HP Pavilion 15 review

Verdict

With the first Ice Lake laptops just around the corner and the GPU here showing its age, it's hard to justify dropping £850 on the HP Pavilion 15. However, there's nothing really wrong with this laptop. If the price drops in the weeks and months to come, bargain hunters could make a killing.

advantages

Nice keyboard

Good speakers

Well suited for office work

Disadvantages

Below average display

Not fantastic value for money

Important Specifications

Evaluation price: £850

15.6 inch Full HD display with IPS

Intel Core i7-8565U processor

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

8GB DDR4-2400MHz RAM

256GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD

Type-C USB 3.1 Gen 1, 2 x Type-A USB 3.1 Gen 1, HDMI 1.4;Ethernet, 3.5mm audio jack

What is the HP Pavilion 15?

The HP Pavilion 15 is an affordable laptop that underperforms most of the competition, making it an ideal option for students and office workers.

The review unit I was sent - the HP Pavilion 15-cs1506sa - sits under the hood with an Intel Core i7-8565U processor alongside an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti GPU. On paper, that means you should have enough processing power to run basic PC tasks. Tasks to complete, and enough GPU grunt to snag some Fortnite, Overwatch and the like on the side - just don't expect to run these at high speed Texture packs and settings pushed to the max. A dedicated graphics card may be at play here , but the HP Pavilion 15 is not a high-end gaming laptop.

However, the price here is quite attractive - £850 at the time of writing - and means it competes squarely with the likes

Acer Nitro 5

, which occupies the same price range but offers more modern 16-card cards that

Razer Blade Stealth (2019)

and not to mention HP's own

envy 13

.

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The HP Pavilion 15 is all about right angles and silver finishes

HP Pavilion 15 Design and Features - Diamond Geezer

The new HP Pavilion 15 is a fairly standard looking Windows 10 laptop that features the micro-drilled, right-angled triangle motif found on other HP laptops like the

HP Envy 13

and the

HP EliteBook 1050 G1

.On this particular laptop, the interlocking triangles create a slightly retro diamond/elongated Zelda Rupee shape.

Behind that triangular weave sit two speakers, and like many HP laptops, the speakers were tuned with the help of high-end Danish audio brand Bang & Olufsen.

The HP Pavilion 15 is a fairly large laptop at 361.6 x 241.6 x 17.9mm with a full-size keyboard, number pad and the 5mm bezels of the 15.6-inch display. As for the ports the right side features two Type-A USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, a lock slot, and a full-size SD card reader, while the left side features HDMI 1.4, Ethernet, and Type-C . Has USB 3.1 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

As with the HP Envy 13, Thunderbolt 3 technology isn't present here, so the Type-C USB port only transfers data at speeds of up to 5 Gbps (vs. up to 40 Gbps with Thunderbolt 3), but it's another £800 laptop and Thunderbolt 3 remains expensive to implement.

Another thing the HP Pavilion 15 has in common with the HP Envy 13 is that the shape of the case ensures that the back part of the underside of the deck - where the ventilation opening is located - is slightly lifted off the desk when the laptop is opened. This is a Design feature that we have also seen on other laptops - namely the Asus ZenBook range - and will likely become a standard feature of all Ultrabooks in the future.

At just under 2 kg (1.89 kg), the HP Pavilion 15 is slightly heavier than most laptops in its category. Most lightweight Ultrabooks and notebooks these days are closer to the 1 kg mark. Although the HP Pavilion 15 is heavy in comparison , it's still light and slim enough to carry around in your bag all day.

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Thanks to the good travel and key function, typing on the HP Pavilion 15 is effortless

HP Pavilion 15 Keyboard - How easy is it to type on the HP Pavilion 15?

The HP Pavilion 15 is great for typing. The keys have good travel - not great for the Lenovo ThinkPad T490, but still deeper and more comfortable than most laptops - and a soft backlight keeps you going late into the night can work easily.

The keycaps have a similar feel to the HP Envy 13', but since the HP Pavilion 15' is larger, there's room for a number pad here. This (sort of) compensates for the arrow keys being small and fringed, and you could just use the combination lock and use keys 2, 4, 8 and 6 as arrow keys at the same time - problem solved.

Despite these layout issues, the Pavilion 15's keyboard is solid. Key action is nice and snappy, with little wobble from the letter keys. Shift, Caps Lock, Enter, and Space Bar -- the usual suspects -- are all a little wobbly, but nothing grabs me Immediate concern here. Everything feels sturdy and durable.

