The Pavilion line has always been HP’s mid-range consumer brand, and this 15-inch model fits right in. It’s not quite an ultrabook, but it has a lot going for it. This model has 16GB RAM, a fast 512GB SSD, a touch-screen 15.3-inch FHD display, and a 4th-generation AMD Ryzen 7 processor, among other high-end features. It has a good chance of making our list of the best laptops. Most of the time, it does a great job with those parts. It gets results that are good, but not quite as good as the high mark set by the top end of Intel’s 11th-generation mobile processors.
The Pavilion’s 1080p IPS display is clear for a 15-inch screen, and its contrast ratio of 1593:1 is better than average. However, the rest of the panel is pretty average. With a claimed maximum brightness of 250cd/m2, the HP Pavilion 15 laptop’s screen is not very bright.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]Even when working outside, it doesn’t get bright enough to beat glare in places with a lot of light. But even on the lowest setting for brightness, it gets dark enough to watch in a dark room without glare. There are models with 300cd/m2 panels that should work much better in bright places, but they are still not good for use outside.
As shown here, DisplayPort over USB-C doesn’t seem to work on our unit. No matter what settings were used, the image on the external monitor would jerk and look wrong. Even when we used different laptops and monitors, the results didn’t change. This only seems to happen with the USB-C port, since video-out via HDMI would work fine.
Transfer speeds from the MicroSD reader with a spring are about 70 MB/s, which is pretty fast. On the older Pavilion 15 Gaming, it took almost twice as long to move 1 GB of pictures from our UHS-II test card to the desktop.
The Power 15t has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU with 4GB of video memory (VRAM). It’s on the lower end of Nvidia’s Pascal 10-Series GPUs, but it can still play games well at lower settings. The battery can be charged quickly. Again, with the laptop turned off and the battery completely dead, a 30-minute charge brought the battery level up to 43%, which is a little less than the stated 50%.
A 90-minute charge made it 96%, which is more than the 90% that was said. The battery life is said to be 9 hours and 30 minutes for a mix of uses and 8 hours and 45 minutes for watching videos. HP doesn’t say how they come up with these numbers, but they seem optimistic.