Intel Core i7-2630QM processor and ISV-certified AMD graphics. Business-rugged construction. Touchpad is large and luxurious. Multiple options for connecting external displays. HP packs a battery of tools to manage and protect your laptop. Cons Pointing stick is stiff, lacks traction. Mediocre audio.

1. February 11, 2012
batteryfast.co.uk
HP EliteBook 8560w Reviews
HP EliteBook 8560w Reviews graphics, and a laundry list of top-notch
features.
CloudTags: HP laptop , EliteBook 8560w , hp battery
uk , Hp probook 4310s laptop battery , Hp pavilion HP’s newest mobile workstation, the HP EliteBook
dv6 batteries 8560w ($1,579 direct), proves that there’s just no
replacement for a fully featured workstation laptop.
Plenty of professionals can get by with a standard
business laptop, but engineers, architects, and digital
artists quickly find that run-of-the-mill just doesn’t
cut it. Sometimes you need better, more powerful
tools. The HP EliteBook 8560w is packed to the gills
with powerful components like a quad-core pro-
cessor, ISV-certified graphics, and everything you
need to keep a system safe and secure, and it takes
the top spot among mobile workstations as our new
Editors’ Choice.
Design
The EliteBook 8560w has HP’s DuraCase, a durable
aluminum skin covering a magnesium alloy chassis,
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/hp-elitebook-8560w-reviews/
and featuring a smudge-resistant finish. The chiseled
good looks of the gunmetal grey belie the fact that
this system is built tough, meeting MIL-STD 810G
standards for shock, vibration, temperature, and
altitude—the only laptops with more durability are
• Pros Intel Core i7-2630QM processor and fully rugged systems like the Dell Latitude E6420
ISV-certified AMD graphics. Business-rug- XFR ($5,612 direct, 3.5 stars). The EliteBook 8560w
ged construction. Touchpad is large and is also spill-resistant, complete with a drain in the
luxurious. Multiple options for connecting bottom of the chassis to remove any potentially da-
external displays. HP packs a battery of maging liquids.
tools to manage and protect your laptop.
• Cons Pointing stick is stiff, lacks traction.
Mediocre audio.
• Bottom Line The HP EliteBook 8560w is
the go-to workstation laptop when you
need performance and power to spare. It
offers quad-core processing, ISV-certified
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2. February 11, 2012
batteryfast.co.uk
HP EliteBook 8560w Reviews
View Slideshow See all (8) slides button), with a set below the touchpad and above
for use with the pointing stick.
The laptop measures 1.5 by 15 by 10.2 inches (HWD)
and weighs 7.1 pounds—significantly thicker and Features
heavier than a top-of-the-line consumer laptop like
the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Late 2011 Refresh) The EliteBook 8560w bristles with ports and connec-
($1,799 direct, 4 stars), which weighs only 5.2 pounds tors, with connections for USB 3.0, USB 2.0, eSATA/
and is 0.94 inch thick. Compared with other mobile USB 2.0, and FireWire 400, along with jacks for
workstations, however, it’s a featherweight—the Edi- headphones and microphone and a media-card slot
tors’ Choice Lenovo ThinkPad W700 ($4240 direct, on the front. Connecting to an external monitor or
4.5 stars) tipped the scales at nine pounds. projector is simple with the inclusion of both VGA
and a full-sized DisplayPort, and with AMD’s Eyefi-
The lid is covered with aluminum, with a hairline nity technology, you can connect and run up to five
brushed finish radiating out in concentric circles displays at once. You’ll also find an ExpressCard/54
from the blue-white glowing HP logo in the center slot for expanding your hardware capabilities and
of the lid. The lid is attached with a beefy-looking a case-lock slot that lets you lock the whole thing
metal hinge that runs most of the laptop’s length. down when needed.
The hinge holds the screen steady, with little to no
flexing even when pressure is put on the lid. Just On the right of the laptop you’ll find a dual-layer
above the screen, HP includes a 720p webcam. The DVD+-RW optical drive. On the back of the laptop,
15.6-inch widescreen display is no joke either, with in addition to Gigabit Ethernet, you’ll find a modem
1,920-by-1,080 resolution, LED backlighting, and a connection. The 56Kbps modem might be a bit of a
matte finish. The backlighting could be just a bit throwback, but the built-in 802.11n WLAN worked
brighter, but it still offered lively colors, deep blacks, just fine in our tests, and Bluetooth 3.0 lets you sync
and crisp details. The accompanying SRS Premium your wireless peripherals with ease.
