HP EliteBook 850 G5 review – feature-loaded business device with minor flaws


HP is one of the persistent brands found in the business segment. Today we are looking at a device that is more on the premium side, both with its price and with its claims. Actually, we reviewed its predecessor last year and were left with mixed feelings. At first glance, this unit lives up to the promise of great build quality and sleek design, aiming directly at Apple’s MacBooks. In addition to that, this year HP added a touch sensitive IPS panel as an option.

Moreover, HP is bragging about the docking capabilities of the EliteBook 850 G5. There are a lot of capable laptops in this segment, although HP’s EliteBook 850 G5 takes a little different approach and it addresses multimedia too. It will also be interesting to see how the new RX 540 GPU by AMD fares against the older one, which was burdened with AMD’s former blemishes. Without further ado, let’s see if the performance matches the premium looks of this high-priced piece of hardware.

You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: http://laptopmedia.com/series/hp-elitebook-850-g5/

Contents


Specs Sheet

HP EliteBook 850 G5 Tabelle der technischen Daten

Acer
Not available
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15.6”, Full HD (1920 x 1080), IPS
HDD/SSD
512GB SSD NVMe
M.2 Slot
1x 2280 PCIe NVMe M.2 slot Siehe Foto
RAM
16 GB DDR4, 2400 MHz
Abmessungen
370 x 252 x 18.3 mm (14.57" x 9.92" x 0.72")
Gewicht
1.78 kg (3.9 lbs)
Gehäuse Material
Plastic / Polycarbonate, Aluminum
Ports und Konnektivität
  • 1x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
  • 1x USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps)
  • 1x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps)
  • HDMI 1.4b
  • Kartenleser
  • Ethernet LAN Gigabit Ethernet
  • Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2x2)
  • Bluetooth 4.2
  • Audio-Buchse combo audio / microphone jack
  • Smart card reader
Merkmale
  • Fingerabdruckleser
  • Web-Kamera HD 720p
  • Beleuchtete Tastatur
  • Mikrofon 3 multi array microphone
  • Lautsprecher Bang & Olufsen stereo speakers
  • Optisches Laufwerk
  • Sicherheitsschlitz
  • Spill-resistant keyboard with drain
  • Ambient light sensor

What’s in the box?

The device is neatly protected by large foam pieces. Somewhere inside the box are thrown the manuals and set up guides, and for the charger there is a separate compartment.


Design and construction

HP EliteBook 850 G5 features a very sleek design with a premium build quality at first glance. We suppose that the paint job on this device is very thick as our tools weren’t able to detect the aluminum, advertised by HP (although it really feels like aluminum). The 18.3 mm profile suits very well the 15.6-inch form factor and moreover, it is built like a tank. It measures at 370 x 252 x 18.3 mm (14.57″ x 9.92″ x 0.72″) and weighs 1.78 kg (3.9 lbs). As you can see from the image below, there is a strip in the upper part of the top panel, which is made of plastic and resembles the antenna for the SIM card.

With a lot of willpower, the lid can be opened with a single hand and moreover – it feels very durable with almost no bend when exposed to external forces. This is both due to the aluminum lid and the tempered glass placed on top of the touch screen panel. Opening it up, we can see bezels which are hiding the face recognition sensors, the Web camera and some microphones on the top and HP’s logo on the bottom.

Next, we look at the base of the HP EliteBook 850 G5, which is once again made from aluminum. The grill on top, seen in the picture below, conceals the Bang and Olufsen branded speakers – upward facing speakers are always good. However, there is a lot more happening beneath it.

First – the keyboard – it has a good tactile feedback and it’s good for typing, although the key travel is relatively short. However, what we don’t like is the placement of the “up” and “down” arrow keys – usual “setback” of HP devices. The keyboard also houses the mandatory for a business device (as seen on Latitudes and ThinkPads), joystick.

Then we move to the touchpad, which has dedicated buttons on top, which are meant for when you use the joystick and integrated buttons beneath the glass surface of the touchpad itself. It feels adequate enough and the keys are easy to recognize, despite the lack of visual designation. A feature that HP integrated inside the touchpad area is an NFC antenna. Speaking of input devices, we can’t miss the brilliant touch screen. Combined with the super fast Core i7-8550U it appears to be very accurate and responsive.

