HP Pavilion Plus 14-EH0001NF review: our full review – Laptops

Gaming PC, creative PC, office PC… Laptops as light as they are powerful, with the best screens and the best components. You cannot stop looking for the best of everything, but it is impossible to find it: you will necessarily have to balance each aspect to find the perfect compromise.

So if you’re looking for an ultrabook that’s also capable of playing the latest video games, finding a laptop like the HP Pavilion Plus 14 with a graphics card might be tempting. Let’s see what’s in his stomach.

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFData sheet

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFDesign

HP, or Hewlett Packard to the old-timers at the end of the room, is in an odd position in the market in terms of design. For one, you have the Specter brand often at the forefront of modern lines. And on the other… There is the Pavilion. This category that our product is part of, which seems to be locked on the same lines since the early 2010s and has never really evolved. This is the observation we naturally make when we take the computer in hand.

Because yes, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 is “light”… like an ultrabook from the beginning of the previous decade, that is, 1.4 kilos when many now approach the kilo or even stay below this bar. It has the lines of a 2010 MacBook copycat, with a slightly (but not too) rounded light gray metal body whose inspiration leans toward unibody but whose construction isn’t. . And it has the same dimensions, too, at 12.5 x 9.5 x 0.75 inches, when the delicacy has also become very accessible in the meantime.

All of this is not to say that the formula no longer works. Quite the contrary: the HP Pavilion Plus 14 is still a very well-built laptop, easily transportable everywhere, and one that never catches the eye of a passing beholder. Like Dell, HP is still heavily influenced by its place in the B2B market, where originality isn’t really right, but this very pragmatic side could be an advantage for some users.

Keyboard and touchpad

It is perhaps precisely this experience in B2B that allows HP to integrate here a keyboard that is instinctively perfect. The keys are well spaced, have a deeper actuation distance than most benchmarks on the market, and a very satisfying bounce. We can also count on some swipe navigation shortcuts on the right side of this configuration.

The touchpad is excellently centered on the bottom of the device and is diagonal enough to be comfortable at all times. Only its plastic casing is rather disappointing considering that in this price category, glass casings are legion. The same goes for the integration of its fingerprint scanner, placed below the arrow keys and not integrated into any home button like other competitors. Here again signs of lack of evolution in the manufacturer’s designs.

connectors

On the left of the device, there is a combo jack, a 5 Gb/s USB A 3.1 port, and a micro SD card reader. On the right, there’s a second USB A port with the same specs, an HDMI 2.1 port, and two 10Gb/s USB C 3.2 Gen 2 ports that support Power Delivery charging and DisplayPort 1.4.

Source: Frandroid – Chloé Pertuis

Source: Frandroid – Chloé Pertuis

A connection that on paper is not so bad, but remains disappointing to note the neglect of an increasingly important standard that is, however, technically well supported by the configuration of the device. Yes, we’re talking about Thunderbolt, which should be built into every Intel setup selling into four figures these days.

webcam and audio

The five-megapixel webcam doesn’t really have much more to offer than the market average, namely a rather dull and ill-defined image, eaten away by noise. What to do video conferences, and nothing else.

Not a good surprise in the audio settings, either. Again, the speakers are located under the device, in the exact spot where the laptop (emphasis on “lap”) rests on its legs, blocking audio output as a result. The speakers themselves are unremarkable, still lacking the overall definition to be truly satisfying. They will work well for social media videos, basically.

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFScreen

The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is equipped with a 14-inch OLED panel with a definition of 2880 x 1800 pixels, that is, a 2.8k screen with a 16:10 ratio. This supports a 90Hz refresh rate, but it’s not touch-sensitive and it’s not anti-glare.

Under our probe and with the DisplayCal software, we can see that the panel covers 168% of the sRGB space, 119% of the DCI P3 space, and 116% of Adobe RGB when it leaves the factory. Peak brightness is measured at 416 cd/m² in HDR mode, which is pretty decent for this setup with support for HDR up to 500 cd/m², though it would have benefited from support for an anti-reflective coating to optimize the readability gain of the screen.

The overall colorimetry isn’t impressive, but it’s not bad either. We can count on an average color temperature of 6200K, slightly too warm compared to the 6500K sought, and an average Delta E00 of 2.65, somewhat far from the 1.5 sought in our test, but not bad.

We are grateful no matter what to see a screen with a brightness greater than 300 cd/m², the average observed when manufacturers seek to save money on their panels, and a competitive 90Hz refresh rate in this sector.

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFsoftware

Manufacturer HP never hesitates to pack a lot of adware into its formula, and it didn’t hold back on the Pavilion Plus 14. We’re always greeted by the harrowing McAfee and its treacherous practices, plus regular notifications for an ExpressVPN subscription or to create a Dropbox storage space.

Other than that, the management software suite provided by HP isn’t bad, but it’s not very advanced either. Half of their apps look more like a big ad or mini help blog than anything really useful. When the app is there, like HP Command Center, it gets the job done without offering much customization and tuning either.

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFperformances

The HP Pavilion Plus 14-eh0001nf we’re testing here is powered by a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 1255U, a 10-core, 12-thread SoC backed by 16GB of DDR4-3200MHz RAM and 1TB of PCIe Gen 3 storage. x4. We also have a 4GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 GDDR6 here with just 35W TGP.

Yes: although the SoC is recent, it is not supported by state-of-the-art hardware. Whether it’s 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, PCIe Gen 3 storage, or that mobile RTX 2050 GPU that isn’t particularly useful in this setup, this Pavilion Plus 14 feels a bit like a pot: rotten components ordered in bulk by manufacturer year. before.

General reference points

As for the benchmarks, there are no bad surprises in this Intel i7-1255U, which offers us a score of 6805 points in multicore and 1712 points in monocore in Cinebench R23. We have seen this SoC score better, but these results are still average. This is further highlighted by its PC Mark 10 score of 5641, which highlights that the HP Pavilion Plus 14 is struggling in the same category as its rivals.

The GeForce RTX 2050 also shows a somewhat disappointing, but not surprising performance. With a Time Spy Extreme score of 1595, we can’t say it’ll support a big gamer for years to come, but it will launch a popular competitive free-to-play game smoothly in 1080p.

There’s also no problem standing out next to the Samsung-provided SSD, which offers the expected performance for a PCI Gen 3. The only problem is that we’re entitled to expect PCIe Gen 4 storage these days.

cooling and noise

The HP Pavilion Plus 14 has at least one advantage: It controls its heating quite well. Although it still hits 40°C at the bottom of the hull when pushed all the way in, it’s still very discreet and doesn’t take off into other skies. In this aspect, it is still an ultrabook.

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFAutonomy

The HP Pavilion Plus 14 incorporates a 51Wh battery and is compatible with the DisplayPort standard and therefore recharges through the USB-C port. It is compatible with a power supply of up to 90W, whose charger is provided in the box.

The autonomy of the device is surely one of the most disappointing elements of its configuration. Given that it bills itself as an ultrabook, we expect ultrabook longevity; They’re not here. In advanced office use, we can only count on it for 3 or 4 hours.

Giving it really all the possibilities, activating the energy saving mode and with limited backlighting, therefore we rotated around 6 hours on average. Without going as far as MacBook records, laptops in the Windows universe now easily hit ten hours. The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is too limited on this point.

HP Plus Pavilion 14-EH0001NFPrice and availability

The HP Pavilion Plus 14-eh0001nf is now available in France. Our test configuration is sold at 1,599 euros on the manufacturer’s official website.