HP Pavilion 14
This stylish laptop has some shortcomings, but we can’t argue about the quality on offer for the price
SCORE
PRICE £567 (£680 inc VAT) from hp.com
In the HP hierarchy of consumer laptops, the Pavilion range sits one step up from the bottom rung: it goes Essentials, Pavilion, Envy and then Spectre at the top.
This means you miss out on some luxuries found on the Envy 14 opposite, but it looks and feels like a much more expensive laptop than its price suggests. Finished in attractive silver, an aluminium alloy lid and keyboard deck both add to the premium aroma. Put it side by side with Acer’s budget offerings and there’s only one winner for style.
It’s a compact system as well. Measuring 17mm high and with a 1.4kg weight, it takes up little room in a travel bag. More expensive laptops beat it comfortably for screen-to-body ratio, but the side bezels only consume 7mm so are barely noticeable in use. There would have been plenty of space in the centimetre-tall top bezel for a Windows Hello-compatible infrared camera, but HP saves such nice-tohaves for its more expensive laptops.
It would have been nice to have a better webcam full stop, but this 720p unit sits in the middle of the pile in terms of quality. We don’t think anyone will complain about the image on a Zoom call – they definitely won’t complain about the clearly captured audio – but we hoped for more detail and less visual noise.
The 14in Full HD panel is exactly what we’d expect for a competitively priced laptop such as this. Put it next to the HP Envy 14 and it looks drab, which is due reflection of its colour coverage: 57% of the sRGB gamut compared to 97% for the Envy. And its colour accuracy is far worse, with an average Delta E of 4.49 to its posher sibling’s 0.5. Nor do whites look quite so white. Still, a far fairer comparison is with similarly priced laptops, and in this company it’s difficult to criticise. Especially when you consider that it’s a touchscreen, which often comes in useful.
The Pavilion’s keyboard wouldn’t be out of place in a far more expensive machine, with highlights that include clearly separated cursor keys and dedicated buttons for Home, Pg Up, Pg Dn and End. We could be picky and call out the singleheight Enter key, but in practice this didn’t prove an issue to hit. And if we were being really picky then we’d say there isn’t much travel on the keys themselves, and note the lack of a backlight, but we are far too polite to make such remarks. And even if we did, we would quickly move on to praise the sizeable trackpad that was tailor-made for gestures.
Of the six laptops here that include Intel’s Core i5-1135G7 processor, the Pavilion 14 comes in third fastest across all our tests. The Dell XPS 13 and HP EliteBook 840 both ramp up the speeds with a higher wattage, pulling them away from competitors, but we suspect that HP believes this machine is built for modest tasks. A score of 122 in the PC Pro benchmarks indicates there’s years of life in this laptop, and Intel’s Iris Xe graphics give it enough 3D acceleration to cope with undemanding games such as Minecraft at 1080p. For Fortnite, think 720p at lower settings if you want to get above 30fps.
There’s potential to upgrade the 8GB of RAM, which is supplied as two 4GB DIMMs, but doing so involves removing the two long strips of rubber feet that provide a grip. We didn’t succumb to temptation on this occasion, but HP provides a detailed maintenance and service guide that walks repairers through the steps required. It’s easy enough to replace the battery, SSD, memory and Wi-Fi module, but we’d leave the fingerprint reader and display to the professionals.
This still leaves upgrade paths for anyone with a screwdriver set, and if this machine is still going after a few years you may well decide it’s time to move from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6, for example. Or upgrade the 256GB SSD to a larger device; it’s a fast reader, at 2,033MB/sec for sequential reads, but 672MB/sec for writes is slow compared to the other systems here. Taken as a package, and one that costs a remarkably keen £680, this is the stand-out offering for anyone with around £700 to spend. And if your budget is closer to £500, then seriously consider the Core i3 version over the faster but less sophisticated Acer Swift 3.