HP Envy 15
Is HP’s new pro laptop capable of inspiring the envy of others… or just stirring it up amongst entrenched customers?
HP has a few flagship laptops that sit in the premium ultrabook space, but while most tend to skew towards a lightweight ultrabook style, the new Envy 15 is designed to be more of a powerful premium laptop. The range opens with a strong Intel Core i7/16GB RAM/ Nvidia GTX 1660Ti configuration, which goes for $3,599. Add another $900 to this lofty price and you can replace the 15.6-inch Full HD 1080p display with a 400 nit 4K HDR monitor and dial up the GPU to an RTX 2060 (Max-Q). Both these units come with a 512GB NVMe SSD, which offers super fast 2,751/1,496MB per second respective read and write speeds. In order to fill out that premium SSD to 1TB you’ll have to fork out for the top of the line $4,999 Envy 15, the device we’ve tested here.
For such a high end device the keyboard, trackpad and speaker surround is pretty bland, looking like a squarish ripoff of a Blade 15 (which is already a 15-inch MacBook Pro rip-off). This pedestrian looking chassis is only available in what we imagine must be called ‘Dull Grey’ and while there is at least some dimension to the body, it still feels like if it were any thicker it’d be indistinguishable from a box.
Fortunately looks are only so consequential and there’s the odd redeeming feature in the design like the recessed, trackpad-adjacent fingerprint reader. Despite their appearance the trackpad is soft and responsive, the keyboard comfortable to type on and the top firing Bang and Olufsen speakers are loud enough for personal use. If you do need to do any professional colour work, the 4K versions have screens that are capable of reproducing the DCI-P3 colour gamut with a Delta E of less than two and the device does include a couple of Thunderbolt ports so you can hook it up to multiple high resolution screens if you need to work on a larger scale. The 400-nit AMOLED display looks vibrant and offers a much bigger contrast ratio when compared with traditional LED screens.
The Envy 15 is running one of the best performing laptop processors available, the hexa-core i7-10750H CPU, but it’s a little late to the party since many competitors launched devices with these chips in the middle of 2020 – Dell even has an 11th gen Intel CPU in its XPS 13. Still, this processor is one of the best value high performance CPUs and it’s more than capable of churning through demanding video rendering and general processing workloads. Add the RTX 2060 GPU, which can run Ultra 1080p ray traced Metro: Exodus at 35fps and you have more than enough processing power for tackling demanding graphical workloads on the go.
There is one last thing you should be aware of… the battery is abysmal. This powerhouse can only keep its demanding processors running for one hour and 49 minutes in PCMark 10’s Work Battery benchmark or three hours and 12 minutes in media playback. You might even want to fork out for a couple of chargers if you’re planning on moving it around a lot.
A powerful work laptop that ticks all the boxes but seems a little square for the bold price tag.