HP’s Pavilion—the company’s bread-and-butter laptop—has been earning money lately from sophisticated shoppers, who may have swung to the once more premium Envy and Specter series. Last summer’s Pavilion Aero was fast, well-equipped, and weighed a featherweight 2.2 pounds, and the new Pavilion Plus 14 (starts at $729.99; $1,279.99 as tested) is a sleek aluminum ultraportable laptop with an attractive OLED display. Available with. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 earns an Editors’ Choice approval, replacing the Carbon, plus a midrange ultraportable that also offers OLED and is lighter, but costs more and has fewer ports.
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Lots of configurations to choose from
American buyers are limited to natural silver instead of the many colors offered to foreign buyers, but otherwise the Pavilion Plus 14 is a dream for those who like to pay attention to configuration details. It can be ordered with either Intel integrated or Nvidia discrete graphics, and 12th-generation processors from Intel’s 15-watt U, 28-watt P, or 45-watt H series. He is exceptionally flexible; Which you choose will depend on your lust for performance versus battery life.
(credit: Molly Flores)
Right now the cheapest model is the $729.99 HP.com configuration with a Core i5-1235U processor, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 14-inch display with 16:10 aspect ratio and 2,240-by-1,400. -Pixel resolution supported by a GeForce MX550 GPU. Prices may be lower, though, so it might be worth waiting for a sale like the $549.99 deal we saw at Staples, which ended just before review deployment of.
The $999.99 model steps up to the Core i7-12700H (six performance cores, eight efficient cores, 20 threads) with Intel Iris XE integrated graphics and a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED panel. Our $1,279.99 review The unit matches it, except with a 1TB SSD instead of Home and Windows 11 Pro. Gamers can juggle the Core i7-1255U with rarely-seen GeForce RTX 2050 graphics. Various models have Wi-Fi 5, our system’s Wi-Fi 6, or Wi-Fi 6e, as well as Bluetooth for wireless connectivity.
(credit: Molly Flores)
The Pavilion Plus 14 measures 0.72 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches (HWD), which is slightly heavier than the Slim 7 Carbon (0.59 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches). The Acer Swift 3, a 14-inch ultraportable with a traditional 16:9 screen aspect ratio, measures 0.63 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches. Though it’s not a burden in a briefcase, the HP is the heaviest of the three at 3.09 pounds, Lenovo’s 2.42 pounds and Acer’s 2.71 pounds.
HP claims the Plus has a recycled aluminum lid, keyboard deck, and bottom, as well as recycled plastic keycaps. There’s some flex if you grasp the corners of the screen or mash the keyboard, but the laptop feels fairly sturdy overall. The screen bezels are thin (the company says the screen-to-body ratio is 87%) and the Palm Rest houses a fingerprint reader for password-free login.
(credit: Molly Flores)
We love seeing Thunderbolt 4 ports on laptops under $1,000 and up; The Pavilion Plus doesn’t have any, but since it starts at $1,000, we can’t complain too loudly. There are two 10Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C ports on the right, along with a 5Gbps USB Type-A port and an HDMI video output (either accommodates an AC adapter for charging the laptop’s battery). Another USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and an audio jack are on the left.
(credit: Molly Flores)
some luxury amenities
Since you can sign into Windows Hello with a fingerprint, we don’t mind that the webcam lacks face recognition technology, though we’re disappointed that it doesn’t have a privacy shutter. On the plus side, it blows away the usual 720p junk with a sharp 5-megapixel resolution (capturing 2,592-by-1,944-pixel 4:3 images or 2,560-by-1,440 16:9 shots or video) and well Gives light and colorful images without noise or static.
The backlit keyboard wins you points for having the actual Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of adding the Fn key and cursor arrows for those functions. It loses points for HP’s trademark arrangement of said cursor keys in an inverted row instead of the proper inverted T, which consists of half-sized, hard-to-hit up and down arrows instead of full-sized left and right arrows. The middle is stacked. (And, I’m tempted to say, it loses more points for the inclusion of an emoji key along with the brightness and volume controls on the top row.)
