HP Dragonfly Pro Review: An AMD Ryzen 7 Laptop That Delivers

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and dirty test that measures sequential read/write bandwidth across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff for the use case scenarios that the machine will be tasked with. 


Here, the Dragonfly Pro's 512GB PCIe 4 NVMe Solid State Drive delivers 6GB/s reads and 3.5GB/s writes, fairly consistently. Unfortunately, even with a bit of research, we were unable to identify the manufacturer of the SSD at play here, as the manufacturer wasn't identified by Windows SI hardware resources. Regardless, the storage subsystem of this laptop is more than up the challenge of mainstream productivity and content creation workloads.

Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark

We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge mixed internet usage experience, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream.


In our first web responsiveness benchmark test, the Dragonfly Pro puts up middling numbers, with its Ryzen 7 7736U CPU slotting in just behind Intel's 12th Gen Core CPUs, but markedly trailing Intel 13th Gen.

Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark

This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...


In the heavier-duty Cinebench multi-threaded test, the Dragonfly Pro's Ryzen 7 7000 series processor vaults to the top of the pack, only bested by AMD's higher power Ryzen 9 6900 series processors and far ahead of even Intel's 13th Gen Core i7-1360P in the Lenovo Yogi i9 Gen 8. That said, single-threaded performance trails Intel's higher power, 28 Watt Core i7-1360P by about 8 percent. 

Geekbench 5 Benchmarks

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics scenarios. We tested the notebooks featured here in Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads. It measures single-threaded performance allowing a single core to stretch its legs, and multi-threaded throughput to put all cores under a heavy load. 


In GeekBench 5, the tables turn, with Intel's 13th Gen performance ranking a bit higher, though the Ryzen 7 7736U-powered Dragonfly Pro is able to chalk up an impressive score with a third place finish.

PCMark 10 Productivity And Content Creation Benchmarks

PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.


Overall, the HP Dragonfly Pro offers up exceptional performance in this mixed usage productivity, consumption and content creation benchmark. It was also able to ace the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 with Intel 13th Gen, with specific strength in the Productivity and Digital Content Creation tests. 

3DMark Graphics And GPU Tests

3DMark has several different graphics tests which focus on different types of systems. We tested here with Night Raid, which is 3DMark's targeted benchmark for laptops with integrated graphics. This test presents a solid challenge for the system's CPU and GPU engines using DirectX 12's API.


In these quick-take graphics and gaming synthetic benchmarks, AMD's Ryzen 7 7736U on-board the Dragonfly Pro, with its integrated AMD RDNA 2 graphics engine takes the pole position versus the other thin and light machines in our test group, with a dominating lead over the Intel 13th Gen-powered Lenovo Yoga 9i machine.

In-Game Graphics Test

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 and turned the visuals up to the High preset. For Gears Tactics, we used a similar resolution, but tested the game with its Low, Medium, and High presets to see how it scales. The frame rates here are the averages reported by each game's built-in benchmark utilities. 


In this in-game test, the Ryzen 7 7736U-powered Dragonfly Pro offers class-leading performance on par with NVIDIA's discrete GeForce GTX 1650 mobile GPUs, with the exception of the high image quality setting which is more heavily affected by VRAM bandwidth, giving back the advantage to the discrete GPU solution. However, versus the integrated graphics-equipped competitors here, the Dragonfly Pro and its Ryzen 7 7000 series processor has a strong, performance advantage.