HP Probook 470 G5

Laptop I use for school and work – This laptop functions well. However it is quite weighty and thick. It is also quite slow and the battery life is around 4-6 hours. However it is quite stable and is able to work well for its uses.

A hidden gem. Relatively cheap, but a high-performance laptop for an IT professional or a power-user – I am a software developer who usually works in the office and sometimes I have to take the laptop home. My priorities are mostly the following: raw CPU performance, IO subsystem performance, memory size, operating system and its edition. The 3D gaming performance, electricity consumption and battery life are not important for me. I am satisfied by the laptop as it has boosted my productivity for a pretty conservative price for a laptop of this class.

Before I start the review I need to make an important note. This particular review relates to HP ProBook 470 G5 with the PART NUMBER 2WK17PA ONLY!

One of the most ridiculous habits of laptop manufacturers is to advertise and sell significantly different laptops under the same brand name/model. The HP site contains at least 4 (four) variants of the similarly named laptop (HP ProBook 470 G5) packed with 8 or 16GB of RAM, i5 or i7 CPUs, HDD or SSD drives of varying sizes. Of course prices are different. This particular review relates to HP ProBook 470 G5 with the part 2WK17PA only. Other laptops with the same model but different part numbers are significantly different from this one. If you attempt to search for "HP ProBook 470 G5" you may be directed to one of these variants, but not exactly to the reviewed laptop.

If you decide to buy an HP ProBook 470 G5 laptop based on this review make sure that you are buying the right one!

My previous working laptop ASUS (which is 4 years old) is still good, however its standard HDD is painfully slow and given the amount of software and the size of data I have to work with it causes real problems, when in some cases I simply have to wait for a significant period of time staring at the screen.

Pros:

1. Storage subsystem is excellent. This laptop has a 512GB NVME SSD. This means two things.

First, it is lightning fast because of the drive technology. Startup times are very short and usually about 20 sec from pressing of the power button to the responsive desktop. Copying large arrays of data or backing up 10 - 20GB databases don't force me to fall out of the work flow and do something else because the process may take tens of minutes. With an SSD it all happens much quicker than with HDD. Working with virtual machines doesn't feel slow as used to be with a traditional HDD.

Second, it has a relatively big SSD. With 512GB total size about 480GB is available from the start. The rest is taken by the restore partition and by the pre-installed operating system. Not much of course, 1TB would be more preferable, but this is not a tiny 128 - 256GB SSD drive which barely can host anything other than OS itself and a couple of programs. Come on, Visual Studio 2017 alone can eat up to 30GB of space. If you run virtual machines then having a few will drain your SSD free space almost instantly, but with this SSD this moment either won't happen at all or will happen much later.

You can also compress programs and OS files using NTFS compression, which will save you even more space and won't sacrifice the performance much. At least I did not notice any difference in performance.

2. Memory. It has 16GB of RAM, which is enough to do the majority of the development tasks. Such amount of RAM is not necessary for an ordinary office/home user or probably a gamer, but for a developer who frequently runs memory intensive tasks this is very good. You can also run 2 - 3 VMs simultaneously.

3. CPU. This is Intel Core i7-8550U. It is good enough for most of the development tasks so you don't feel crippled. However, comparing it to a four year old Intel Core i7-4770HQ from my old ASUS it did not bring any significant improvement in performance. Energy consumption - maybe, but this is not important for me.

4. Operating system. It is Windows 10 Professional 64-bit. This basically means that you will be able to connect to a domain out of the box without a necessity to spend money to upgrade from Home to Pro. Something that home users don't care about, but important for a corporate user.

5. Screen. A decent 17.3 inch matte screen. You can work outdoors. It doesn't look so nice and the colors are not so crisp as they usually look in the showroom on many laptops, but come on, if you go outside you won't see anything on a non-matte screen. Especially, if you have some bright objects behind you. Especially in Australia with its intense sun.

6. Connectors. The majority of the connectors are grouped on the right side of the laptop, which gives your workplace a tidier look rather than having an "octopus" on a desk.

7. The price. This laptop costs about AUD $1900, which is very cheap for a laptop with such characteristics. If you want something similar you will have probably buy a gamer's laptop charged with a super-duper graphics card and the price will be much higher than this one. A simple check for a laptop with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD on the Harvey Norman site will give you only two laptops in the 2500 - 2700 price range and one of them will be Surface and another one will be Lenovo Yoga with a 13.3 screen.

8. The power supply unit is small comparing to others. Doesn't take as much space in the bag and most important it is not as heavy as others, which means that it is less likely to get self-unplugged from the power cord and fall at your foot or your desk smashing a coffee mug 2 seconds after you pull it out of the wall socket.

Cons:

1. The CPU could be faster. As I said before its speed is almost the same as a 4 year old CPU from my previous laptop. It is okay for the most development tasks such as compiling a couple of millions lines of code, but its performance is not enough if you want to process images or video. Err-r-r-r... you can do it, but it won't be fast.

2. The cooling system sucks. When CPU load hits about 20%, which happens quite frequently when you run something like Visual Studio or NetBeans the fan starts spinning and you won't like it. It is loud. My both old laptops (one ASUS, other is Gigabyte Q2756) loaded with i7-4770HQ/MQ processors either don't even start their fans or do it so quietly so I can barely hear them, especially ASUS.

3. The case is made of some silver plastic which is not at all scratch resistant. Even a slight touch by a firm object leaves traces.

4. The keyboard is hopeless because of both its layout and size. Not only it has a reduced set of cursor keys with the arrows up and down compressed into a single key, but it also lacks the context menu key. F-keys are tiny and the numbers on them are barely visible. At the same time this laptop is a 17.3 laptop and there is plenty of space from all sides of the keyboard. Fortunately, this rarely bothers me as I normally use Microsoft Natural or Ergonomic keyboard, which is much better than any other keyboard that exists in the nature.

5. Bloatware. The laptop is full with bloatware including HP and third-party programs which I deleted almost immediately after setting up. This also has a nasty program called Flow.exe, which is a part of the Conexant audio driver and which causes lots of performance problems. HP support forum has quite a bit of cries of the angry people, regarding this program. Fortunately, there is a solution.

6. The laptop size is somewhat a problem. I found that it doesn't fit a single bag or backpack I have. This means that in order to bring it to home and back I will need a new case or a backpack that might be too large for other means.