The trackpad was less easy to use out of the box so I had to crank the sensitivity level all the way up to be able to use this with ease.After reviewing the

Asus ZenBook 14

, which offers the smoothest trackpad I've used in months, I think all other laptop trackpads are ruined for me.

The keyboard layout here is generally good, although cramming the navigation keys over the number pad isn't ideal

HP Pavilion 15 Speakers - Are Bang & Olufsen's speakers any good?

The HP Pavilion 15's speakers are very good, and only minimal distortion is audible at maximum volume.

Dialogue over streamed Netflix and iPlayer content sounded crisp, as did most of the music I played while working on this review. It passed my Master of Puppets test - where I beat the classic Metallica track at 50 Stream % volume and notice if there is any obvious distortion - with all instruments sounding clear and defined.

Some music, like solo piano and acoustic guitar—tracks with a lot of resonance—didn't sound good at high volumes. Steve Howe's Mood for a Day, a recording apparently made specifically to rattle laptop speakers terribly, sounded muffled , when pushed above 60% volume.

In general though, the speakers are very good and a step above most. Music and dialogue are certainly better than you might expect from an $800 laptop.

HP Pavilion 15 Display - Can I use the HP Pavilion 15 for photo editing?

The HP Pavilion 15's display isn't well suited for image editing. Low maximum brightness and poor color space coverage mean I wouldn't recommend this for even the most basic photo work or digital art. Even if you just want to resize your vacation snaps, you should If you're looking for a laptop for any type of photo work, better something like the HP Envy 13 or this

Razer Blade Stealth 13 (2019)

.

I recorded a maximum brightness of 223.55 cd/m² using an X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and DisplayCAL 3. That's a bad score and explains why websites, photos, and games looked a little dull and washed out. If a 2019 laptop can't offer at least 300 nits of maximum brightness, you might want to think again.

However, a low black level of 0.15 nits means contrast is high - I recorded an acceptable contrast ratio of 1432:1, and while it was a bit dull, nothing looked overly hazy or washed out.

However, color space coverage was poor at only 61.7% of the sRGB (standard RGB) space. As the name suggests, sRGB is the standard color space used by developers, website designers and digital artists, and as such it is a good indicator of how lively and vibrant a website, webcomic, or video game graphic looks on a display. Ideally, a display will provide 100% sRGB coverage, but in reality any laptop display that covers 80% or more is good.

The wider Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces are more interesting for digital photographers and videographers, and while you won't be doing extensive editing in Premiere Pro on the HP Pavilion 15, it's worth noting that the Adobe and DCI values ​​are very good are low - 42.9% and 44.0%, respectively. This is also below average. You should hope for around 70% coverage of these two color spaces.

In contrast, the HP Envy 13 covered 69.2% and 71.7% of the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color space in my test.

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If you want Fortnite to look this pretty on the HP Pavilion 15, you can expect to be cruising at 30 fps most of the time

HP Pavilion 15 Gaming – How well are Fortnite and Apex Legends doing?

Using FRAPS to measure game performance, I recorded average frame rates of around 30-40 fps and 70-100 fps on

Fourteen days

with the graphics settings on Epic or Low and 20-30fps and 50-60fps

Apex Legends

, with textures and shadows at the top and bottom.

While the 60Hz display means you won't appreciate the higher frame rates you can get from the HP Pavilion 15, you could always hook this up to a Full HD gaming monitor. HDMI 1.4 is an old one Hey - it's all about HDMI 2.1 these days - but it still supports 1080p video at 144Hz. So if you're looking for something to play battle royale shooters on and you already own a cheap full HD monitor or are thinking about getting a cheap Full HD monitor anyway, at least you have the option to do so as a workaround.

Don't expect AAA titles like

steering

or

The division 2

but it runs fine. I ran the in-game benchmark on Dirt Rally - a game from 2015 that we still use in reviews to see how systems handle older games - and on the ultra settings I got an average frames per second of 44.95. I was only able to comfortably drop 60 fps here when I turned the graphics settings down to medium, where the HP Pavilion 15 gave me an average of 77.92 fps and a max fps number of 110.24 delivered.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

it didn't fare so well. I averaged 29fps and 30fps with the graphics set to High and Medium. Every time I tried to run the benchmark with graphics on the highest settings, the game crashed. In fairness, that HP Pavilion 15 with a graphics card from 2017 does not run demanding titles well and is good enough for battle royale shooters and older PC games.

You'll want a gaming mouse, though, because when it comes to tense firefights, this trackpad isn't your friend.

