HP EliteBook 8560w

HP's newest mobile workstation, the HP EliteBook 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 processor, 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, 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 fully rugged systems like the Dell Latitude E6420 XFR ($5,612 direct, 3.5 stars). The EliteBook 8560w is also spill-resistant, complete with a drain in the bottom of the chassis to remove any potentially damaging liquids.

The laptop measures 1.5 by 15 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 7.1 pounds?significantly thicker and heavier than a top-of-the-line consumer laptop like the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Late 2011 Refresh) ($1,799 direct, 4 stars), which weighs only 5.2 pounds and is 0.94 inch thick. Compared with other mobile workstations, however, it's a featherweight?the Editors' Choice Lenovo ThinkPad W700 ($4240 direct, 4.5 stars) tipped the scales at nine pounds.

The lid is covered with aluminum, with a hairline brushed finish radiating out in concentric circles from the blue-white glowing HP logo in the center of the lid. The lid is attached with a beefy-looking metal hinge that runs most of the laptop's length. The hinge holds the screen steady, with little to no flexing even when pressure is put on the lid. Just above the screen, HP includes a 720p webcam. The 15.6-inch widescreen display is no joke either, with 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, LED backlighting, and a matte finish. The backlighting could be just a bit brighter, but it still offered lively colors, deep blacks, and crisp details. The accompanying SRS Premium Sound produces passable audio, but when I turned up the speakers to enjoy some Jimi Hendrix, the sound thinned out at high volume.

The EliteBook 8560w has a full-sized keyboard, with black tile keys and a full numeric pad. The whole thing is backlit, with bright white LEDs and very little light leakage. In the center of the keyboard is a bright orange pointing stick, similar to that seen on the Lenovo W700, but with a bumpy concave surface instead of a textured, rounded nub. Made of a harder rubber, the stick tended to be rather stiff and didn't adequately grip my fingertip during use, making it one of the few details that fell flat. The touchpad, on the other hand, is a pleasure to use. The glass-surfaced touchpad is 4.25 inches wide. There are three buttons (right, left and a center scrolling button), with a set below the touchpad and above for use with the pointing stick.

Features
The EliteBook 8560w bristles with ports and connectors, with connections for USB 3.0, USB 2.0, eSATA/USB 2.0, and FireWire 400, along with jacks for headphones and microphone and a media-card slot on the front. Connecting to an external monitor or projector is simple with the inclusion of both VGA and a full-sized DisplayPort, and with AMD's Eyefinity technology, you can connect and run up to five displays at once. You'll also find an ExpressCard/54 slot for expanding your hardware capabilities and a case-lock slot that lets you lock the whole thing down when needed.

On the right of the laptop you'll find a dual-layer DVD+-RW optical drive. On the back of the laptop, in addition to Gigabit Ethernet, you'll find a modem connection. The 56Kbps modem might be a bit of a throwback, but the built-in 802.11n WLAN worked just fine in our tests, and Bluetooth 3.0 lets you sync your wireless peripherals with ease.

Internally, you'll find a 500GB 7,200-rpm hard drive, along with an embedded TPM security chip, a smart card reader, and HP ProtectTools. The last is a suite of tools designed to provide IT-friendly security, with everything from drive encryption and credential management to facial recognition and remote lock-down tools should a laptop be lost or stolen. Intel vPro provides remote IT assistance, even over corporate wireless networks or outside corporate firewalls through a wired LAN connection. It allows everything from maintenance and management to security (such as wiping a drive full of sensitive information) remotely.

HP provides plenty of other tools as well, from HP Power Assistant, which lets you manage your power usage, to HP DayStarter, which displays your calendar and battery level during boot-up, and HP QuickWeb, which gives you near-instant Web access without having to wait for the system to boot up. Other bundled software includes Microsoft Office Starter 2010, Roxio MyDVD, PDF Complete, and a 60-day trial subscription to Norton Internet Security. HP covers the EliteBook 8560w with a three-year warranty that offers not only parts and labor coverage, but three years of labor on-site.

Performance
ISV (Independent Software Vendor) certification means that the graphics hardware, an AMD FirePro M5950 with 1GB of VRAM, has been tested and shown to be compatible with a broad array of software for engineering, design, digital content creation and more?Autodesk AutoCAD, DS Solidworks, Siemens PLMS Solid Edge, Adobe After Effects, and a laundry list of other programs that would cripple most consumer-grade systems.

In our 3DMark 06 graphics tests, the EliteBook 8560w scored 12,981 points at standardized settings (1,024-by-768 resolution, no anti-aliasing), and 7,471 points at native 1,920-by-1,080 resolution with 4X anti-aliasing. By comparison, the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch scored 11,180 at lower settings, but the tricked-out Alienware M14x R3 ($2,002.99 direct, 3.5 stars) gaming laptop cranked out 13,543 points at the same resolution. Though no one is likely to be buying the EliteBook 8560w for gaming, the heavy-duty graphics processor produced impressive scores in our gaming tests, hitting 86.8 frames per second in Crysis (at low resolution) and 11.8 fps at native resolution. In Lost Planet 2, it managed 78.9 fps at medium quality and 26.0 fps at 1,920-by-1,080.

Graphics aren't the only part of the equation, however, and the real test of any workstation is its ability to crank through a heavy processing load. The EliteBook 8560w is equipped with a 2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-2630QM processor paired with 8GB of DDR3 memory. As a result, the EliteBook 8560w scored 2,589 points in PCMark 7, putting it in the midst of leading consumer laptops, like the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (2,235 points) and the Samsung Series 7 (NP700Z5A-S03) ($1,299 list, 4 stars) (2,697 points). It also produced top scores in processor-intensive media tasks such as Photoshop CS5 (3 minutes 57 seconds) and Handbrake (1 minute 36 seconds). These scores beat out last year's HP EliteBook 8740w ($1,999 direct, 4 stars) (Photoshop 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 EliteBook 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 space?the Lenovo W700 lasted 2:31 (with a 96Wh battery), and the EliteBook 8740w only 50 minutes (with a 73Wh battery)?and HP offers additional power management that will extend the battery life even further, as well as letting you track your power usage and potentially reduce your fleet's carbon footprint.

In the mobile workstation category, where top-of-the-line components are tweaked and optimized for 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.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE
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