The company’s standard laptops, the Pavilions, have recently caught the attention of savvy customers who previously may have looked up to the more expensive Envy and Spectre series. The Pavilion Aero from last summer was quick, well-equipped, and only weighed 2.2 pounds. The Pavilion Plus 14 is a stylish aluminum ultraportable laptop that comes with a stylish OLED display. The Plus replaces the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon, which also features OLED and is lighter but costs more and has fewer connectors, as the Editors’ Choice for a midrange ultraportable.
The HP Pavilion series is typically regarded as having better aesthetics than Dell Latitude and Lenovo’s Thinkpad lineup. It is the performance in which each of the three is vying for first place. The company is also attempting to win this round with HP Pavilion Plus. So, is this truly the ideal laptop for both businesses and students? This will be explained in ourHP Pavilion Plus review.
HP Pavilion Plus review: Design
The laptop is affordable, has a good screen and battery life, and is easy to carry around. It’s not the best work laptop on the market, but it’s a great value for the price.
The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is a well-balanced machine that can handle most tasks and connect to a wide range of devices. It even enhances what would otherwise be an average webcam image by working in tandem with a program that enhances the image based on lighting. ..
The laptop’s keyboard is one of its standout features. It has a large trackpad and well-placed keys, making typing easy and almost typo-free. There’s also a backlight switch, which makes it easy to work in dark environments. ..
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard and clickpad on the Pavilion 14 were identical to the regular Pavilion 14, which is hardly a complaint since we really liked the Pavilion 14’s keyboard. Compared to Asus Vivobook or Lenovo IdeaPad keyboards, this Pavilion’s keyboard is surprisingly crisp and has satisfactory touch travel. Our main complaint is still the white backlighting, which contrasts poorly with the white keycaps. We suspect this won’t be a problem for the other four color options. ..
The HP Pavilion Plus 12.5-inch laptop has a large clickpad that is 8 cm wide and 12.5 cm long, which makes cursor control feel spacious and smooth. The laptop also has a 90Hz display refresh rate, which makes the cursor feedback satisfactory, albeit slightly spongy and a bit loud. ..
Display
The HP Pavilion 14 display is a great option for those looking for an excellent OLED display. The visuals in movies and television shows are excellent, and the color reproduction is great. We were pleased with how well the display captured color when we viewed the most recent Resident Evil series. We were impressed by how well the vermillion red of the fire illuminated the scene as Jade ran around a burning compound in the second episode.
The clinical Umbrella Company offices are well-lit, but the screen’s glare makes it difficult to see the images. ..
The HP Pavilion 14 is the best laptop in its class, beating all of its competitors in terms of color accuracy and brightness.
HP Pavilion Plus review: Audio
The HP Pavilion Plus 14’s audio is good for watching movies and television but less so for listening to music. The kicks and bass were audible when we opened Spotify and listened to Wyclef Jean’s song “911” (feat. Mary J. Blige), but the maximum volume wasn’t up to par. The preinstalled software on the two speakers bearing the Bang & Olufsen brand includes audio presets calibrated for music, movies, and voice in addition to an EQ with presets mostly based on jazz and pop music genres. The HP Optimized EQ preset was the best of the bunch when we opened the app while listening to music and chose the Music preset. The sounds of all the other EQ presets were either muffled or lost their audible bass.
We found that the software and Movie preset worked together to create a more cinematic experience when watching content. The volume was louder and the sound was clearer while watching the latest Resident Evil Netflix series.
Graphics
Graphics performance on the HP Pavilion Plus is a bit slower than expected. Our HP showed frame rates a few percentage points lower compared to an average laptop with the same Iris Xe 96 EUs GPU. It’s still good enough to play most games at low settings, but it’s now surpassed by the recent Radeon 680M. An upgrade to the GeForce RTX 2050 is expected to increase graphics performance by about 150-180% over our Iris Xe. Strangely, 3DMark results do not match between Balanced and Performance modes even after multiple runs.
Performance
The 12th-generation Intel Core i7-12700H is a 45-watt processor with 12 cores (four Performance and eight Efficient) and 16 threads that served as the foundation for our review unit. In thin-and-light ultrabooks like the Pavilion Plus 14, which normally come with 28-watt Intel P-Series or 15-watt U-Series CPUs, we don’t often see processors like this one. The Pavilion Plus 14’s use of Intel’s integrated Iris Xe graphics is also noteworthy. Discrete graphics are typically combined with the 45-watt CPUs.
The Pavilion Plus 14 had a comparable performance to the Asus Vivobook S 14X, which likewise employed a Core i7-12700H with Iris Xe graphics. The multi-core results in Geekbench 5 were greater than the single-core scores, which were lower. In our Handbrake test, which encodes a 420MB video as H.265, it was essentially tied, however Cinebench R23 was slower.
Both laptops performed worse than other devices with the same CPU, such as the Dell XPS 15, and depending on the benchmark, both were closer to laptops with the 28-watt Core i7-1260P. The fact that both laptops showed obvious throttling was another similarity. We tested each laptop’s thermal control utility in performance and balanced modes, noting that each throttled in our CPU-intensive workloads when the temperature reached 95 degrees C or above. That undoubtedly reduced their effectiveness. As we pointed out with the Asus, it’s not that the Pavilion Plus 14 is slow; it’s that it’s not benefiting from the more powerful CPU given its very thin chassis. ..
Battery life
The HP Pavilion Plus 14 laptop is one of the worst laptops we’ve tested in a long time. It performs unusually well in benchmarks, but that seems to have fooled the laptop into thinking it’s a gaming laptop. The battery life on this model is extremely short, lasting only four and a half hours in our HD movie test and five hours and 10 minutes in PCMark 10. Unless you’re constantly charging it, it’s difficult to use this model as a working laptop. ..
This laptop has a low battery life, which is a problem because it means it won’t be able to last long on a workday.
HP Pavilion Plus review: Heat
Since the HP Pavilion Plus 14 is a work laptop that eventually will probably sit on your skin, effective heat management is essential. The touchpad maintained the lowest temperature during our Cinebench stress test at 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The laptop’s temperature rose to 95 degrees Fahrenheit between the G and H keys in the middle of the keyboard. The warmest part of the computer, the underside of the Pavilion, reached 108.14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Configuration options
The Pavilion Plus is a new laptop from HP that comes in two variants: one with a Core-i5 1240P processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 2.2K IPS screen; the other with a Core-i7 1255U chip, but also comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 GPU. Both models are discounted by £100 at the time of writing. ..
Acer’s latest Swift X is a strong competitor. It comes with 2.2K or 2.5K displays, and its graphics are powered by Intel’s new Arc A370 dGPU. We found it to be quite a decent machine, but the GPU was lacking, which wasn’t a real surprise given the problematic deployment of discrete Intel GPUs. The good thing is that you can buy it with an RTX 3050 GPU for £1,250. ..
Conclusion
HP Pavilion Plus 14: A great computer for the price. The performance is excellent, the display is great, and the webcam is very good. However, the battery life could be better and there are a lot of software issues that need to be fixed. Overall, this computer is a great value for the price.
HP has announced that it will be bundling some of its apps with the Pavilion laptops, which some people may find useful. The sacrifice is ultimately about saving money by putting up with a few inconveniences. We also believe that many people will welcome this compromise. ..