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Ports on the left side of the HP Pavilion 15 from left to right: HDMI 1.4, Ethernet, Type-C USB, 3.5mm audio jack

General Performance of the HP Pavilion 15 - How is the HP Pavilion 15 for Basic PC Use?

The HP Pavilion 15 is absolutely fine for everyday office use on the PC. Despite average SSD read and write speeds, I never had trouble working on it for a day.

While you might have trouble loading multiple photos in Photoshop, GIMP, or your free photo editing app of choice, this shouldn't be a big deal since the screen isn't really designed for serious photo work anyway.

I ran PCMark 10, a general performance benchmark, and got a score of 4220. This is just below the base 4500 that PCMark 10 Developer UL indicates a PC is good for office work. For what it's worth, in my experience the HP Pavilion 15 is fine in this regard, and laptops , which returned scores of 4000 and just under, were also fully capable of performing basic PC tasks such as processing, email, and video calls.

Meanwhile, Geekbench 4 returned results similar to what I've seen on laptops with an Intel Core i7-8565U Whiskey Lake processor - 4668 on the single-core test and 13,081 on the multi-core test. I got similar results when I do the same test on that

Lenovo ThinkPad T490s

(4647, 13742) and Dell XPS 13 (4281, 14167). Both laptops have the same Whiskey Lake processor. The HP Envy 13 model I tested also returned similar scores (4877, 14509), despite being on a running on the less powerful Core i5 Whiskey Lake CPU.

In plain language, all these numbers mean that the HP Pavilion 15 and its processor are ideally suited for office work.

I also ran 3DMark's Fire Strike benchmark, which is designed to test a GPU's graphics rendering capabilities, and got a 5948, a pretty average score in this day and age. We have the HP's gaming credentials Pavilion 15 already established so not really worth walking around here.

Finally, the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, which tests SSD and hard drive read and write speeds, gave me an OK 1735.8 MB/s read and a not-so-OK write speed of 742.90 MB/s. Saving large projects may take a while here, but if you store most of your written work in Google Docs or Microsoft OneDrive, this might be less of an issue.

Ports on the right side of the HP Pavilion 15 from left to right: SD card reader, Kensington lock slot, 2 x Type-A USB ports

HP Pavilion 15 Battery Performance - Will the HP Pavilion 15 run all day?

Broadly speaking, yes. In my experience, I was able to run the HP Pavilion 15 without AC power for nearly eight hours with the display brightness locked at 150 nits.

According to HP's official spec sheet, you can drive it for over 16 hours, but in my experience that number only makes sense if you really don't do much on the laptop. If you're working - writing, cropping photos, sending and replying to multiple emails , all with music in the background - you can comfortably cruise through a workday without having to worry too much about reaching for the charger.

That said, running the PC Mark 8 Work benchmark at a brightness of 150 nits until the battery hit critical levels returned a result of three hours and three minutes, which is far short of what I've observed in everyday use I'm not sure why such an atypical result was returned as most Whiskey Lake laptops I've tested get between eight and eleven hours on a single charge. Having a dedicated GPU is a factor – You can always disable this manually via the Nvidia Control Panel if you need to switch to the CPU's integrated graphics.

Luckily, you can recharge the HP Pavilion 15's 68 WHr lithium-ion battery to 100% in just over two hours. Expect 40% in the tank after half an hour of charging and 69% after an hour.

Should I buy the HP Pavilion 15?

Since you can't currently get the Dell XPS 13 and HP Envy 13 for much more money, I would advise against buying an HP Pavilion 15 unless you can get yourself into one

Black Friday

Selling at a decent discount.

Considering it's £850 and we're going to see laptops like that

Acer Swift 5

– with the next generation

Intel Ice Lake

Laptop processors - coming out very soon for about the same money, it's hard to justify going without the better part of a giant now.

There's nothing really wrong with the HP Pavilion 15, but it comes with an outdated GPU, a not-so-great display, and a price that won't be that competitive very soon.

The choice is yours to either wait for the price to drop or go with an alternative: if you want a cheap sub-£1000 laptop for basic PC work, grab the HP Envy 13 instead. It's smaller, but that Overall experience is much better.

If you're looking for a cheap laptop for light gaming, get an Acer Nitro 5, which is a similar price point and comes with Nvidia 16-series graphics options instead of the 10-series. If you want something that straddles both camps, consider a Dell XPS 13 or a Razer Blade Stealth 13 (2019).

Verdict

A decent lifestyle laptop but currently overpriced for what you get.

Buy directly from HP

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