Gone are the times when notebooks and gaming laptops lagged behind their stationary desktop counterparts. These days you can buy a desktop-grade notebook in a 14″ form factor with roughly the same performance levels as modern gaming desktops. The most obvious example is the ASUS Zephyrus G14. Despite featuring the Max-Q version of the RTX 2060, it manages to offer performance comparable to the vanilla RTX 2060.
In this post, we’ll be having a look at the HP Shadow Elf which has now been upgraded to feature the 11th Gen Intel Core and Ryzen 5000H processors. On the GPU side, you have the option to choose between the RTX 3050, 3050 Ti, 3070, and yes, the RTX 3080 Ti.
The maxed-out configuration of the Shadow Elf features the Intel Core i9-11900H and the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory, and 1 TB of SSD storage. The screen size has grown from 15.6″ to 16.1″, not bad considering the massive improvement in CPU and GPU performance. The bezels have been compressed, increasing the screen size, bringing the screen-to-body ratio close to 81%.
In terms of the display, you can choose up to a 2K screen with up to 165Hz refresh rate and a response time of 3 ms. Considering the availability of the potent RTX 3080 Ti, you should be easily able to max out the frame rates at 1440p even at the highest quality presets.
The Shadow Elf 7 comes with a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, offering read speeds of up to 7GB/s and writes of 5GB/s (sequential) which is plenty impressive for a notebook. To keep this monster cool, the cooling mechanism has also undergone an overhaul. We’re looking at a two-in, three-out, and five-air duct design with 97-blade fans.
Finally, the gaming laptop also supports DC dimming, passes the blue light eye protection certification, filtering 29% of the blue light without affecting the color pallet.
