Old school, it's time for you to change your book! HP Shadow Elf 4 new review

IT168 evaluation every year to the fourth quarter, is the retail industry "punch performance" time, for the PC industry is also so. The traditional "golden nine silver ten" golden week will promote a huge purchasing power, many consumers will also wait until this time to start a new notebook products. For laptop manufacturers, they are also willing to promote some of the "good and sitting" of the classic sequel, which HP Shadow Genie as the market as a durable game book series, but also in the fourth quarter of the new departure.

For some of the older students who have already graduated, the old laptop on hand has been quite old, purchased from the freshman school so far has been the fourth year, on the "Jedi Survival" and other popular games are not able to cope with, more unable to cope with the next graduation into the social work needs. Especially in the last three or four years, laptop performance has been updated very quickly.

Earlier years, some netizens jokingly referred to Intel as a "toothpaste factory", each time the launch of a new CPU is to squeeze toothpaste in general, "a small increase", but this year's eighth-generation Core let a person see the light. According to Intel's official test results, its computing performance compared to last year's seventh-generation Core increased by as much as 40 percent, completely belonging to the "qualitative leap".

The arrival of HP's new Shadow Elf 4 is just in time.

The HP Shadow Elf 4 has a classic look, with a red X line and carbon fiber that shows off the personality and energy of young people. From the first glance, you wouldn't think it's a big screen book with a 15.6-inch screen. Thanks to the new 7.03mm micro-bezel design, the HP Shadow Elf 4 only uses a mold similar to that of a 14-inch laptop, making portability relatively good.

Performance:

First, let's take a look at the performance increase of Intel's 8th-generation Core i5-8300H, a 2.3GHz standard-voltage processor. With a score of 173 points in CINEBENCH R15 scoring software, the computing performance is not up to the heights of the i7-770K, but it's more powerful than the i7-4770K, i7-3930K and i7-3770K CPUs, and there's no shortcoming in the pairing of 8G of RAM and a 128G SSD.

As the saying goes, "A good horse goes with a good saddle", the HP Shadow Elf 4, in addition to the 8th Generation Core i5-8300H processor, also adopts a 128GB M.2 PCIE SSD+1TB HDD hybrid hard disk solution, giving full play to the advantages of the Coffee Lake-H platform. Measured read and write speeds are surprisingly high at 1682.39MB/s, and read speeds are up to 534.91MB/s. This speed performance will be twice as effective for loading large games and large programs.

PCMARK10 Basic Mode Test:

PCMARK10 Game Mode Test:

The HP ShadowElf 4 comes with a "Berserk Mode" (High Performance Mode), and through the PCMARK 10 Basic Mode and Game Mode Tests, it can be seen that "Rampage Mode" corresponds to the score range. In Game Mode, the HP ShadowElf 4 scored 4304 points, which is 692 points higher than the basic mode. Such a huge performance boost can help improve the image quality and frame rate of certain 3D games that eat graphics cards.

3D Mark GPU performance test:

In the 3D Mark test, you can see that the HP ShadowElf 4 scored 20,823 points in SkyDiver mode, and 8,604 points in FireStrike mode, which is clearly the high level of performance that the GTX1060 deserves. For students, not only do they have no problem playing mainstream 3D large games, but they can also meet the needs of 4K video editing, CAD graphic design and production when they join the workforce in the future.

HP Shadow Wizard 4 body dimensions of only 360mm x 263mm x 26 mm, which is many 15.6-inch notebook unattainable "body". At the same time, the HP Shadow Elf 4 also improved the internal cooling system, unexpectedly added a separate heat pipe to the PCH, cooling effect compared to the previous generation has been significantly improved. The bottom is below normal human body temperatures except for the air outlet location, which is on the hot side.

Enabling HP's "Rampage Mode" to squeeze the maximum performance out of the GTX1060, which boosts CPU power consumption to 40W for a 30-minute dual-core test, the CPU and graphics card occupancy rate reached 100 percent through FurMark and AIDA64, and the peak CPU core temperature was 84 degrees Celsius after ten minutes. The peak temperature of the CPU core was 84°C after ten minutes. However, the average temperature of the C-case of the HP Shadow Elf 4 is only 48℃ or so, the main heat area is located in the air vents above the keyboard, and the keyboard area is only lukewarm. Personally, I think the heat generation of the HP Shadow Elf 4 is moderate, slightly accompanied by a bit of fan rotation sound, but the noise level is also within the acceptable range of consumers.

Built-in software:

HP Shadow Elf 4 has a built-in set of its own software optimization software OMEN Command Center, which is able to always monitor the performance of the game book, but also able to be a switching mode, and its performance mode (Berserk Mode) is able to enhance the overall performance of the CPU and graphics card performance, which is better suited to gaming environments; and the network booster can help the game The GIGABYTE DualBIOS? is a patented technology that automatically recovers BIOS data when the main BIOS has crashed or failed, and automatically recovers all BIOS data when the main BIOS has crashed or failed.

The ShadowElf 4 is also equipped with HP's exclusive Headphone X technology, which can simulate a 3D surround effect, and with headphones on, it helps you to accurately determine the enemy's location and seize the first opportunity to shoot at the last moment of the "chicken" game. The game streaming function is able to turn old computers into treasures, and at the same time, you can control your computer remotely through the function, which is very beneficial to the office often lost partners. In addition, users can customize the keyboard backlighting through OMEN Command Center.

Next we'll focus on Performance Mode (Rampage Mode) and Game Streaming.

Performance Mode is the mode that HP ShadowElf 4 is specially prepared for gamers, and from the actual testing and gaming experience, we found that its CPU and graphics card performance can be effectively improved, while its excellent heat dissipation brought by the increased fan speed ensures that HP ShadowElf 4 Generation's comprehensive gaming performance, and also ensures that long-time game playing won't be affected by the performance due to downclocking and other reasons.

