Keyboard PCs have been around for a long time — remember the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, or Apple II? — although they’ve long been out of fashion for a multitude of reasons. HP’s EliteBoard G1a brings the category back with a very nice design that addresses many of the issues with previous generations. It represents a return to the flexibility and dynamism that’s been missing from PCs for quite some time. There are plenty of small-form-factor machines that are tiny little boxes on your desk, but there really is no better a space-saving form than a keyboard that has a PC built into it.
The EliteBoard G1a leverages AMD’s latest Ryzen 5 340 Pro SoC and pairs it with what are essentially laptop innards within a slim, lightweight, and sleek keyboard design. The keyboard features two USB-C ports, one of them a 40 Gbps port that allows for two external monitors via an HDMI hub that plugs into one monitor’s HDMI port. (One variant of the EliteBoard has a permanent USB-C cable attached internally for power that doesn’t take up either of the external USB-C ports.)
The 40 Gbps USB 4 type-C port can also drive devices like AR glasses from RayNeo or XREAL. I am currently writing this review with the new RayNeo Air 4 Pro, although I did just get a warning from the PC that the glasses are requesting more power than the EliteBoard can provide; that might be a consideration for which model of AR glasses you use.
That same port also allows for single cable connectivity through a Thunderbolt 4 cable to monitors like my Dell 56-inch 6K unit. That monitor provides up to 140W of power to the keyboard, more than enough to run versions of the EliteBoard that require external power. The version of the EliteBoard G1a that HP sent me included an optional 32Wh battery that allows for portable computing essentially anywhere. That’s the brilliance of this device: with a pair of AR glasses and the included pre-paired mouse, you have an entire PC setup right at the tips of your fingers.
All versions ship with a Kensington lock, which makes sense considering that you don’t want someone to just pick up your ultraportable keyboard PC and walk away with it.
The processor at the heart of the EliteBoard is the AMD Ryzen AI Pro 340, a six-core design with three performance cores and three efficiency cores. This SoC also comes with a 50 TOPS NPU, which means that this is even a Copilot+ capable PC when configured with 16GB of RAM or more. As configured for this review, the system sported 32GB of DDR5 5600 MT/s memory and a 512GB SSD. A Radeon 840 GPU is integrated, which is more than enough graphics power for a knowledge worker. As far as performance goes, the EliteBoard gets the job done but won’t win any awards. I ran GeekBench 6, Cinebench 2026, and Blender benchmarks, and it did put up decent scores that would indicate a solid overall productivity experience.
The system comes with a 65W GaN charger that’s quite compact and easy to use. With that capacity charger, the battery should charge fairly quickly, but I expect that many people will end up drawing power directly from their monitors, as I have.
Thermally, this keyboard is also well designed with active cooling. Cool air is ingested through hundreds of holes in the bottom of the keyboard and out exhaust ports that run along the middle of the back of the keyboard. The EliteBoard is generally quiet, but I did notice when first setting things up that the fans did spin up quite a bit, but haven’t since. That said, you can definitely tell where the SoC is located on this system with the center of the keyboard being ever so slightly warmer than the rest of the keyboard. This could be seen as a benefit in some cooler climates or for people whose fingers get cold while typing.
The EliteBoard is built with a spill-resistant keyboard deck that can be easily removed for cleaning or replaced entirely, so if the keyboard malfunctions you don’t have to replace the entire PC. Based on the internals I’ve seen, it should be relatively easy to service compared to most PCs today. It also features up to 75% recycled plastics, which makes it pretty environmentally friendly.
The EliteBoard had one of the smoothest setup experiences I’ve experienced to date. Windows and drivers were all up to date, and the included mouse is pre-paired. All I had to do was plug in the monitor and log into my Microsoft account and things were ready to go. AR glasses from RayNeo and XREAL worked fairly well with this device, but (as noted earlier) the RayNeo Air 4 Pro glasses did trigger a power consumption warning that I didn’t have with the XREAL One Pro glasses.
The EliteBoard also has a built-in speaker so you can hear when you get notifications or any sound without needing to pair earbuds or use AR glasses but isn’t intended for listening to music. Did I mention that the keyboard itself is pretty nice to type on as well? An optional fingerprint reader — a much faster way to log in than username/password — is at the top right corner of the number pad in the power button.
While there are competitors like the Linglong keyboard PC, those can’t really be trusted in any kind of business environment. The EliteBoard G1a ships with HP’s Wolf Security suite, which makes this a much more enterprise-ready solution that IT departments can trust and deploy quickly. Gone are the days of bolting a SFF or NUC to the back of a monitor; now the entire unit is just the keyboard and doesn’t take up any more desk space than that. And if deployed with powered USB-C monitors, it can even reduce clutter and power cables. Sure, it only has two USB-C ports, which can be limiting for some users, but I would argue that if you need more ports than that, you probably shouldn’t be using this PC.
That said, I do think that this PC’s primary function is as a stationary PC that connects to a display and or peripherals with a single cable. At 32Wh, the optional battery is fairly small so I wouldn’t expect to get very long battery life out of it, especially if you’re connecting something like a pair of AR glasses, which fully depend on the PC for power and data. In my experience, the battery lasted about 3 to 4 hours with a pair of AR glasses, but would likely last a lot longer with an external USB-C display that doesn’t draw additional power. The standby battery life is quite good, which is nice considering the smaller battery, but I can’t really imagine that this PC will live in a bag very much.
The EliteBoard G1a was without a doubt the most innovative thing I saw from any PC vendor at CES 2026, and was probably the most interesting product that leveraged AMD at the show, too. It would be nice to see HP offer more powerful processors in this platform, but I suspect it might be thermally constrained by this design. I really like that HP put so much thought into designing this keyboard PC. In fact, I wrote this whole review using it on a single charge, mostly at the dining room table at my in-laws’ home because that’s the only place I could find to work while visiting them for a week.
The EliteBoard G1a isn’t targeted at people trying to save money on a PC without a display, even if some people might have that thought. HP has priced this PC starting at $1,500, but I foresee this not being the final price beyond initial pre-orders. This isn’t a very powerful PC for $1,500, but I do think it’ll be much more popular if HP can get the price down below $1,000. Although HP isn’t marketing this as a cost-saving platform, there will be plenty of people who incorrectly see it that way.
Although consumers and small businesses could benefit from the EliteBoard G1a’s portability and form factor, the main targets here are medium to large enterprises. These machines can be easily swapped out by IT if there are any problems, and their spill resistance and ease of serviceability make them more resilient in a business environment. I believe that 90% of people who get one of these as their PC will have next to no idea that their keyboard is their PC and will only find it odd that the power button is on the keyboard.
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