The Case of HP 470 G7 Notebook is made entirely out of plastic, which is the first major difference to previous NoteBook 470 devices. The latter feature a metal top case, at least some of them, and together with the Notebook moniker that, too, had to go and was replaced with a printed brushed metal texture to imitate the design. The overall color is silver-gray with a touch of black in the display bezels. The device lacks a maintenance hatch. It has to be taken apart in order to access the internal hardware. Yet another cut corner compared to Notebook 470 models that to this day feature dedicated maintenance hatches. Overall build quality was okay, except for the poor fitting of the base’s top case. Stability is in need of improvement. We were easily able to depress the base underneath the touchpad, and warping it was a breeze. The latter is also true for the display lid. Applying pressure to the back of the display results in minor image distortions. The hinges managed to hold the display firmly in place with only some teetering. Opening the lid one-handed is possible, although it requires some finger-arm-gymnastics.

Processor

The HP 470 G7 Notebook is equipped with Intel Core i5-10210U is a power efficient quad-core SoC for notebooks based on the Comet Lake (CML-U) generation and was announced in August 2019. Compared to the similar Whiskey Lake processors (e.g. Core i5-8665U), the only difference is support for higher memory speeds (up to LPDDR4-2933 vs DDR4-2400) and two additional cores in the top model (not in this i5). The processor cores are clocked between 1.6 and 4.2 GHz (all 4 cores 3.9 GHz max). Thanks to Hyper-Threading 8 threads can be used. Compared to the faster i5-10510U, the level 3 cache was reduced from 8 to 6 MB. More information on Comet Lake and all the models and articles on it can be found

Display

The HP 470 G7 matte 17.3-inch display runs at a native resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. Its maximum brightness of 281.3 nits and the contrast ratio of 966:1 are barely acceptable, and too low for a notebook in the G7’s price range. We expect results north of 300 nits and 1000:1.

Keyboard