HP EliteBook X G2i Review

Design and Keyboard

• Surprisingly light and stylish
• Varied port selection
• Tactile keyboard and trackpad

The EliteBook X G2i doesn’t feel like a business laptop – I know that sounds like an odd thing to say, but it has a lot more in common with stylish prosumer ultrabooks than anything else. It comes in a pleasant dark blue colourway, as some of the brand’s other laptops have, and feels excellent in hand with a durable magnesium alloy chassis.

This is a particular point of difference against older EliteBook models, which employed aluminium. By moving to magnesium alloy, it can aid in making a laptop lighter while still being especially durable – at 990g, it’s one of the lightest laptops you’ll find today, outside of the Asus Zenbook A14 (2026).

HP has also kitted this laptop out with a solid array of ports. On the left side, you’ll find a pair of Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C ports alongside a full-size HDMI and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right side is a further, albeit slower, USB-C port, a USB-A and a NanoSIM slot for optional 5G cellular connectivity – neat.

Open up the lid and you’ll be greeted with a smaller form factor keyboard that’s surprisingly tactile and responsive under finger. It’s quite a deep travel, while there is also some solid white backlighting underneath.

The EliteBook X G2i’s trackpad is rather large for a smaller laptop and it provides plenty of real estate for your fingers alongside having pleasant haptic clicks under finger.

Display and Sound

• Detailed, accurate OLED screen
• Zippy action and solid resolution
• Surprisingly capable speakers

HP has kitted out the EliteBook X G2i with a OLED panel, opting to go with a 14-inch 3K, or 2880×1800, resolution 120Hz option to benefit from zippy on-screen motion and solid detail.

As an OLED, the virtually perfect colour accuracy is no surprise. To be specific, we’re getting 100% coverage of both the mainstream sRGB and creative DCI-P3 gamuts, while Adobe RGB coverage at 92% is also excellent, making this screen an ideal pairing for both mainstream and more colour-sensitive workloads.

In addition, there are deep blacks and gorgeous contrast, with a measured 0.03 and 17430:1, respectively. The 6300K colour temperature is also pretty good, too.

This laptop also has surprisingly capable speakers, thanks to a quad array that HP has put inside. Audio is clear and decently detailed, and they can get surprisingly loud, too.

Performance

• Fast Panther Lake processor
• Much beefier integrated graphics
• Super fast SSD and solid RAM headroom

In terms of processor choice, the EliteBook X G2i sample I have features the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H, which is one of the top options available in this lineup, and in Intel’s new crop of Panther Lake processors.

It is, in essence, the follow-up to the potent Core Ultra 7 255H that impressed me inside the Acer Aspire Vero 16 (2025), which provided very similar performance to its beefier brother, the Core Ultra 9 285H in spite of it being a theoretically worse chip by name.

The Core Ultra X7 358H features 16 cores and 16 threads, the same as the higher-end Core Ultra X9 388H, but is downclocked to a boost of 4.8GHz against the X9’s 5.1GHz. Plus, there’s the same Intel Arc B390 iGPU with its 12 Xe3 cores that make for a hefty improvement over the Intel Arc 140T and 140V integrated graphics in last year’s chips.

As a quick refresh, Intel’s new Panther Lake chips aim to blend the gains we saw in the last generation of Intel’s mobile chips with the power of Arrow Lake H and the efficiency of Lunar Lake in a new range. They’re also built on Intel’s new 18A process that makes some small but noteworthy changes to the way transistors are made to make sure the processor is using as much of its power as efficiently as possible, in basic terms.

The synthetic benchmark scores in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 put this Core Ultra X7 chip as being marginally slower than the Core Ultra X9 388H found in the Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) in single-core loads, although it’s on par in multi-threaded benchmarking.  

These numbers are higher than both Arrow Lake H and Lunar Lake-powered laptops, not least owing to gains from the new architecture, plus it beats out some of last year’s AMD Strix Point laptops and trades blows with the AMD Strix Halo chip inside the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) and Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition.

As mentioned previously, the real gains of Panther Lake are more on the side of its integrated graphics, rather than its modest increase in raw grunt. The Intel Arc B390 iGPU that’s found in the top tier of these new Panther Lake chips features 12 of Intel’s new Xe3 cores with a major boost in raw power over last year’s offerings, resulting in a virtual doubling of the 3DMark Time Spy score over last year’s laptop model. 

It pushes this Panther Lake chip closer to the Strix Halo chips from last year, even if Intel isn’t quite on par with AMD in this regard. Nonetheless, this is a chip designed for a fully-fledged ultrabook, rather than a mini PC or gaming handheld, as it were, giving it a different appeal entirely.

My sample of the EliteBook X G2i came with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a solid 1TB SSD, providing decent storage headroom and some surprisingly brisk speeds for a business laptop. In fact, the SSD inside this HP laptop is one of the fastest I’ve tested, being a speedy PCIe 5.0 option – I measured reads and writes of 13,915.13 MB/s and 11,327.19 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Little bloatware in Windows 11
• Some HP-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC functionality is here

The EliteBook X G2i comes running full-fat Windows 11, and with a decently clean install, too. There isn’t much in the way of additional bloatware or unneeded third-party software, although you will find some HP-specific apps to greet you on startup.

Chief among these is MyHP, which is their catch-all system app where you can check on vitals such as system utilisation and configure settings such as power modes and energy optimisation. There is also HP’s own AI Companion nestled in the taskbar, along with the Support Assistant app for troubleshooting.

As well as having HP’s software, this is a Copilot+ PC, so it comes with Microsoft’s usual AI gubbins built into Windows, such as generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 14 hours 14 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one to two working days

The EliteBook X G2i comes with a more modest 68Whr cell inside, which the brand says should be good for up to 21 hours on a charge – considering the Panther Lake internals, I don’t imagine that’s far off the truth.

When dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running the PCMark 10 Modern Office test, this laptop lasted for 14 hours and 13 minutes. This means you’ll comfortably get through a couple of working days before needing to recharge.

HP doesn’t provide a charger with the EliteBook X G2i by default, although they supplied a compact 65W GaN charger with my sample, which was solid at getting go-juice back into the laptop. It took 37 minutes to get it back to 50%, while a full charge took 85 minutes.

Should you buy it?