Reviewing the HP ProBook 4 G1a, I discovered that it's a punchy platform at an attractive price for corporations, but it's not for power users

HP ProBook 4 G1a: 30-second review

The HP ProBook 4 G1a is a versatile and budget-friendly laptop designed for small businesses and educational institutions. Powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 250 processor, part of AMD's Ryzen 200 series that uses the Hawk Point refresh cores. This processor features eight cores and sixteen threads, with a base clock speed of 3.3 GHz and a maximum boost clock of 5.1 GHz. The integrated AMD Radeon 780M GPU, based on the RDNA 3 architecture, provides solid graphics performance for everyday tasks and supports up to four displays.

The 14-inch WUXGA display has a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels and a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is available in both touch and non-touch variants, with brightness levels ranging from 300 to 400 nits. It can come equipped with up to 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, which is upgradeable, and a 1 TB PCIe NVMe SSD. This ensures that the ProBook 4 G1a can handle multiple applications and large files with relative ease.

In terms of connectivity, the ProBook 4 G1a offers a range of ports, including two USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 USB-A ports, an HDMI port, an RJ-45 Ethernet port, and a headphone/microphone combo jack. The laptop also supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3, ensuring fast and reliable wireless connections. The inclusion of HP Wolf Pro Security provides robust protection against cyber threats, making it an understandable choice for business users.

The design of the ProBook 4 G1a is sleek and professional, with a weight of approximately 1.4 kg, making it a reasonably easy carry. And, a 56 Wh Li-ion polymer battery that supports fast charging should keep you operational for a long working day.

Overall, the HP ProBook 4 G1a is a well-rounded laptop that offers excellent value for money, making it an ideal choice for users who need a reliable and efficient device for everyday use. Maybe that doesn’t get it into our hallowed best business laptop collection, but it’s a serious contender for anyone needing a large number of machines for basic office use.

HP ProBook 4 G1a: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? From $973/£744/€860
• When is it out? Available now
• Where can you get it? Direct from HP or via Amazon

The HP ProBook 4 G1a comes in a wide range of SKUs that offer processor, memory and storage variations, and it’s also available as a user-customisable option.

The starting price from HP in the USA is $972.65 for a 14-inch display Ryzen 5 processor model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

What’s quite odd is that with the exact CPU, memory, and storage specification but a larger 16-inch panel, it’s actually much cheaper, selling for only $768.32.

For European customers, even the entry-level machines come with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and these start at only £743.99 in the UK.

For a machine with the review specification of AMD Ryzen 7 250 with Radeon 780M Graphics, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage, the UK price is £959.99, which seems highly reasonable for that spec. US customers will pay $1410.71 for that same configuration, which seems less of a bargain. Based on the exchange rate at the time of writing, the US version of this machine should cost $1,300.

Most of the competitor machines are using either the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H CPU (Dell Inspiron 14 Plus), or Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G5 AMD and Acer TravelMate P4).

All these machines are roughly in the same price range, going from $800 to $1000, and Lenovo also have Intel processors on its ThinkBook 14 series.

While none of these compete well on performance, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus (2025 model) does come with Thunderbolt 4, and Acer TravelMate P4 (2025) has a bigger battery.

If performance isn’t a factor, it largely comes down to which brands you trust, if any.

• Value: 4 / 5

HP ProBook 4 G1a: Specs

HP ProBook 4 G1a: Design

• Sliver styling
• Plenty of ports but no Thunderbolt
• Memory and storage upgrades

Not sure what design language HP is speaking these days, but the lighter coloured laptops tend to be cheaper, but not all. Maybe HP thinks that more home buyers like silver over grey and black varieties, but the HP ProBook 4 G1a comes with an attractive ‘Pike Silver’ scheme that is mostly plastic in construction. The lid might be made of thin metal, but the majority of the chassis is certainly plastic.

Having seen a few HP concurrent designs recently, this one exhibits the most features, where price clearly played a role in determining which features ultimately made it into the finished product.

Where other, more expensive EliteBook designs use an integrated fingerprint reader and power button, on the ProBook 4, these are separated. The power button does only that, and the fingerprint reader lives in the open space to the right of the touch panel below the keyboard.

The backlit keyboard has a nice size and spacing that make it relatively easy to use and type at a decent pace. However, I wasn’t a fan of the touchpad, which repeatedly ignored taps as clicks, and occasionally even corner clicks as input.

The webcam has a good resolution and is AI-connected, allowing it to recognise its owner quickly once trained. Having seen the OLED displays on higher-end HPs, the IPS panel on this machine isn’t impressive, and it's rated only at 300nits, making it ineffective when outside. That some 16-inch versions of the ProBook 4 are cheaper than the 14-inch also hints that it might be costing HP more than it should.

What users are likely to find more pleasing is the number of ports on this machine, which doesn’t need a docking station for standard use.

On the left are two USB-C ports (20Gbps), a USB-A port (5Gbps), a full-size HDMI and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the right is another USB-A port (5Gbps), an RJ45 LAN port (1Gbit), a Kensington security slot and a SIM card slot.

That the LAN port wasn’t 2.5GbE seemed more about HP justifying the cost of more expensive machines than an actual cost saving. The review hardware had a mobile SIM card slot that you must specify in a custom build, as I don’t think it comes on pre-defined SKUs.

Thunderbolt would have been nice, but again, HP wanted to keep that for better-paying customers. One of the USB-C ports is needed for charging, using a 65W charger that HP includes with the ProBook 4.

What’s slightly curious about the port selection is that the AMD Ryzen 7 250 has two USB4 ports natively on the chip, so these could have been used without extra USB components, should HP have wanted.