In addition to the good build quality, this device features a couple of biometric security features – a fingerprint reader, as well as a face recognition system. We found the first one to be super accurate, while not the fastest on the market. What we liked more, though, is the facial recognition, which is rarely found on a laptop. Recently we tested the Dell XPS 13 9370, which is also equipped with this feature. HP’s technology has a slight edge over the Dell counterpart, as the device unlocked every time we looked at it. However, if your head is pointing at the keyboard, it won’t recognize you at all.

Last but not least, the I/O, which has some interesting additions compared to cheaper devices. The left side of the EliteBook 850 G5 houses the hot air vent, as well as a single USB 3.0 Type-A port that supports charging when the device is turned off, and a Smart Card reader expansion slot. On the other side, you can see the charging connector, accompanied by a Thunderbolt 3 port. Following next we have the docking connector, an RJ-45 port, one HDMI 1.4b connector, as well as another USB 3.0 Type-A port and a 3.5 mm combo jack.


Disassembly and maintenance

HP has done a great job making the EliteBook 850 G5 easy to upgrade. While it lacks a service panel, and you have to take off the entire bottom plate, this can be done very easily. You need to remove all 10 Phillips head screws (two of them are located in black holes). After that, carefully lift the panel, and you’re there.

As you can see, the internals resemble a wide area with barely any free space left. First, we’re going to take a look at the battery. It has three cells and a capacity of 56Wh, which combined with the ULV chipset should result in good amounts of time away from the plug. Right above it are located both RAM DIMMs, which support 32 GB of DDR4 memory.

In the image below you can see the cooling solution HP opted to use for this notebook. While retaining almost the same cooling design as its predecessor it proves to be insufficient for the Radeon RX 540 configuration. This design has the major flaw of connecting the CPU and GPU on one heat transfer path which ruins the efficiency and makes GPU temperatures, in this case, extremely hard to manage.

Here you can see both wireless adapters – the left one (WWAN adapter) is optional and provides 4G connectivity via SIM card.

Next, we have the SSD slot, which in our case is occupied by the superfast 512GB Samsung PM981 NVMe drive. However, storage devices are region dependent so keep that in mind when looking for a laptop.

In the image above you can see one more interesting thing that HP introduced to its series – I/O connectors are modular, so if one breaks you can replace it with the same model super easily.

And last but not least, here is the design of the touchpad PCB, if you’ve never seen one. In this case, there is an NFC antenna right between the PCB and the glass on the other side.


Display quality

HP EliteBook 850 G5 in the configuration we tested is equipped with a Full HD IPS touch sensitive panel and bears a model number AUO B156HAN02.3. It has a diagonal of 15.6 inches and a resolution of 1920 x 1080, leading to a pixel pitch of 0.18 x 0.18 mm and a pixel density of 142 ppi, thus making it appear as “Retina” when viewed from at least 60 cm.

Viewing angles are comfortable.

We measured a peak brightness of 232 nits in the center of the screen and 225 nits as an average across the surface with 7% maximum deviation. The correlated color temperature on white screen at maximum brightness is 6810K – a bit colder than the optimal 6500K in sRGB. However, further along the grey scale we get a slightly warmer image – 6710K. You can see how values change at 142 nits or in other words – 80% brightness.

Values above 4.0 are unwanted and should not be present. The contrast ratio is good – 1200:1 (1140:1 after calibration).

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of 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.

Sadly, the panel we tested failed to suffice in this aspect, rendering only 54% of the sRGB color gamut.

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.

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. In 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 reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 27 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 850 G5 does not use PWM to adjust its screen brightness at any level. This makes it comfortable to use for extended periods of time in this aspect.

Blue light emissions

Installing of 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 850 G5’s IPS display proved to be a sufficient business grade panel. The lack of PWM adjustment of the brightness and good contrast levels, combined with the excellent viewing angles make it very good for office work. However, the display is inappropriate for web designers as it has a very shallow color range and moreover, the colors are not that accurate, even though our Gaming and Web design profile, vastly improves that.

Buy our profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for HP EliteBook 850 G5 configurations with 15.6″ AUO B156HAN02.3 (Full HD, 1920 x 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at: Kaufen bei Amazon.de (#CommissionsEarned)

*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

Although EliteBook 850 G5’s Bang & Olufsen speakers sound good, there are some deviations in the whole frequency range.


