HP ProBook 635 Aero G8: Great performance and portability
HP ProBook Aero G8.
Who would have predicted a global pandemic a few years ago and all of the changes it has made to our work-life balance. One area of growth in the last two years has been laptop sales as many of us continue to work from home or share time between the office and home. I’ve been testing the ProBook 635 Aero G8 from HP, which offers excellent performance and portability for business users.
The Aero G8 is small and light my review unit was 1.110kg. For reference, the all-metal Macbook Air is 1.29kg. For reference, the all-metal Macbook Air is 1.29kg. The silver body is mostly plastic but the back of the lid is metal and matches the rest of the case.
On the bottom of the notebook is a long rectangular ventilation grill behind which are the fans that vent air away from the motherboard. I’m not a big fan of this design because if you’re using it on your lap and working on something that makes the fans come on, it can become uncomfortably warm. To be fair though, the fans don’t engage too often while doing office-type tasks or while watching videos like they would on older intel based notebooks.
The lid can rotate all the way to 175-degrees and while the hinge is solid and stiff, it’s still possible to open it one-handed.
The 13.3-inch full HD IPS display features large bezels on top and bottom with much smaller ones on the sides. The top bezel houses a HD camera alongside Windows Hello near-infrared imaging that scans your face to unlock the G8. The camera also features a physical privacy shutter that slides over to cover the camera lens but the image quality is disappointedly bad, especially in low light.
The palm rests are small, but the front edges slope forward to ensure decent comfort. The trackpad is centred and is a good size for Windows gestures. It is super smooth and a pleasure to use.
To the top right of the left palm rest is a fast and reliable fingerprint reader and on either side of the keyboard are stereo speakers. These are fine for video calls and watching YouTube videos but not so great for watching movies or listening to music. There’s a serious lack of bass or fullness.
There’s a good selection of ports too. On the left side are USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) and a 3.5mm audio jack (headphone/mic combo). On the right, there is a barrel-style power jack, HDMI 2.0, USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 2), and a SIM card tray.
I’m not too sure why HP included a legacy power port when the G8 comes with a 65W USC-C charger. Perhaps, this is only with the high-spec model I was sent for this review and the base model comes with a different charger.
The display has a strong matte anti-reflection coating that helps to reduce glare. It can get very bright (1,000nits), but doesn’t get as dim as I’d like for those occasions when you need to work in the very low light. However, using the Sure View feature does dim it further.
This drastically reduces the viewing angles for people around you who won’t be able to see what’s on your screen. The latter can be toggled on and off via the F2, but even with it off, the display has terrible viewing angles and so I didn’t use my Spyder Elite colour measuring device to calibrate the screen since I would not recommend this laptop screen to be used for any kind of colour critical work unless you connect the G8 to a second screen or choose one of the other G8 variants with a different screen type.
For business users, this is less of an issue and as long as you’re looking directly at the screen, it’s fine. The colour, contrast and sharpness do look great for watching movies as long as you don’t shift off-axis too much.
The keyboard is a joy to use and type on. It has excellent spacing with decent key travel and tactile response. There are two levels of white backlighting behind each key and it’s spill-resistant. Most of the keys are full size with the exception of the up and down arrows and top row of function keys, which are roughly half size. Not surprisingly, there’s no dedicated num pad. The keys feel soft to the touch and although not super quiet, they generate a soft rather than a clanking sound.
This is one of the first laptops I’ve tested with the new AMD Ryzen 7 5800U CPU on board and the myriad of benchmarks I ran including PC Mark 10, 3D Mark, CrystalDiskMark and CineBench display how powerful this system is.
My review unit came with 512GB of NVMe SSD storage, 16GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM and the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U with Radeon Graphics. While this is intended as a business workhorse, the performance indicates it could be used for much more power-intensive tasks. I did notice a big drop in the benchmark results when on battery power.
While this isn’t a gaming machine it does have discrete graphics that are more than capable of some casual gaming.
My review unit came with a 53Whr battery. Using the 65W charger you can get up to 50% in 30 minutes with the screen turned off, giving you more time to work and play unshackled from the power outlet. I found battery times varied greatly depending on the workload, screen brightness and power management setting. For example, by streaming a movie over WiFi from Netflix for two hours with the screen brightness set to 50% and the battery on efficiency mode, the battery went from 100% to 59%. After four hours the battery was down to 32%. Using the supplied 65W charger, Windows estimated it would take 49 minutes to fully charge the G8 and while HP doesn’t recommend it, I tried using my 140W Apple MacBook charger, which was able to deliver 95W to the USB-C port with an estimated 40 minutes to a full charge.
On their site, HP claims up to 20 hours of battery life with the 53Whr battery but this depends on the screen type (five to choose from), configuration, loaded applications, features, use, wireless functionality, and power management settings.
The HP ProBook 635 Aero 8 notebook is relatively light, with a small form factor that makes it ideal for those who need power while on the go. It has a lot of essential privacy and security features built into both the hardware and software.
For more information, see HP
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