HP EliteBook 1040 G11 Review: A Road Warrior’s Secret Weapon
When doing thermal testing on the HP EliteBook 1040, we ran into a peculiar issue. On occasion, the machine had gotten itself stuck in a state where CPU clocks were limited to around 1000 to 1250 MHz, and GPU clocks were hard capped at only 200 MHz. The machine was surprisingly usable in this state, but obviously wasn't performing at is best. It took most of a day to get this resolved; System Restore didn't help, and even the combination of a clean Windows install and CMOS reset didn't immediately resolve it. Once we got the latest Arc driver installed on the fresh copy of Windows, though, the issue magically disappeared. If you happen to be facing a similar issue with Meteor Lake, try updating graphics drivers before investigating further.
Testing the system with its intended PL1 value of 48W, it runs remarkably cool. However, it is configured with a PL2 value—that's the short-period turbo boost power limit—of 64W, and the built-in cooling solution will quickly saturate with that level of heat output. If the system has been idle long enough for PL2 to reset, then the first load you put on it will immediately rocket the CPU package to its 100°C thermal limit. However, it will quickly drop down to the 48W PL1 and things will cool off considerably.
What this tells us is that the EliteBook 1040's cooler is actually quite competent—just very small, and with minimal thermal mass. It can dissipate the heat from the Core Ultra SoC rather well, but it becomes saturated with heat almost immediately when the system starts turbo boosting. This isn't a problem. For workloads where the 64W turbo power is relevant, the load should be short-duration enough that thermal throttling isn't a concern, and for longer workloads (like, say, gaming), you'll be riding the 48W PL1 limit which the cooling solution is able to deal with.
Noise also isn't an issue with the HP EliteBook 1040 G11. This measurement was taken from a distance of 1 foot (25cm) while the system was performing a Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail benchmark run. It includes both the 64W PL2 period as well as a longer part of the benchmark running at the 48W PL1. At its loudest, the EliteBook 1040 G11 pushed out only 44.4 decibels of noise, which our measurement app helpfully informs us is approximately the sound level of a quiet library. In short, don't worry about using this thing in a classrom, in an office, or anywhere else, really—your keystrokes will be louder than the fans.
HP EliteBook 1040 G11 Battery Life Benchmark
Battery life is critically important for a system like this. Businesspeople on the go may or may not have time to stop and charge their laptop between meetings or while traveling. The machine needs to last through endless hours of meetings that could have been e-mails and nights spent poring over spreadsheets that someone else really should have already checked. So how does the EliteBook 1040 G11 fare? See for yourself:
The answer is very, very well. The EliteBook 1040 G11 put up one of the best benchmark results for battery life that we've ever seen. This is even more impressive in light of the fact that this system doesn't have the benefit of a power-sipping OLED display or a new-fangled arm processor—this is a straight-up x86-64 laptop with a reasonably bright LCD screen. The 68-Whr battery is pretty large for a machine in this size class, but it's nowhere near the 99-Whr monster in our MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo, yet it puts up nearly the same battery life result thanks to HP's smart power management (and the smaller screen, of course.)
Intel talked a big game about Meteor Lake's power efficiency before it came out, and we indeed found that our first Meteor Lake laptop offered excellent battery life—although many attributed it to MSI's giant battery. This machine achieves 98.3% of the battery life with about 2/3 the battery. In fact, it readily outpaces our Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor in battery life, albeit not in performance.
HP EliteBook 1040 G11: Our Thoughts
Our final analysis of this new HP machine essentially comes down to whether it is for you. If you're a gamer, a home user, a content consumer, or an enthusiast, this machine isn't necessarily targeted at you. Gamers won't be satisfied with the low SoC power limit and enthusiasts will want a more bleeding-edge feature set. A home user might be satisfied by this system, but the 5G modem and business-oriented security features (which add significant extra cost to the machine) could be overkill.
However, if you are a businessperson on the go—especially someone who needs competent performance, ubiquitous 5G connectivity and all-day battery life from a highly secure and reliable laptop, then this machine might be exactly what you're looking for. We didn't delve too deeply into the wealth of corporate security and management features that are available on this system, but the benefits are built-in regardless. IT managers who are interested in buying this machine likely already know all about both Intel and HP's business features.
On the surface, the EliteBook 1040 G11 may seem expensive for what you get. $2,099 for a laptop with a 48W power limit, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and no discrete GPU is pretty pricey. Once again, though, this laptop is intended for enterprise road warriors that require the utmost reliability, durability, connectivity, port options and security, and many of the features that you're paying for with the EliteBook 1040 may not show up on a simple specs sheet. In short, this machine offers a bit more than just the sum of its parts.
Because of its specific user target, it's difficult to gauge the machine's value in light of mainstream consumer laptops, but speaking empirically, the performance of the HP EliteBook 1040 G11 is solid and its battery life is outstanding. You also get a three year warranty standard, and you can opt into all kinds of extra features when you're buying, like cloud-delivered recovery services, OPAL2 self-encrypting storage, and so on. If that sounds appealing to you, then get in touch with your HP B2B sales rep as soon as possible (you can also find it on Amazon), because the HP EliteBook 1040 G11 is a top notch machine.
