HP EliteBook 1050 G1 review – business notebook in chic outfit

HP has their EliteBook series for one reason. To satisfy the needs of their most pretentious clients. Premium quality, premium security, premium performance – premium price. Everything here literally screams premium. From the first glance – to the first touch. Some would say that it looks kind of like a MacBook. Well, it certainly does. However, this device has some character. It has a different spirit. While it can certainly be viewed as a challenger to the almighty 15-inch Apples, it is in a league of its own.

One of the most prominent security features are the fingerprint reader and the IR face recognition. In addition to that, you have the full choice of HP accessories and vPro processors. If you are more than a businessman or you are some sort of a content creator, there is the option for a discrete GPU in the form of GTX 1050.

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/hp-elitebook-1050-g1/

Contents


Specs Sheet

HP EliteBook 1050 G1 Tabelle der technischen Daten

Acer
Not available
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15.6”, Full HD (1920 x 1080), IPS
HDD/SSD
256GB SSD PCIe NVMe
M.2 Slot
2x 2280 NVMe M.2 slot Siehe Foto
RAM
8GB DDR4, 2666 MHz
Abmessungen
360 x 254 x 18.9 mm (14.17" x 10.00" x 0.74")
Gewicht
2.06 kg (4.5 lbs)
Gehäuse Material
Aluminum
Ports und Konnektivität
  • 2x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), Thunderbolt 3, DisplayPort, HDMI
  • 1x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps), Sleep and Charge
  • 1x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
  • HDMI
  • Kartenleser SD, SDHC, SDXC
  • Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2x2)
  • Bluetooth 5.0
  • Audio-Buchse
  • HP Module with NXP NFC Controller NPC300 I2C NCI
Merkmale
  • Web-Kamera 720p HD
  • Mikrofon dual array microphone
  • Lautsprecher Bang & Olufsen
  • Sicherheitsschlitz
  • Ambient light sensor
  • Glass ClickPad with chemically etched surface

What’s in the box?

HP has included a wide variety of paperwork with the EliteBook 1050 G1. One of the brochures actually shows every possible official accessory that you can get with your EliteBook device – nice marketing there. In addition to that, you get the laptop itself, as well as an ample 150W power brick.


Design and construction

HP EliteBook 1050 G1 represents the typical simple premium laptop. It has an all aluminum body, comprised of brushed and polished material. In addition to that, it employs chamfered edges and aggressive lines, in contrast to the rounder MacBook Pros. In addition to that, we find it a lot sleeker than Dell Latitude 5591. Moreover, the laptop has a 19mm thin profile and weighs 2.06 kg (4.5 lbs), which is neither too much, nor too little for a 15-incher.

HP has gifted the EliteBook 1050 G1 with narrow side bezels. However, its chin and forehead are pretty prominent. While we can’t really explain the big masculine chin, there is a specific reason for the large forehead – it is because of the face recognition technology. In fact, this is one of the best working Face Recognitions out there. It works in a completely dark environment and low screen brightness. Not only it works flawlessly, but it does so incredibly fast. Seriously, guys, this technology is no joke.

On the base of the notebook, we find a large grill, a not so large (NumPad-less) keyboard, a touchpad, and a fingerprint reader. We are happy to see that beneath the speaker grill there are two speakers, adding to the two on the bottom of the notebook. While they are far from the actual size of the grill, they sound quite nice.

Despite the lack of Numeric keys, the keyboard is very tactile. However, the key travel is a little short to our likings, but nothing like a Butterfly key of a MacBook. Moreover, there is a backlight illuminating the keyboard. However, here is where Latitude 15 5591 excels.

Next, we have the touchpad and the fingerprint reader. We were pretty happy with the touchpad experience – fast, accurate, glass cover – 10 points for Gryffindor. Contrary to that, there is a slow, not always accurate fingerprint reader. Honestly, we would easily give it up for a little cash back, since the Face Recognition is basically flawless.

