HP EliteBook X G2i 14-inch Review: A Business Laptop That Knows Its Job

The EliteBook X G2i is HP's premium business laptop, and it makes sense the moment you stop comparing it to consumer machines. The configuration I tested runs the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and the range starts at ₹2.5 lakh.

The two things that stand out are the weight and the endurance. It comes in under a kilo, which is light enough that you stop registering it in a bag, and it managed nearly 14 hours in the battery test despite carrying the smaller of the two cells HP offers. Performance holds up too. It kept pace with the XPS 14 and the Galaxy Book6 Pro in Geekbench 6 despite being the thinnest of the three, and heavy multitasking never slowed it down.

Elsewhere, the keyboard is very good aside from slightly tight spacing, the quad speakers are far better than a work laptop needs, and the port selection means you never go looking for a dongle. Sure View, HP's privacy screen, is the standout feature and the sort of thing you appreciate the first time someone glances at your screen beside you.

The display is where it gives ground. It's an IPS LCD at a price where rivals will hand you an OLED, viewing angles fall away sooner than they should, and Sure View dims the screen heavily while locking you out of the brightness control. The lid flexes more than the rest of the chassis does, too.

None of that stops this being a very capable machine. It just means the EliteBook X G2i is built for a buyer who values security, serviceability and portability over having the best screen in the room.

HP has not tried to do anything clever with how this laptop looks. Mine is the Eclipse Gray one, and it looks like a work laptop. Atmospheric Blue and Glacier Silver are the other two options, and none of them are trying to start a conversation. At this price, I'd have liked something with a bit more personality, but for the audience this is built for, the plainness is probably the point.

I tend to prefer my laptops on the subtle side, so the EliteBook X G2i and I got along fine from the start. Mine is the Eclipse Gray one, with Atmospheric Blue and Glacier Silver as the other two options, and none of them are asking for attention. In an office, or in a meeting room where the laptop is the least interesting thing on the table, that restraint works in its favour.

The build backs it up too. The keyboard deck stays firm when you press into it, which is where cheaper machines usually give themselves away, and the whole thing feels solid in a way that matches what HP is charging. There's a bit of give in the lid if you look for it, though nothing that showed up in normal use.

The weight is the part that actually stands out. This is a magnesium chassis, and it comes in under a kilo, which is quite light.Carrying it around through the review period, it never registered as something in my bag, and that matters more on a work and business laptop than on almost any other kind.

Being this light usually brings a problem with it, which is that the laptop slides around every time you type. HP has dealt with that with generous rubber padding along the base, and the machine stays put on a desk. You can also open the lid with one hand, which is a small thing that I always appreciate.

The lid itself is where my one real complaint sits. It doesn't feel like the rest of the machine, and there's a definite flex to it when you press down. Nothing went wrong during my commutes with it and I wouldn't call it fragile, but on a laptop that costs this much, the lid should feel as convincing as the keyboard deck does, and this is something HP should sort out.

This is one area where the EliteBook X G2i doesn't ask you to compromise, and on a laptop this thin, that's worth appreciating. You get two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, a third Type-C running at 10Gbps, a powered USB-A, a full-size HDMI 2.1 out, a combo audio jack and a nano lock slot. Plenty of machines this light have decided that two Type-C ports are all you're getting, and then left you to buy a hub to make up the difference.

All three Type-C ports support power delivery and display output, which means you can charge from whichever side of the desk the socket happens to be on. That sounds like a small thing until you've spent a week with a laptop that only charges from one side. Between the three of them, you have enough bandwidth to run external displays and still have a port free for charging. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 handle the wireless side.

The keyboard here is genuinely good. The keycaps have a deeper dish than usual, so your fingers settle into each key instead of skating across the top, and the travel is good enough that long typing sessions never get tiring. The keys are backlit too, which covers late nights.

My only small gripe is the spacing. The keys sit a little closer together than I'd like, and when I was typing in a hurry or deep in the flow of writing, my fingers would occasionally bump into each other and leave me with a mistype to fix. It's a 14-inch chassis, so the room is there, and the Acer Aspire 5 manages it better on a similar footprint. Nothing that got in the way of using the laptop, but it's worth mentioning.

The fingerprint sensor sits in the power button, so one press wakes the laptop and logs you in. The trackpad is the haptic type and the whole surface is clickable, which means no hunting for the bottom half of the pad. Feedback is quiet and consistent wherever you press.

The display does its job well. It's a 14-inch panel at 1920x1200, and the 16:10 ratio gives you useful vertical room when you're working through documents and spreadsheets. Text is sharp, the anti-glare finish keeps reflections in check, and for the everyday work this laptop is built around, I had no complaints. It's a touch panel too, which comes in handy more often than I expect it to.

The bigger addition here is Sure View. HP's privacy screen sits on the function row, and switching it on shuts down shoulder surfing completely. It works the same way the privacy screen on the Galaxy S26 Ultra does, where anyone sitting beside you sees nothing usable while the screen stays readable straight on. If your working life involves flights, cabs or coffee shops with client data open, this is genuinely excellent, and it's the sort of thing the consumer laptops this competes with simply don't offer. That said, Sure View comes with a catch as well. The screen dims down heavily when it's switched on, and you can't adjust brightness while it's active, so you're stuck at whatever level it sets until you turn it back off.

