An Impressive Travel Laptop: Living With an HP Dragonfly G4

pcmag.com:

HP’s Dragonfly G4 is, as the name suggests, the fourth generation of a business laptop HP positions as a little more refined—thinner, lighter—than its traditional EliteBook series of machines. Previous generations were known as the Elite Dragonfly, but as HP has started to use the name for other markets— including the small-business-oriented Dragonfly Pro—the "Elite" part of the name has dropped. Still, there’s no doubt that the Dragonfly G4 comes across as a relatively minor upgrade to last year’s Elite Dragonfly G3, enhanced with the 13th Generation Core processor ("Raptor Lake") and some unusual extra videoconferencing features.

I've been using the Dragonfly G4 for a few weeks now, and it's impressive—a great machine to travel with, with a nice selection of ports, a very good keyboard, improved security, and an excellent webcam in a very lightweight package.

One big difference in this year's model is the processor—an Intel Core i7-1365U. Like Intel's i7-1355, which I've seen in recent looks at the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 and X1 Yoga Gen 8, this has two performance cores (each offering two threads each) and eight efficient cores, thus a total of 10 cores and 12 threads. It has a base power of 15 watts, with a maximum frequency of 5.2GHz on the performance cores and 3.9GHz on the efficient cores (versus a maximum of 5.0GHz and 3.7GHz, respectively, on the i7-1355). Compared to the Elite Dragonfly G3, which had an Intel Core i7-1265U (Alder Lake) processor, it has a higher turbo frequency but otherwise seems similar.

In my tests, despite the faster theoretical maximum turbo, the Dragonfly G4 was generally a bit slower than the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 and a bit faster than the Elite Dragonfly G3 on basic