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. Particularly when it comes to work or study machines, HP Pavilion laptops have long been a standard in the industry. 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 our HP Pavilion Plus review.
HP Pavilion Plus review: Design
The case is light, but surprisingly sturdy for a low-end work laptop, and despite the low weight, it has some heft. It is still thin and light enough to carry comfortably in most bags. The silver color is common among even the best laptops these days, but it is still attractive and elegant. Once you open it up, the OLED screen really shines, giving everything it displays a gorgeous, high-quality image. This makes sense, since it complements the 2.8-inch display and even has thin bezels that provide a spacious screen area. The port selection is pretty good: two USB Type-C and two Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, an SD card slot and one headset jack. The presence of HDMI 2.1 is especially nice, since work machines usually use 1.4. 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 latter is a handy feature that allows us to adjust the image through the webcam in real time, and until now we didn’t know we needed it. The keyboard is one of our favorites in work laptops, with a good-sized trackpad and wide, well-placed keys that make typing easy and almost typo-free. There’s also a backlight switch, another great feature for late night work sessions. It was very pleasant to use, and going back to normal sized keys felt like a significant degradation.
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard and clickpad remained identical to the regular Pavilion 14, which can hardly be called 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 clickpad is large at 12.5 x 8 cm compared to the already large 12 x 7.5 cm on the rival Yoga Slim 7i Pro. As a result, cursor control feels spacious and also very smooth thanks to the 90Hz display refresh rate. That said, the feedback from the clicks is satisfactory, albeit slightly spongy and a bit loud. Nevertheless, this is one of the most comfortable clickpads we’ve used on Pavilion-class laptops. also you will learn our article on HP Pavilion Plus review.
Display
In most cases, the 14-inch, 2880 x 1800, 90 Hz OLED display on our HP Pavilion 14 setup is fantastic. The visuals in movies and television shows are excellent. We were pleased by how nicely the display captured color when I was viewing 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. Moments in the clinical Umbrella Company offices are well-captured in true black, particularly when the dark interiors juxtapose with the ceiling-mounted fluorescent lights. The screen, sadly, lacks anti-glare protection (or, if it does, it is ineffective), which causes a lot of light and background images to reflect off the surface. It significantly detracts from the otherwise excellent display and is highly distracting. The panel of the HP Pavilion 14 spans 194% of the sRGB color space and 137.5% of the DCI-P3 color space. With 139.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and 197% of the sRGB color gamut, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon was the only rival to match the Pavilion’s performance. The Asus ZenBook 13 OLED was the only competitor bright enough to compete, coming in at 321 nits, while the Pavilion 14 was also the brightest at 381.8 nits.
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. However, we discovered that when watching content, the volume worked considerably better when combined with the software and Movie preset. Things sounded cinematic while the most recent Resident Evil Netflix series was playing. We could hear every detail as the main character of the show sprinted through a throng of zombies at the beginning of episode 2. Numerous zombie extras’ screams, the sound of fire blazing from the burning compound, and the sounds of a car shifting from the left to the right of the set could all be heard.
Graphics
Graphics performance 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. you can read our article on HP Pavilion Plus review.
Performance
The 12th-generation Intel Core i7-12700H, a 45-watt processor with 12 cores (four Performance and eight Efficient) and 16 threads, 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. Looking at our benchmarks, 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. Unfortunately, the Pavilion Plus 14 would not finish the PCMark 10 Applications test, which is a good test of general productivity performance. 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
This battery is the worst battery we’ve tested for a working laptop in a long time. As we mentioned earlier, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 scores unusually well in benchmarks compared to its competitors and even handles some modern games well. But that seems to have fooled the Pavilion Plus into thinking it’s a gaming laptop or something, and it responded by increasing its battery life. In our HD movie test, the battery didn’t go beyond four and a half hours, and the PCMark 10 battery test showed a result of five hours and 10 minutes, making it extremely difficult to use as a working laptop unless you keep it regularly charged at the outlet. This is due to two problems: high-end hardware like the OLED screen and Intel Alder Lake Core i7, and the rather meager 51Wh battery, which is almost guaranteed to run out in no time. Of course, sacrifices have to be made for price, size and weight. But a working laptop should last a long time, and this one can’t. Such low battery life for a machine designed to support a workday is simply inexcusable. also you can check our article on HP Pavilion Plus review.
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. The Pavilion Plus 14 can become a touch warm, but not so hot that you wouldn’t want to use it.
Configuration options
Consumers in the U.K. get the Pavilion Plus in two variants. One features a Core-i5 1240P processor, 8GB of RAM and a 2.2K IPS screen. It will cost you £730. The other model discussed here runs on a Core-i7 1255U chip, but is accompanied by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 GPU. It has 16GB of dual-channel RAM and a 2.8K OLED display. This model costs £1,100, and at the time of writing, it’s discounted by £100. Acer’s latest Swift X is strong competition. It’s available with 2.2K 14-inch or 2.5K 16-inch displays, and its graphics are powered by Intel’s new Arc A370 dGPU GPU. 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
With the Pavilion Plus 14, HP did so much right, and the pricing is difficult to contest. However, the appalling battery life and overwhelming amount of crappy software could be a concern. You’ll adore the PC’s 16:10 display—which can be had in OLED if you want that—impressive performance, webcam, and Windows Hello capabilities if you can get beyond those drawbacks. And considering that some of the HP-bundled apps are actually useful, you might even benefit from them. The Pavilion sacrifice is ultimately about saving money by putting up with a few inconveniences. We also believe that many people will welcome this compromise.