That said, the panel is an IPS LCD, and at this price that's hard to ignore. There are plenty of laptops asking similar money that hand you an OLED, and HP offers a 3K OLED on this very machine, so the better screen exists in the lineup and just isn't in this configuration.

To be fair, nobody is buying an EliteBook to watch movies on it, and for the spreadsheets, documents, and video calls this machine actually exists for, the panel holds up fine. But the gap shows the moment you put it next to an OLED. Colours don't have the same punch, blacks come out grey rather than black, and darker content loses the depth you get used to on a better panel.

Viewing angles are the other place where the panel gives itself away. Shift a little off-centre, and the image starts washing out sooner than I'd expect from a laptop in this bracket. Sit square in front of it and there's no issue at all, which is how you'll use it most of the time anyway. But lean back in your chair or have someone pull up alongside to look at something with you, and the colours visibly fade off.

The speakers caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting much here, because business laptops usually treat audio as something to tick off rather than get right, and the EliteBook X G2i turned out to be one of the better-sounding laptops I've used in a while.

There are four of them, tuned by Poly, and they fire upwards from either side of the keyboard, which means the sound reaches you directly instead of bouncing off whatever surface the laptop is sitting on. They get properly loud too, loud enough that I never found myself reaching for the volume keys in a quiet room.

What surprised me most was the bass. There's actual weight to it, which is rare on a machine of this form factor, and it makes a real difference to how music and video hold up. The Galaxy Book6 Pro is a more expensive laptop from a company that takes audio seriously, and this beats it comfortably.

For the calls and meetings this laptop will spend most of its life on, the speakers are more than up to it, and if you do end up watching something at the end of a long day, they hold their own there too.

The EliteBook X G2i runs the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, a 16-core Panther Lake chip clocked at 3.69GHz, paired with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 1TB PCIe Gen5 SSD. It's the same chip I've tested in the Dell XPS 14 and the Galaxy Book6 Pro.

In Cinebench R23, it returned 2052 in single-core and 15495 in multi-core, with an MP ratio of 7.55x. That MP ratio is worth a mention, since it tells you how well the chip scales when all 16 cores are working, and 7.55x is a healthy figure for a laptop of this form factor. For context, the HP OmniBook 5 on the Intel Core Ultra 7 355 managed 8006 in multi-core, so this is close to double the multi-threaded performance.

Geekbench 6

Geekbench 6 is where it gets interesting. The EliteBook scored 2861 in single-core and 16309 in multi-core. The XPS 14 managed 2762 and 14789, and the Galaxy Book6 Pro 2762 and 16177. Single-core is the number that governs how snappy a machine feels day to day, since most of what you actually do runs on one thread, and the EliteBook takes that one from both. Multi-core matters when you're rendering or exporting, and it edges past the Samsung there too.

PCMark 10 is the closest thing to a real-world test, running through browsing, video calls, spreadsheets, and photo editing rather than pushing the chip flat out. It returned 5682 overall, with Essentials at 10320, Productivity at 7004 and Digital Content Creation at 6888.

Cinebench 2024

Numbers aside, the part that actually matters is how it holds up on a normal working day, and here it never gave me a reason to think about it. I regularly had more than 20 Chrome tabs going with several folders and apps open behind them, and the laptop simply carried on without a stutter. The 32GB of RAM is doing a lot of that work, and the 1TB SSD means you're not managing storage either, which on a machine you'll keep for three or four years matters more than it sounds.

My unit came with the 56Wh battery, which is the smaller of the two cells HP offers on this machine, so I went in with fairly modest expectations.

In PCMark 10's battery test at 50 percent brightness, it ran for 13 hours and 18 minutes. That is a genuinely decent figure for a laptop this thin, and it looks better still once you account for the smaller battery, since the 68Wh version of this machine should stretch further again. Panther Lake is clearly pulling its weight on efficiency here.

The EliteBook X G2i knows exactly what it is. It's a business laptop, and it spends its money where a business would want it spent rather than where an individual buyer would.

The strengths are real. It weighs under a kilo, and you stop noticing it in a bag. The Core Ultra X7 358H handled everything I threw at it without complaint, including 20-plus Chrome tabs. Battery life ran reliably. The speakers are far better than they need to be, and what I expected them to be. The port selection means you never reach for a dongle. And Sure View is the sort of feature you appreciate the first time someone glances at your screen on a flight.

The compromises are just as real. An IPS LCD at this price is hard to defend when rivals hand you an OLED for similar money, viewing angles fall off sooner than they should, and the lid flexes in a way the rest of the chassis doesn't.

So who's it for? If you're spending your own money and you want the best laptop at this price, the XPS 14 and the Galaxy Book6 Pro give you a better screen. If you're buying for a company, or you're the person carrying sensitive work around on a machine IT has to support for the next four years, the EliteBook makes a case neither of those can match.