Software

HP installed all sorts of security features that you may or you may not need on your Windows 10 operating system. However, if you really need them and you have to reinstall your device, you can find them as well as all of the drivers you’re going to need here: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-elitebook-850-g5-notebook-pc/18491276

Battery

As always, the battery tests were run with Windows power saving setting and Wi-Fi turned on, and the screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits. EliteBook 850 G5’s 56Wh battery unit provided decent performance, enabling the user to browse the web for 10 hours and 50 minutes, watch movies for 9 hours and do some minor gaming for two hours and a quarter, although we doubt you are going to do the latter away from the wall.

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 – Intel Core i7-8550U

The Intel Core i7-8550U is part of the new 8th Generation Kaby Lake Refresh and it’s a direct successor to the Intel Core i7-7500U from the Kaby Lake generation and the Intel Core i7-6500U from the 6th Skylake generation. With the latest alteration to the ULV (ultra-low voltage) processors, Intel doubles the core count from 2 to 4 and retaining the so-called Hyper-Threading technology, keeping the same 14nm manufacturing process and feature the same 15W TDP.

However, due to the core count change, the base frequency of the Core i7-8550U is lowered to only 1.8 GHz while Turbo Boost frequencies remain pretty high – somewhere between 3.7 – 4.0 GHz. This ensures considerably higher multi-core and single-core performance during short workloads before going back to more bearable frequencies considering the 15W TDP but most of the other specs and features remain the same.

The chip also incorporates a newer Intel Gen 9.5 integrated graphics called Intel UHD Graphics 620. The support for Google’s VP9 codec and H.265/HEVC Main 10 is still the most notable feature of the iGPU. Intel claims that the new UHD 620 chips improve the overall power consumption compared to the previous one.

You can browse through our top CPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-cpu-ranking/


GPU – AMD Radeon RX 540 (2GB GDDR5)

AMD Radeon RX 540 is based on the Polaris architecture and consists of 8 CUs, 16 ROPs, 32 Texture Units and 512 Stream Processors. According to AMD it can go up to 1219 MHz on demand and comes in two variants – 2GB and 4GB GDDR5 memory.

Radeon RX 540’s memory works at 6000 MHz effective and is build on a 128-bit interface. The memory bandwidth is 96 GB/s. This graphics card supports DirectX 12.0, H264/H265/HEVC encoding and 4K on 60Hz via the HDMI port.

You can browse through our top GPUs ranking: http://laptopmedia.com/top-laptop-graphics-ranking/


Storage performance

Our HP EliteBook 850 G5 review unit has got a Samsung PM981 NVMe drive with 512 GB storage. It is one of the fastest SSDs we ever tested with Read and Write speeds of 3382.7 MB/s and 2025.5 MB/s respectively.


Gaming tests

The Radeon RX 540, found on this particular laptop is not exactly a gaming graphics card, but it can provide you with some decent framerates at low resolution and eye-candy in GTA V. We also tried CS:GO and DOTA 2, but in both cases there was Vsync interrupting the whole time, thus we didn’t take the results in mind. As you can see, the framerate on GTA V may also be mistaken for Vsync driven result, but the case was not the same here. Those 60 fps are an overall average from all five scenes on the GTA V benchmark.

GTA-V-benchmarks

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5)HD, Low (Check settings)HD, Medium (Check settings)HD, Very High (Check settings)
Average FPS60 fps29 fps– fps
Min FPS22 fps11 fps– fps

Temperatures

The temperature tests go this way. We use Prime95 and FurMark to torture the CPU and the GPU respectively. This won’t give real-life representation but with our methodology, we try to give you the most optimal results.

The first values from the test are from the 30th second of running the Prime95 stress test, which simulates a heavy task run on your computer (usually lighter tasks take from a part of the second up to a couple of seconds). Next, we take the ones from the 2nd-minute mark, which imitates a very heavy task, run on the CPU. The last values we give you are the ones at the end of the test, which is 15 minutes, simulating the CPU load when rendering a video, for example.

0-15 min. CPU torture test

Let’s start with reminding you of the Base and Turbo frequencies of the Core i7-8550U, which are 1.8 GHz and 4.0 GHz, respectively. Our unit idled at 39°C but needed no more than 7 seconds to reach 83°C and slump the frequencies to 2.0 GHz. Although the first couple of seconds were optimistic as the frequency of the cores fluctuated between 2.5 and 3.5 GHz, we didn’t wait long until we saw a huge drop in clock speed.

Cores frequency (0 – 00:30 sec.)
CPU Temperature (0 – 00:30 sec.)

At the second checkpoint, the temperatures remained stable at around 63°C. Sadly, this didn’t mean frequencies were going to jump back at reasonable levels as they remained at 2.0 GHz.

