MARCH 2020 PCWorld 61measures ranging from prudent to Draconian.
As with all security procedures, the levels of
pain are up to the administrator.CPU PERFORMANCE
The Elite Dragonfly’s performance reflects the
priorities of corporate laptops, which put
security and reliability over raw speed. You
can see that odd dynamic right here: The
8th-gen Core i7-8665U in the Elite Dragonfly
has a higher clock speed than the common
consumer Core i7-8565U CPU. But one look
below and you won’t see it.
Maxon’s 3D rendering Cinebench R15
benchmark, which measures a CPU’s multi-
threaded performance, shows the Elite
Dragonfly under-performing against laptops
with slower CPUs.
When we task Cinebench with using a
single CPU core, the situation doesn’t change
much: The Dragonfly is still a little slower than
most other laptops. The good news is that in
single-threaded tasks—which is the bulk of
what’s done on small, thin laptops—it’s not a
big deal at all.
Our harshest test of a CPU uses the free
HandBrake utility to encode a 30GB 1080p
file. The task typically takes an hour on thin-
and-light laptops, and it stresses the cooling
capabilities of any laptop. We again see the
Elite Dragonfly underperform other laptops.
If you’re starting to wonder just why the
CPU has a higher boost clock on paper, but is
actually slower, the reason is that it’s a businesswhich is an indication of its accuracy.
OLEOPHOBIC COATING
Here’s another fairly unique feature on the
Elite Dragonfly: an oleophobic coating to
help it repel fingerprints and other greasy
marks. We tested it against our typical snack
fare, and found it effectively repelled most
smudges from fingers that had recently
handled corn chips and nacho tortilla chips.
However, it was no match for the gold
standard of potato chips, which caused our
fingers to leave a snail-like trail on the palm
rest. The oleophobic coating helps, but don’t
expect it to work miracles.
SECURITY FEATURES
APLENTY
As a corporate laptop, the Elite Dragonfly is
hardened against attacks, including those to
the BIOS. HP says it can both detect scary
UEFI-targeting root kits and recover from
them. The Dragonfly also integrates
Bromium’s security technology (go.pcworld.
com/brom) in its Sure Click feature. It
basically takes the sandboxing approach of
many browsers, but enforces it in hardware.
Set up as a consumer would, the Sure
Click would automatically sandbox PDF files
in micro-virtual machines. By default, risky
attachments are opened in micro-virtual
machines using the Chromium browser.
With its hardware-based security, the Elite
Dragonfly lets you set up the laptop with