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HP was the first out of the gate to officially announce a Chromebook with Ryzen’s Chrome OS-centric C-series APU. The HP Pro c645 Chromebook was followed up by offerings from Lenovo and then Acer. While Lenovo was technically first to the market, HP’s premium Ryzen-powered Chromebook is now available and you can customize it to fit a wide variety of needs and use cases.
Unlike the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook and the Acer Chromebook Spin 514, HP’s Pro c645 is a clamshell device but it does offer most of the premium features that you’d expect from an “executive-level” laptop. These features include options like fingerprint scanners, NVMe storage, aluminum chassis, spill-resistant keyboard, and so on and so forth. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Pro c645 is the best option available but HP’s deep ties with the enterprise sector will likely make it a popular option for business types. We haven’t had a chance to review the Pro c645, yet but it is essentially the AMD version of the Pro c640 that I had my hands on a few weeks back.
The two glaring complaints that I had with the c640 carry over to its AMD sibling. Those are the omission of USI stylus support and the borderline abysmal dimness of the 250 nit display. Not being a 2-in-1, I can forgive the lack of stylus support but I’m just not keen on these sub-par mediocre panels that OEMs are putting in devices that they deem “premium.” We’ve said it before – 300 nits should be the very minimum on devices in the premium realm and that’s that. All that aside, I reiterate that I am confident that HP will successfully market this Chromebook to its clients, and as of this week, you can now order the Pro c645 Chromebook in all of its available configurations.
Processor options for the Pro c645 range from an Athlon Silver all the way up to the Ryzen 7 3700C. Depending on the APU that you choose, RAM can be configured up to 16GB. Storage starts at 32GB of eMMC but you can opt for 128GB of NVMe if you add it to the Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 models. Other optional features include a backlit keyboard and touchscreen if those are features that you’re interested in but the touch display doesn’t up the brightness, unfortunately. The base model comes with an Athlon Silver 3050C, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, and is priced at $716. You can bump up to the Athlon Gold for $90 and you’ll double the storage and RAM while also getting the fingerprint sensor and backlit keyboard. That’s a no-brainer if you ask me.
If you’re looking for more power, the maxed-out Ryzen 7 model with 16GB of RAM, 128GB of NVMe and a touchscreen is going to run you around $1,400 but there are other options for the Ryzen 5 that will get you a powerful device closer to the $1,000 range. You can find the HP Pro c645 Chromebook at the link below. We’ll do our best to get one of these in-house amd let you know how it stacks up against the other AMD Chromebooks on the market.
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