. We’re not sure we’d choose any of these systems for intensive, workstation-class video editing or 3D rendering, but they’re all ready for everyday office apps and light multimedia content creation. AI Tests Benchmarks for artificial intelligence applications are barely teething, but UL’s Procyon AI Computer Vision test leverages several AI inference engines executing machine-vision tasks using popular neural networks. It’s best used to compare Arm systems with one another since it runs differently (testing the CPU, GPU, and NPU separately) on x86 machines. Another Geekbench test simulates real-world machine learning tasks to gauge overall AI performance. We run two of its inference back-end subtests, which stress the GPU (via DirectML) and CPU, respectively.
As expected, with AI testing in its infancy, our results were inconclusive. The Microsoft portables’ Snapdragon X1 Elite X1E-80-100 chip has zero AI advantage over the HP twins’ X1E-78-100, while the Swift Go laptop’s AMD Ryzen CPU proved especially competitive in the Geekbench tests. (The Geekbench AI test is not optimized for Snapdragon X Elite.)Graphics Tests We usually run a pair of x86 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, but here, we use two versions apiece of two different Arm-compatible benchmarks from that graphics test suite. Wild Life Unlimited (1440p) and Unlimited Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. 3DMark Steel Nomad’s regular and Lite subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects.
We didn’t see much that’s definitive here except for varying results in the more and less demanding versions of each subtest. We’ve game-tested Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU elsewhere, finding it quite decent for casual play if nowhere near a match for the discrete GPUs of high-end gaming laptops. These business- and productivity-oriented portables aren’t meant for hard-core gaming or workstation graphics tasks but will display what you need to get work done.Battery and Display Tests We test each laptop and tablet’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
Even trailing its sibling by an hour and a quarter, the EliteBook showed remarkable battery life: You’ll have absolutely no worries about getting through a full day of work or school plus an evening’s streaming entertainment. Its display isn’t as dazzlingly bright as the Surface systems’ screens but provides excellent brightness and color for everyday use.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Verdict: A Promising Debut for Snapdragon X in the Office The scarce few benefits of Copilot+ PCs to date, such as clever webcam effects, whet our appetite for future goodies. While we wait, we can’t honor the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q an Editors’ Choice award because it doesn’t stand out from the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, the HP Dragonfly G4, and other business slimlines with more ports and available mobile broadband. However, we’re keeping an eye on this one.
Cons
A leap of faith to abandon x86
No HDMI port or SD/microSD card slot
No 4G or 5G mobile broadband
Nearly identical HP OmniBook X 14 is much cheaper
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The Bottom Line
Are corporations clamoring for Arm-based Copilot+ PCs? We doubt it, but HP’s EliteBook Ultra G1q is a high-power, long-lasting example with industry-leading security tools.
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