HP ZBook Firefly 14 G7 Gray 2020

The standout number here is 73rd percentile for RAM, but it’s paired with an 11th-percentile CPU that constantly drags you down. You get a lightweight 14-inch laptop with excellent ports and gobs of memory for not much money, but the ancient i5 chip turns every multitasking session into a waiting game. It’s a decent typing and browsing machine at the $330 bottom end, but anything more demanding will have you pulling your hair out.

The HP ZBook Firefly 14 G7 is a refurbished ultrabook that makes a curious first impression. Our database pegs it down at the 11th percentile for CPU performance, which is a polite way of saying the 10th Gen i5-10210U inside is painfully slow by today’s standards. But flip the spec sheet, and you’ll notice 32GB of DDR4 RAM sitting in the 73rd percentile—well above average for laptops in this price bracket. So you get a machine that can hold a ton of browser tabs and applications, yet struggles when actually doing anything demanding with them. It’s the definition of a mixed bag.

At 1.45kg and with a strong port selection (78th percentile for connectivity), the Firefly is easy to carry around and doesn’t need dongles. The 14” Full HD display is where things get disappointing again, landing in the low 21st percentile for screen quality. Throw in mediocre storage speed (39th percentile) and below-average reliability (31st percentile), and you start to see the trade-offs. Prices swing wildly from $330 to $651 across vendors, so how much you pay matters a whole lot.

The elephant in the room is the Intel Core i5-10210U, a 4-core chip from 2019 that struggles with modern workloads. In our benchmarks, it’s one of the worst CPUs we’ve tested in recent memory, slower than even budget Chromebooks in some multi-threaded tasks. You’ll feel that sluggishness launching apps, switching between heavy documents, or running anything beyond basic office software. The 32GB of DDR4 memory is the silver lining—it keeps the system from choking under heavy multitasking, but it’s like giving a tricycle a massive trunk. It helps, but the engine can’t push it fast.

Integrated Intel UHD Graphics scores a middle-of-the-road 44th percentile, which means it’s fine for streaming video and light photo editing but utterly hopeless for gaming or GPU-accelerated creative work. We clocked the 512GB SSD at a mediocre 39th percentile, so boot times and file transfers aren’t snappy. If you stick to web browsing, email, and Office 365, the machine will hum along okay, but don’t expect it to age gracefully.

Value depends entirely on which vendor you pick. At the low end of $330, you’re getting 32GB of RAM, a solid port array, and a compact body that most laptops at that price can’t match. That’s a legitimately good deal if your workload is all about browser tabs and spreadsheets. But once you cross the $500 mark, you’re paying too much for an aging, slow CPU and a lackluster screen. For just a bit more, competitors like the ASUS ProArt PX13 deliver modern performance and a far better display. We spotted a $321 price swing across sellers, so shop around aggressively and don’t get duped into overpaying.

Stacked against the competition, the Firefly is outclassed nearly everywhere except RAM and ports. The Apple MacBook Air MC6T4LL/A with an M1 chip will run circles around this Intel dinosaur in both speed and battery life, all while having a much better screen. Samsung’s Galaxy Book5 Pro and the Microsoft Surface Laptop Copilot+ PC offer gorgeous AMOLED or high-contrast displays and modern ARM performance that makes the i5-10210U look prehistoric. Even Lenovo’s Yoga 83JR0001US, while not a powerhouse, trounces the Firefly in display and CPU benchmarks. The one area the ZBook holds its own is having 32GB of RAM standard—most competitors in this price range stick to 8GB or 16GB. So if you need memory above all else and can deal with a slow CPU, it’s a rare find, but that’s a pretty specific niche.

If you care at all about speed, display quality, or battery life, skip this one. The i5-10210U CPU is so weak that even web browsing can stutter with enough tabs open. Creative pros will be miserable with the integrated graphics and dull 14” screen. And anyone who needs a laptop that can last a full workday away from a plug should look elsewhere—battery life is a black box here, and it’s not going to be pretty. Basically, if your workload goes beyond email and a few Office docs, save your money for something with a modern chip.

The HP ZBook Firefly 14 G7 is a niche machine for extreme budget shoppers who absolutely need 32GB of RAM in a small laptop. At $330 it’s a fair deal; at $651 it’s a scam. The 10th Gen i5 is a serious bottleneck, the screen is mediocre, and reliability is questionable. If your daily grind is light office work, web browsing, and you love having a hundred tabs open, it’ll survive. But for almost everyone else, a modern Chromebook or a refurbished M1 MacBook Air will run faster, last longer, and look better doing it.