WidthLengthHeightWeight
HP EliteBook 1050 G1360 mm (14.17″)254 mm (10.00″)18.9 mm (0.74″)2.06 kg (4.5 lbs)
Dell Latitude 15 5591376 mm (14.80″)251 mm (9.88″)24.3 mm (0.96″) (+29%)1.97 kg (4.3 lbs) (-4%)
Apple MacBook Pro 15 (2018)349 mm (13.74″)240 mm (9.45″)15.5 mm (0.61″) (-18%)1.83 kg (4 lbs) (-11%)

Ports

On the left side of the device are neatly located two USB Type-A 3.0 ports, one of which has charging support. On the other side are the charging plug, as well as two Thunderbolt connectors, and an HDMI port. Further along the rim are located a Combo Audio jack and an SD card reader. We should note that there are exhaust drills on either side of the device.


Disassembly, upgrade options, and maintenance

As a premium device which is also practical, HP EliteBook 1050 G1 offers good upgradability options. In order to do so, though, you have to get inside it first. This can be done by unscrewing the 9 Torx-headed screws from the bottom plate. Here, HP was kind enough to implement a design of the bottom plate, in which the screws remain attached to it even when they are unscrewed from the body. This way you won’t lose any of them. An important note here is that you need to unpry the bottom plate starting from the hinges. Otherwise, it can be pretty difficult for you to even lift the plate up.

This reveals an interesting picture – the processor is cooled by two heatpipes, leading to opposing sides of the chassis. This should result in a huge potency of the cooling system, boosting the frequencies higher than the competition.

Well, obviously everything about this laptop’s internals comes in two – there are two RAM DIMMs which support up to 64GB of memory. Not only that, but the EliteBook is equipped with two M.2 NVMe enabled slots.

Lastly, we got the 64Wh battery, which in fact is the smaller of the two available options. Given the fact our unit doesn’t have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 onboard, this should provide a reasonable battery life.


Display quality

HP EliteBook 1050 G1 has an IPS panel, model number AUO AUO24ED. Its diagonal is 15.6″ (39.62 cm), and the resolution 1920 х 1080 pixels. The screen ratio is 16:9, and we are looking at a pixel density of – 142 ppi, and a pitch of 0.18 х 0.18 mm. The screen turns into Retina when viewed at distance equal to or greater than 60cm (24″) (from this distance one’s eye stops differentiating the separate pixels, and it is normal for looking at a laptop).

It has excellent viewing angles. We offer images at 45° to evaluate image quality.

The measured maximum brightness of 396 nits in the middle of the screen and 382 nits as an average for the whole area, with a maximum deviation of 8%. The Correlated Color Temperature on a white screen is 7260K – colder than the optimal for the sRGB standard of 6500K. The average color temperature through the grey scale before profiling is 7230K.
In the illustration below you can see how the display performs from a uniformity perspective. In other words, the leakage of light from the light source.

Values of dE2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color sensitive work. The contrast ratio is fine – 1340:1 (1260:1 after profiling)

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

The yellow dotted line shows HP EliteBook 1050 G1’s color gamut coverage.

Its display covers 91% of the sRGB/ITU-R BT.709 (web/HDTV standard) in CIE1976.

Our “Design and Gaming” profile delivers optimal color temperature (6500K) at 140 cd/m2 luminance and sRGB gamma mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Design and Gaming” profile.

Below you can compare the scores of EliteBook 1050 G1 with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right).

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle, and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time (Gaming capabilities)

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and vice versa.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 32 ms.


PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

HP EliteBook 1050 G1’s display is flicker-free throughout the entire brightness spectrum. Thus, making the screen safe in this aspect.

Blue light emissions

Installing our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

Conclusion

HP EliteBook 1050 G1’s screen has a panel with a Full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles, and good contrast ratio. In addition to that, the screen is very bright and covers the sRGB color spectrum almost fully (at 91%). Moreover, it doesn’t use PWM for brightness adjustment. On the downside, the reaction time of the panel is pretty slow, although this is a parameter concerning mainly gamers.

Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for HP EliteBook 1050 G1 configurations with 15.6″ FHD IPS AUO AUO24ED.