Cores frequency (0 – 2:00 min.)
CPU Temperature (0 – 2:00 min.)

This trend continued up until the end of the test as the core clocks were ticking at 2.0 GHz, occasionally dropping down to 1.9 GHz, but still in the “no throttling” zone. The average temperature for the whole period of the torture was 64°C, which is reasonable.

Cores frequency (0 – 15:00 min.)
CPU Temperature (0 – 15:00 min.)

0-30 min. GPU torture test

Next, we tested the Radeon RX 540 with our favorite FurMark stress test. We are not proud to say that our fears of the cooling not being sufficient enough for this hardware were justified. Even at the beginning of the torture test we noticed some fluctuations in the clock speeds, which by the way were far from the maximum boost clock of this GPU. Moreover, around the 3-minute mark, which coincided with the GPU reaching 67°C, clock speeds fell drastically down to around 250 MHz. This was the trend for the entire test, excluding a 1-minute adventure to the relatively normal 550-750 MHz just to go back to the same 250 MHz, until the end.

Although the inside temperatures were not that high, the thin profile and aluminum body resulted in high surface temperatures. Moreover, unlike other devices, the EliteBook 850 G5 was warm across the whole surface area, with crucial parts like the keyboard reaching more than 40°C. Still, this happened on a very rare occasion of extreme load. However, keep in mind that the fan likes to spin even at low loads but it’s very quiet.

43.1°C
45.1°C
43.8°C
41.2°C
44.4°C
40.6°C
33.6°C
32.4°C
32.7°C

Verdict

As with every device in this price range, we approached HP EliteBook 850 G5 with a lot of expectations. Although the device is very well built, it didn’t meet some essential requirements. Performance-wise, it falls behind some cheaper devices like the Dell Latitude 15 5590 and the ASUS VivoBook S15 (S510). However, the build quality of this notebook is exceptional. Being so thin and lightweight, while featuring an all aluminum body resembles a Macbook approach, hence we decided to put the latter in the comparison charts (just for fun).

We must note that the foundations built by its predecessor – HP EliteBook 850 G4 were not stable at all and HP had some time to think about what went wrong with it. First of all – display quality. This year we definitely saw an improvement over the mediocre TN panel. Now featuring an IPS display, the laptop lets you enjoy high contrast ratio, comfortable viewing angles but sadly, because of the use of a budget panel, the color range is poor as the screen displays only half of the colors found on the Internet. However, this is our only complaint as it doesn’t use PWM for brightness adjustment.

Again, among the strongest points of this year’s model is battery life with around 11 hours of web surfing and 9 hours of video playback with twice the core count. Moreover, the device is NVMe SSD enabled and our unit actually shipped with such, which makes a huge difference. We were really impressed by the input devices as well. A fast keyboard, adequate touchpad with glass surface and NFC antenna embedded in it and last but not least – optional touchscreen, which behaves very well. However, HP doesn’t specify if it’s stylus-enabled or not.

We left the setbacks at the end on purpose. This is because almost all of them can be ignored given the target group of this computer. First of all – the Core i7-8550U doesn’t perform at a decent level in the raw tests, although the device proved to be very snappy and didn’t lag for a second. Next, we have poor graphics card management, which makes it throttle too soon and with low temperature (we don’t know if this is going to be fixed in a future update). However, this happens under extreme conditions, which are unlikely to occur in the business segment.

Finally, we have to say that this device is inappropriate for web designers as color accuracy is not decent plus there is the aforesaid poor color range. However, if you need a fast, cool looking laptop, loaded with features and made specifically for docking – EliteBook 850 G5 is your laptop if you are ready to pay the heavy price tag, though.

Pros

  • Very good input devices
  • High contrast screen with comfortable viewing angles
  • Easy to get inside and upgrade
  • PWM-free across all brightness levels
  • Supports super fast NVMe storage
  • Backlit keyboard
  • Swift and seamless to work with
  • Good battery life


Cons

  • Core i7-8550U underperforms in raw benchmarks
  • A bit pricey
  • GPU throttles heavily
  • Gets warm on the surface under heavy load
  • Mediocre color range

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Andrew
Andrew
5 Jahre vor

I wonder if HP’s crummy ProDisplay monitors have the PWM you speak of. These destroy my eyes at work.

joe
joe
4 Jahre vor

thats a hell of a review, how do I turn backlit keybord on?