HP EliteBook 8540w Pro Reviews

While the semi-rugged design of the EliteBook 8540w won't suit the most taxing outdoor use, its tough chassis, great usability and stunning performance make it ideal for busy urban professionals. Packed with style and features, it makes a fantastic rugged workstation.

More than just an inch bigger in the screen department, the HP EliteBook 8540w adds plenty of extra high-speed connectivity and a professionally qualified graphics processor. For powerful processing and rendering on a portable workstation, the HP EliteBook 8540w is a tough cookie, and tough to beat.

Reaching a rating of almost 93%, the HP Worksation leads our overall rankings board. This is reason enough to take a closer look at some of the other available configurations of this notebook. In this review, our featured model comes with Intel i5-520M CPU, ATI FirePro M5800 GPU and 1600x900 TFT display.

The HP EliteBook 8540w is an attractive and versatile mobile workstation that's tougher than it looks.

The HP EliteBook 8540w Mobile Workstation had very solid performance in our tests, combined with excellent looks and build quality, topped off with an equally impressive sub-$2,000 price-point. Right now the MSRP of $1,679 is the current going rate with sales few and far between. Compared to the standard EliteBook 8540p with a very similar configuration and performance, it's roughly $300 and change more. With the recent drop in SSDs and hybrid hard drives we were surprised to see no higher performing drives trickle down into the pre-configured models. A slightly more affordable 8540w is also offered with a Core i5 processor and ATI FirePro M5800 for $1,469 for users on a tighter budget. Overall if you are in the market for a Workstation-class notebook, the HP EliteBook series is highly recommended.

HP's workstation, Elitebook 8540w, is impressive. Very good manufacturing quality meets a very generous configuration, it's complemented with good graphics and very good CPU performance data, equipped with a very good display and convinces with acceptable emission rates, depending on the demand.