Sound produces passable audio, but when I turned
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/hp-elitebook-8560w-reviews/
up the speakers to enjoy some Jimi Hendrix, the Internally, you’ll find a 500GB 7,200-rpm hard
sound thinned out at high volume. drive, along with an embedded TPM security chip,
a smart card reader, and HP ProtectTools. The last
The EliteBook 8560w has a full-sized keyboard, with is a suite of tools designed to provide IT-friendly
black tile keys and a full numeric pad. The whole security, with everything from drive encryption
thing is backlit, with bright white LEDs and very and credential management to facial recognition
little light leakage. In the center of the keyboard is and remote lock-down tools should a laptop be lost
a bright orange pointing stick, similar to that seen or stolen. Intel vPro provides remote IT assistance,
on the Lenovo W700, but with a bumpy concave even over corporate wireless networks or outside
surface instead of a textured, rounded nub. Made corporate firewalls through a wired LAN connec-
of a harder rubber, the stick tended to be rather stiff tion. It allows everything from maintenance and
and didn’t adequately grip my fingertip during use, management to security (such as wiping a drive
making it one of the few details that fell flat. The full of sensitive information) remotely.
touchpad, on the other hand, is a pleasure to use. The
glass-surfaced touchpad is 4.25 inches wide. There HP provides plenty of other tools as well, from HP
are three buttons (right, left and a center scrolling Power Assistant, which lets you manage your power
usage, to HP DayStarter, which displays your ca-
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3. February 11, 2012
batteryfast.co.uk
HP EliteBook 8560w Reviews
lendar and laptop battery uk level during boot-up, duty graphics processor produced impressive scores
and HP QuickWeb, which gives you near-instant in our gaming tests, hitting 86.8 frames per second
Web access without having to wait for the system to in Crysis (at low resolution) and 11.8 fps at native
boot up. Other bundled software includes Microsoft resolution. In Lost Planet 2, it managed 78.9 fps at
Office Starter 2010, Roxio MyDVD, PDF Complete, medium quality and 26.0 fps at 1,920-by-1,080.
and a 60-day trial subscription to Norton Internet
Security. HP covers the EliteBook 8560w with a Graphics aren’t the only part of the equation, howe-
three-year warranty that offers not only parts and ver, and the real test of any workstation is its abi-
labor coverage, but three years of labor on-site. lity to crank through a heavy processing load. The
EliteBook 8560w is equipped with a 2GHz quad-
Performance core Intel Core i7-2630QM processor paired with
8GB of DDR3 memory. As a result, the EliteBook
ISV (Independent Software Vendor) certification 8560w scored 2,589 points in PCMark 7, putting it
means that the graphics hardware, an AMD FirePro in the midst of leading consumer laptops, like the
M5950 with 1GB of VRAM, has been tested and shown Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (2,235 points) and the
to be compatible with a broad array of software for Samsung Series 7 (NP700Z5A-S03) ($1,299 list, 4
engineering, design, digital content creation and stars) (2,697 points). It also produced top scores in
more—Autodesk AutoCAD, DS Solidworks, Siemens processor-intensive media tasks such as Photoshop
PLMS Solid Edge, Adobe After Effects, and a laun- CS5 (3 minutes 57 seconds) and Handbrake (1 mi-
dry list of other programs that would cripple most nute 36 seconds). These scores beat out last year’s
consumer-grade systems. HP EliteBook 8740w ($1,999 direct, 4 stars) (Pho-
toshop 4:27, Handbrake 2:52), and rank alongside
the best-equipped civilian laptops, like the Series
7 (Photoshop 3:39, Handbrake 1:37).
Despite all of the high-powered hardware, the Elite-
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/hp-elitebook-8560w-reviews/
Book 8560w’s 83Whr battery managed to provide
3 hours 30 minutes of life in our MobileMark 2007
test. It may not take you through a full workday
without plugging into wall power, but the 8560w
is large enough to be more of a deskbound device
anyway. That 3:30 time actually makes the HP one
of the longer-lived entries in the mobile workstation
In our 3DMark 06 graphics tests, the EliteBook space—the Lenovo W700 lasted 2:31 (with a 96Wh
8560w scored 12,981 points at standardized settings battery), and the EliteBook 8740w only 50 minutes
(1,024-by-768 resolution, no anti-aliasing), and 7,471 (with a 73Wh battery)—and HP offers additional
points at native 1,920-by-1,080 resolution with 4X power management that will extend the battery
anti-aliasing. By comparison, the Apple MacBook life even further, as well as letting you track your
Pro 15-inch scored 11,180 at lower settings, but the power usage and potentially reduce your fleet’s
tricked-out Alienware M14x R3 ($2,002.99 direct, 3.5 carbon footprint.
stars) gaming laptop cranked out 13,543 points at
the same resolution. Though no one is likely to be In the mobile workstation category, where top-of-
buying the EliteBook 8560w for gaming, the heavy- the-line components are tweaked and optimized for
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4. February 11, 2012
batteryfast.co.uk
HP EliteBook 8560w Reviews
security and IT-friendly operation, the HP EliteBook
8560w is clearly the laptop to choose. With quad-core
processing, ISV-certified graphics, a choice display
and HP’s extensive collection of tools and utilities,
the HP EliteBook 8560w replaces the aging Lenovo
ThinkPad W700 as our Editors’ Choice for mobile
workstations.
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