A Philips screwdriver and a plastic spudger get you inside this machine, where you can replace or upgrade the WiFI, storage and battery, and even the memory.

That means if you don’t need the power of a Ryzen 7, you could buy a Ryzen 5 model with 8GB of RAM, and address that later if needed. The era when 8GB was enough for most laptop users is mostly behind us, and 16GB is more sensible when you consider that the integrated GPU uses that memory shared with the rest of the system.

But it’s worth noting that there are only two memory slots, so you might have to take modules out to put larger ones in.

The ProBook 4 was made to a tightly controlled budget, but for what HP is asking, it's more than acceptable.

• Design: 4 / 5

HP ProBook 4 G1a: Hardware

• AMD Ryzen 200 series CPU
• Radeon 780M GPU
• HDMI 2.1

The AMD Ryzen 7 250 is a mid-tier processor in the Ryzen 200 series, designed to bring efficient AI acceleration and robust general performance to business-class laptops. Built on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture and fabricated using TSMC’s 4 nm FinFET process, it strikes a balance between power and thermal efficiency, making it well-suited for ultraportables and productivity-focused devices.

Positioned below the flagship Ryzen AI 9 Pro 365, the Ryzen 7 250 offers eight cores and 16 threads with a boost clock up to 5.1 GHz. It integrates a 16 TOPS NPU sufficient for local AI tasks such as real-time transcription, image enhancement, and Copilot features. Though it technically falls short of Microsoft’s Copilot+ certification threshold. This places it in a transitional space, being AI-capable but not fully AI-native.

Graphics are handled by the integrated Radeon 780M GPU, which features 12 compute units and supports up to 4 displays at resolutions as high as 4320p. While not intended for gaming, it delivers smooth performance for media playback, light creative work, and multi-monitor setups. Hardware decoding for AV1, HEVC, and VP9 ensures efficient video handling across modern codecs.

In real-world laptop use, the Ryzen 7 250 performs admirably. Benchmarks place it on par with Intel’s Core Ultra 7 256V in multi-threaded workloads, and its single-core scores are competitive with the latest Core i5 H-series chips. With support for LPDDR5x-7500 and PCIe 4.0, it enables fast memory and storage throughput, ideal for business users juggling multiple applications. However, in this machine uses DDR5-5600, which reduces the bandwidth that it could have potentially offered.

Thermally, the Ryzen 7 250 operates within a 28W TDP envelope, although OEMs can scale this between 15W and 30W, depending on the chassis design, and here it is set at 15W. This flexibility allows manufacturers to deploy the Ryzen 7 250 in both thin-and-light form factors and more robust builds, as in the HP ProBook 4 G1a.

Where this platform takes a slight step back is with the Radeon 780M GPU, which is a slight improvement over the 680M that preceded it. While not completely useless, it’s not a patch on the new 8060S GPU that AMD has on the Ryzen AI 395+ platform.

The RDNA 3 architecture GPU is built with twelve compute units, featuring a total of 768 shaders. The GPU has a base frequency of 800 MHz, which can be boosted to reach up to 3 GHz, but 2700 MHz in this machine.

The Radeon 780M is engineered for efficient power usage, with a maximum power consumption of 54W. It can support up to four displays at resolutions as high as 4320p (7680x4320 at 60Hz), making it ideal for multi-monitor configurations. However, this particular machine is equipped with only one HDMI 2,1 output, meaning that without a USB-C dock, you can only connect two displays. While it isn't designed for high-end gaming, it offers smooth performance for media playback, light creative tasks, and everyday productivity activities.

• Hardware: 4 / 5

HP ProBook 4 G1a: Performance

My comparison product today, the Dell Latitude 9450, is a 2024 design from Dell that was priced at nearly $2000 in the review specification. And, as you can obviously see in these benchmarks, the AMD Ryzen 7 250 is more than a match for the Core 7 Ultra 165U.

The Intel chip has one win in the single-core GeekBench 6 test, but it gets trounced by any of the benchmarks that use graphics.

The one redeeming aspect of the Intel Core Ultra series is their power efficiency, which enables the Dell to last longer on battery than the HP, though it also has a slightly larger battery to help.

A battery life of over twelve hours is still excellent, and should easily get most people through a working day.

Considering that you could buy two HP ProBook 4 G1a 14 for one Dell Latitude 9450, and in most uses it would be faster, hints at how much change has occurred in the past 18 months.

The HP ProBook 4 G1a 14 won’t compete with the latest HP Zbook Ultra G1a 14, or any AMD Ryzen AI 395 Max powered systems, but you won’t get one of those for this outlay.

• Performance: 4 / 5

HP ProBook 4 G1a: Final verdict

While I wasn’t a massive fan of the touchpad on this machine, the rest of this design is fine for the majority of laptop users. The only other caveat to its specification is the lack of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, which is a deliberate choice made by HP.

What I liked was that the memory modules allow for upgrades, which could extend the working life of this hardware if it isn’t destroyed in other ways.

There is only one M.2 slot, meaning that to transition to more storage will require a USB caddy to transfer the OS, but you could put 4TB in here reasonably easily.

A year or two back, the performance on this machine would have been remarkable, but the advent of Intel Ultra 200 series and the AMD Ryzen AI 300 chips relegate it somewhat.

That said, it’s better than the Intel Core 7 Ultra 165U, with the possible exception of its NPU.

For the asking price, this is a decent system that, for anyone doing general office work, is more than adequate.

For those who are using AI extensively or need better GPU performance, it's not an ideal choice, but those requirements will require a significantly bigger budget than even the top of the HP ProBook 4 G1a range.

Should you buy a HP ProBook 4 G1a?

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