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].

Read more about the profiles HERE.

Mit dem Kauf von LaptopMedia-Produkten erhalten Sie nicht nur effiziente und gesundheitsschonende Profile, sondern Sie unterstützen auch die Entwicklung unserer Labore, in denen wir Geräte testen, um möglichst objektive Testberichte zu erstellen.

Büroarbeit

Office Work sollte vor allem von Benutzern verwendet werden, die die meiste Zeit mit dem Betrachten von Textstücken, Tabellen oder einfach nur mit dem Surfen verbringen. Dieses Profil zielt darauf ab, durch Beibehaltung einer flachen Gammakurve (2,20), einer nativen Farbtemperatur und wahrnehmungsgerechten Farben eine bessere Deutlichkeit und Klarheit zu liefern.

Design und Spiele

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Gesundheitsschutz

Health-Guard eliminiert die schädliche Pulsweitenmodulation (PWM) und reduziert das negative blaue Licht, das unsere Augen und unseren Körper beeinflusst. Da er für jedes Panel maßgeschneidert ist, schafft er es, die Farben wahrnehmungsgetreu zu halten. Health-Guard simuliert Papier, so dass der Druck auf die Augen stark reduziert wird.

Erhalten Sie alle 3 Profile mit 33% Rabatt

Sound

HP EliteBook 1050 G1 is one of the loud notebooks when it comes to speaker quality. In addition to that, the low, mid, and high tones are clear.


Drivers

By default, the EliteBook 1050 G1 comes with a preinstalled version of Windows 10 Pro. If you ever need to reinstall it, though, you can find all of the drivers you need here: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-elitebook-1050-g1-notebook-pc/22060470

Storage performance

Our HP EliteBook 1050 G1 came with 256GB NVMe drive from Toshiba. The model number is KXG50ZNV256G, however, it is highly possible that you get a different SSD in your country. Moving to the test results we saw something familiar for a Toshiba SSD drive. The Read score was relatively good at 2.69 GB/s, while the Write speeds were mediocre – 320 MB/s which is worse than a SATA SSD.

SSD model (240-256GB variants)Max.Seq.Read (GB/s)Max.Seq.Write (GB/s)IOPS 4K ReadIOPS 4K WriteLatency Read (ms)Latency Write (ms)
Toshiba KXG50ZNV256G (NVMe)2.690.327948270020.1270.051
Toshiba KBG30ZMS256G1.480.248091198201.5640.309
Samsung PM9813.411.8812199279610.0400.035
LITE-ON CA3-8D512-Q113.181.669864251360.1710.041
Intel Pro 6000p Series1.830.597792282660.0750.033

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. Let us remind you that our unit is equipped with the smaller for the model 64Wh battery.

We were impressed by the 11+ hours of web browsing solely on battery power. In addition to that, if you play videos non-stop, the notebook will last for around 7 hours, which become two hours and 20 minutes, if you are playing a game.

Um reale Bedingungen zu simulieren, haben wir unser eigenes Skript zum automatischen Durchsuchen von über 70 Websites verwendet.

Wir verwenden den integrierten Benchmark von F1 2017 in einer Schleife, um ein reales Spiel zu simulieren.


CPU options

HP EliteBook 1050 G1 has a total of four CPUs for choice. You can get the regular quad-core Core i5-8300H, the hexa-core Core i7-8750H or their respective vPro versions – the Core i5-8400H or the Core i7-8850H.


GPU options

The “base” model of the EliteBook 1050 G1 comes with the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630. Of course, if you are willing to spend some more money to the already premium price tag, you can get the GeForce GTX 1050 with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.