And game streaming can turn your old PC into a treasure, and it doesn't require any external cables. In practice, we utilized a five-year-old desktop PC to control the Shadow Elf 4, and the gaming experience was very smooth on the same network, indeed without any lag. Therefore, the HP Shadow Elf 4's "game streaming" function is the perfect solution to the problem of idle desktop PCs and all-in-one PCs at home, external 17-inch, 19-inch or 21-inch as you like.

Game experience:

"Survival of the Jedi":

Before the test, in the image settings of "Survival of the Jedi", the resolution was manually set to 1920x1080, and the FPS limit in the game was set to "unlimited", and then the overall quality, anti-aliasing, post-processing, shadows, textures, special effects, and trees are all adjusted to ultra-high, fully squeezing the extreme performance of the GTX1060's unique graphics.

After entering the Chicken game screen, the image quality of the entire game is no problem, whether it's the light and shadow in the distance or the objects in the near distance, such as weeds, hills and buildings, they are all very clear and natural. However, the game's frame rate varies greatly from scene to scene, basically fluctuating up and down with the number of 3D-modeled objects, such as when there are more and more houses and more and more enemies on the same screen, the frame rate dips to a certain extent.

In 1080P ultra-high quality, the HP Shadow Gen 4 game frame rate can reach a maximum of about 75fps, the lowest is about 53fps, while the average frame rate reached 61.5fps, the entire game process without any lag phenomenon, and will not appear to skip frames, and in the game of chicken in various scenes can run smoothly. HP Shadow Elf 4 generation equipped with the GTX1060 graphics card can be said to be the game of the sharp, to meet the requirements of gamers for this game of top picture quality top effects.

Medium-quality Tomb Raider test:

Tomb Raider game is recognized as "eat graphics card", the general set of graphics or entry solo models certainly can not run. How does the HP Shadow Elf 4 perform? We started with medium quality settings, setting the presets, material quality, shadow quality, etc. to "medium". We ended up with 99.59 fps for the mountaintop scene, 68.55 fps for the Syria scene, 78.12 fps for the geothermal valley, and an overall score of 82.88 fps, which is pretty impressive.

High-quality Tomb Raider test:

Take a look at the high-quality performance, set the preset, texture quality, shadow quality, detail level, etc. to "high", I found that the actual picture quality has been improved, especially the light and shadow effects of this piece more realistic. The frame rate of the mountain top was 93.26 fps, the frame rate of Syria was 69.78 fps, the frame rate of the geothermal valley was 71.07 fps, and the overall score was 78.52 fps. I'm hanging on for dear life, and recommend HP Shadow Elf 4 owners to go straight to high quality for this game.

Exterior:

Back to the hardware exterior of this product. One of the biggest appearance features of the HP Shadow Elf 4 is the narrow-bezel screen design, which provides users with a wider field of view and better video and audio gaming; at the same time, the narrow-bezel design also greatly reduces the size of the body, so that the 15.6-inch screen can be integrated into the body of a conventional notebook of 14 inches or so, more portable. In addition, the HP Shadow Elf 4 also provides users with a 144Hz screen version, which effectively improves the smoothness of the screen image and brings a better gaming experience, and the version we tested this time is a 60Hz screen.

The HP Shadow Elf 4 is also as good as it gets in terms of body details, with the entire C-side, except for the keyboard portion, featuring brushed metal. The large trackpad design also reduces the reliance on a mouse to a certain extent, helping to facilitate on-the-go office scenarios. In addition the Shadow Genie 4 also features a center flip design that raises the height of the display to create a better visual effect.

In terms of body interface expansion, HP Shadow Elf 4 can be said to be inexhaustible. In particular, a large number of ports are designed on the top, which are RJ-45 network cable port, USB 3.1 Gen1 port, HDMI port, Mini DP port, Thunderbolt 3 port and anti-theft lock hole.

The left side of the fuselage has a USB 3.1 Gen1 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microphone jack and an SD card reader. For people like me who are cool with DSLR photos, having a card reader is really too convenient.

On the right side of the HP Shadow Wizard 4 are the power connector, USB 3.1 Gen1 port and hard disk status light. As you should have noticed by writing this, the HP Shadow Wizard 4 doesn't have a mixed USB 2.0/USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen1 design like many notebook manufacturers do in order to reduce costs, and all three USB ports are the latest USB 3.1 Gen1 standard, which fully meets the needs of multiple storage devices used in parallel.

In terms of keyboard design, the HP Shadow Genie 4 also adopts a 4-zone independent light control design for gaming scenarios that can strengthen the live atmosphere. The 26-key punchless full-size keyboard also ensures a great feel for gaming and typing, and with the soft RGB backlighting, you can use the keyboard accurately without the use of external light sources.

In terms of weight, the HP Shadow Elf 4 weighs just 2.48kg bare, and with the original ultra-thin power supply the travel weight is measured to be 3.114kg. for most students, not only is it easy to commute to and from their dorm rooms and classrooms, but the laptop can also be carried freely in a travel backpack.

Review Summary:

In summary, the HP Shadow Elf 4 has high configuration, high screen-to-body ratio, and high value, which is in line with the needs and expectations of the student population for gaming notebooks. Combined with the pricing of $7,599 for the GTX1060 solo version, the Shadow Elf 4 has a strong price/performance ratio across the gaming notebook market. The combination of Intel's 8th generation Core i5-8300H processor and 8G RAM, 128G SSD and 1TB mechanical hard drive, plus the configuration of the 6G solo GTX1060 mid-range and high-end graphics card is bound to be one of the most competitive products during the National Day Golden Week, and we recommend that all new and old students look for the right time to get started.

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