HP Elite Dragonfly G3 – Initial thoughts and comments.

[MadHatch]

The HP Elite Dragonfly G3 is a premium notebook that covers all the bases, with built in security to ensure that your data and user experience is a safe and productive one.

The laptop is built from recycled magnesium which is nice to the touch. My unit is the darker slate blue colour, which is fantastic to look at. The build quality is good, the laptop feels solid, with very little flex anywhere. The magnesium shell is nice to the touch, not feeling cold or warm. The HP logo is nicely picked out on the top cover in silver – as is the Dragonfly text on the keyboard and edge of the screen.

The keyboard is up to the usual standard of HP and is fantastic – I won’t lie, I prefer the keyboards on HP machines and the feel of this one was a selling point for me. Key travel is nice and allows for light touch typing. The spacing is good, and the keys are a good size and have a nice tactile feel. The backlight works well, with several different levels of brightness. However, here I hit a stumbling block – the time out of the back light on the keyboard, and how to change this. You have to go into the bios and alter the settings there, which is fine – but it would have been nice if HP made that information easier to find or built the setting into one of the services that came preinstalled.

The track pad is excellent. It’s glassed topped and has a nice feel to it. It’s smooth, and easy to glide over with your fingers. It’s nice and clicky – no haptics (do you really need them?) and takes up about 40% of the space on the deck.

As for the preinstalled software… I will admit that in the past, HP software has felt more like bloatwear and served very little purpose other than to make sure you know you are running an HP machine. I was unsure as how to approach dealing with it. I decided to run with the installed services and security software, and I have been pleasantly surprised. The built in Wolf Security System does not get in the way of doing things or installing programs, and the rest of the preinstalled software actually serves a purpose and is useful. Only because I have no experience of how good the Wolf Security is, I have also installed Norton as well. The two seem to be playing well together and aren’t getting in each other’s way.

In terms of how the laptop works – it is fast, snappy and responsive. I have only experienced one moment of lag, but that was when I was downloading the 30+ updates and it was not unexpected. The laptop runs well, both under load and for normal tasks. The DDR5 RAM works really well and keeps performance to a high standard. Although I have one gripe here – the SSD. It’s not high quality, or even the fastest. This is something I am thinking about replacing as I believe a better quality one will work better.

The fans, when under load, are not loud – you can hear them, but they are not high decibels. Again, the Dragonfly does well under load, which for a business aimed machine you would expect. It gets a little warm, but not uncomfortably. It does throttle the CPU and RAM – but that’s to be expected. Performance is good, but this is not a gaming machine – the Dragonfly is unashamedly what it is; a business focused machine.

Although light gaming is possible, just don’t set your expectations high. To be honest, if gaming is your thing – this is the wrong laptop for you. Creativity is possible on the Dragonfly, it can handle video editing, graphics work – and writing with ease. The built in Iris XE Graphics handle those things well.

Battery life is – so far, good. The 65w battery charges very quickly with the supplied charger, and holds that charge well. Unplugged performance is exactly the same. And speaking of IO, the Dragonfly comes with two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports (one on each side) a USB-A 3.2 and headphone jack on the right side and a display port on the left side. Mine didn’t come with the SIM card tray (which is on the left hand side), or the NFC reader under the track pad.

The display is lovely, I got the touchscreen version which maxes out at 400nits. It’s nice and bright and the colour reproduction is very good. The actual touch screen is responsive and good. The 3:2 aspect ratio makes for a squarer screen – but that’s fine if you’re doing a lot of typing or reading.

Final thoughts – I’ve had my HP Elite Dragonfly G3 for 24 hours, and I am very impressed and pleased with it. It does everything I need it to do, it’s responsive, nice and has a premium look and feel. It’s not 100% perfect, but then is any laptop? But it does what I need it to do and then some. All in all? A **bleep** fine machine.