Gaming tests

Obviously, this is far from a gaming laptop. Especially since it comes without a discrete GPU – the UHD630 has to do all the lifting by itself. This results in frame rates lower than even those of UHD620-equipped notebooks.

cs-go-benchmarks

CS:GOHD 1080p, Low (Check settings)HD 1080p, Medium (Check settings)HD 1080p, MAX (Check settings)
Average FPS43 fps25 fps– fps

DOTA 2HD 1080p, Low (Check settings)HD 1080p, Normal (Check settings)HD 1080p, High (Check settings)
Average FPS70 fps31 fps– fps

GTA-V-benchmarks

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5)HD 768p, Normal (Check settings)HD 768p, High (Check settings)HD 768p, Very High (Check settings)
Average FPS29 fps– fps– fps

Temperatures and comfort

Max CPU load

In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.

Average core temperature (base frequency + X); CPU temp.

Intel Core i5-8300H (45W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
HP EliteBook 1050 G13.15 GHz (B+37%) @ 83°C3.24 GHz (B+41%) @ 92°C2.98 GHz (B+30%) @ 87°C
Dell G3 17 37793.44 GHz (B+50%) @ 98°C3.29 GHz (B+43%) @ 98°C3.11 GHz (B+35%) @ 91°C
Intel Core i5-8400H (45W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
Dell Latitude 15 55913.35 GHz (B+34%) @ 75°C3.26 GHz (B+30%) @ 97°C2.92 GHz (B+17%) @ 82°C

HP EliteBook 1050 G1’s cooling was able to handle the Core i5-8300H without any problems. However, it maintained pretty high temperatures through the test – reaching an all-time high of 92C until the 30th second. With an average of 3.24 GHz for the second period, it was able to maintain 2.98 GHz in the final 5 minutes of the torture test. Strangely enough, this was achieved with a 5C higher temperature than the Latitude 15 5591 (despite the different branding the processors are essentially the same). The oddity comes because the latter is cooled by a single tiny heatpipe and just one fan blowing at the heatsink, whereas the EliteBook has double the amount of heatsinks.

Gaming comfort

HP EliteBook 1050 G1 maintained adequate temperatures on its surface. The hottest spot was, quite obviously, the area just above the processor. However, the keyboard or the area you will be actually touching never exceeded 44.5C. We have to note, though, that during extreme workloads, the device tended to be a little noisy.


Verdict

HP has taken the EliteBook game one step ahead with their 1050 G1. If you haven’t checked our review of the EliteBook 850 G5 we suggest you do that in the first place, so you can understand the difference between them. Despite the more professional look of the EliteBook 850 G5 with its designated dock port, we see the 1050 G1 as a more potent device.

It is more aggressive in its appearance and provides a better multimedia experience than the former – its sound is louder and its screen is better. Speaking of which, the display of EliteBook 1050 G1 goes up to 400 nits and has excellent contrast ratio. In addition to that, it covers 91% of sRGB and doesn’t use PWM for brightness adjustment (AUO AUO24ED).

Basically, the EliteBook 1050 G1 seems like the perfect business device. It has fingerprint scanning (quite slow, though) and one of the fastest and most accurate facial recognition technologies on the market. Not to mention the heavy HP Security bloatware.

However, if there is an area in which it heavily lags behind the Dell Latitude 5591, for example, it is the keyboard. Usually, this is where Latitudes excel over other devices since their keyboards have a long travel and seem pretty durable. On the other hand, the one on the EliteBook 1050 G1 is not only “NumPad-less”, but the keys are pretty small and have a short travel. Yes, they are pretty but this is an input device – it should be practical.

Enough nitpicking! If you want a secure laptop, which has an extremely long battery life (around 11 hours of web browsing to be precise) and a spectacular screen – the EliteBook 1050 G1 is the way to go. However, if you prefer performance and better physical feedback, we would point the finger to the Latitude 15 5591 or the more content-creation-oriented XPS 15.

Pros

  • Good build quality
  • Bright screen with 91% sRGB coverage (AUO AUO24ED)
  • 2 NVMe M.2 slots
  • PWM-free across all brightness levels (AUO AUO24ED)
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Super fast face recognition
  • Great battery life


Cons

  • Gets noisy under a heavy workload
  • The keyboard design tries to copy MacBook Pro
  • Relatively high price

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/hp-elitebook-1050-g1/

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