(credit: Molly Flores)
The Escape and Delete keys are small, but the keyboard’s typing feel is great. It’s a bit shallow and plasticy, but still fast and responsive. The large, buttonless touchpad glides on and taps smoothly but has a fuzzy, sloppy click.
The majority of the Pavilion Plus 14’s earnings come from offering a vivid OLED display at an affordable price. It’s not a touch screen, but what HP calls the 2.8K display is exceptionally sharp and colorful, with gorgeous colors and sky-high contrast. The white backgrounds are pristine and look like black Indian ink. The panel also offers a choice of the usual 60Hz refresh rate, or a 90Hz one for slightly smoother scrolling and video. (It’s not a fast-twitch gaming rig, as you’ll see in the performance benchmarks below.)
(credit: Molly Flores)
Bottom-mounted speakers produce relatively loud and crisp sound. There’s no bass to speak of, but the audio isn’t short or hollow, even at top volume, and you can create overlapping tracks. The B&O audio control software provides an equalizer with music, film and voice presets, as well as noise cancellation for conferences. Other software includes HP Enhanced Lighting to emulate the ring light on the screen, HP QuickDrop to transfer files to or from your smartphone, and McAfee, LastPass and ExpressVPN tested.
Testing the Pavilion Plus 14: An Ultralight Ultra-Faceoff
For our benchmark tests, we challenged the HP Pavilion Plus 14 with four other 14-inch consumer slimlines, led by the OLED-screen, AMD-powered Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon, and its Intel sibling, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro. The other two are the Acer Swift 3 and the XPG Xenia 14, which come in at just over $1,000, respectively.
productivity test
UL’s PCMark 10 core benchmarks simulate a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-focused tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s full system drive test to assess the load time and throughput of the laptop’s storage.
The three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate the suitability of a PC for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro emulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder Handbrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (the shorter the time the better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s renowned image editor to rate PC performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that performs a variety of common and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Pavilion Plus landed firmly in the upper middle of the pack, leading our CPU tests and scoring 4,000 in PCMark, indicating excellent productivity for everyday apps like Microsoft Office or Google Workspace.
graphics test
We tested the graphics of Windows PCs with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (suitable for laptops with more modest, integrated graphics) and Time Spy (suitable for gaming rigs with more demanding, discrete GPUs) We do.
We also ran two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which emphasizes both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests provide offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, practice graphics and calculate shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation, respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
For the ten thousandth time, we see that Intel’s Iris XE integrated graphics fall far short of a gaming laptop’s discrete GPU. HP and its partners are fine for casual gaming and streaming entertainment, not the latest simulations and shoot-’em-ups.
Battery and performance testing
We test a laptop’s battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie.) Tears of Steel (opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged, Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off before testing.
We also use the Datacolor SpiderX Elite Monitor Calibration Sensor and its Windows software to measure the color saturation of a laptop screen – the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamut, or what percentage of the palette the display can display. is – and 50% of it and the peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
An unplugged life of nine and a half hours is totally fine—three years ago, we would have thought it miraculous—but it’s just shy of the 12 or more hours we regularly see these days from ultraportables. Still, plus should get you through a full day’s work or school with YouTube, if not the entire Netflix movie left. More importantly, HP’s dazzling display is only from the OLED Slim 7 Carbon, with great brightness and gorgeous color coverage.
The $1,000 Model Looks Even Better
Some of our favorite laptops have IPS displays, but once you see OLED panels it’s hard to settle for less. The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is a capable ultraportable in its IPS guise, but its OLED version is a prime value even with our surcharges review The unit’s 1TB SSD. Losing a few ounces and gaining a few hours of battery life would be awesome, but it still deserves Editors’ Choice honor and a spot on your shopping list.
professionals
Bottom-line
HP continues to upgrade its Pavilion consumer line with affordable ultraportables with great OLED screens and high-res webcams.
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