Gaming laptops were one area where most of the users find it difficult to go and get their desired ultimate mean machine. However, manufacturers are now trying to give you better specs at a competitive price point, which have paved new markets and made it easier for customers to sooth their gaming needs without spending their life savings on it.
We have seen brands aggressively eying the affordable gaming laptop segment. One such brand is HP. The company has recently introduced a slew of products that meant to give a stiff competition to the rest of the gaming laptops. And one such Knight in the Shining Armour is HP Pavilion Gaming 15 laptop. The laptop features some top-of-the-line specifications and the design looks quite modern. It comes with a starting price of Rs 70,791. We got the top-end machine for the review, which is priced at Rs 96,952. So, will it be able to take on its competition? Let’s find out.
Design and Display
Starting with the design first, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 laptop features a stylish design language. The lid is made of a matte plastic with purple-coloured HP logo sitting at the centre of it. Once you open the lid, you will a brushed metal finish just beneath the keyboard area, while the top of the keyboard features mesh diamond designed pattern that is meant for the speakers. The power button is at the top-left corner and there B&O branding at the top-left.
The air vents are present at the bottom of the lid and it gives a pretty edgy feel. The brand has done a good job in giving this laptop the much-needed modern look and aggressive styling. Talking about ports placement, the left side of the laptop features power jack coupled with one USB 3.1 port, one HDMI port, one RJ-45 port and a Headphone jack. The right houses two USB 3.1 ports and one SD card slot. That said, we did notice some problem with the lid joint, but apart from this, the rest of the design is quite attractive in nature.
Coming to the display, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 laptop is equipped with a 15.6-inch Full HD LED backlit display with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels along with 144ppi Pixel density. The screen has an IPS Anti-glare coating, which hides the glare quite effectively. The brightness of the gaming laptop is quite decent in nature and the viewing angles are decent as well. Although the downside here is that the company has added a 60Hz refresh rate, which could have been better in our opinion. We didn’t notice any backlight bleeding and it covers more than 66 per cent of sRGB colour gamut.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The HP Pavilion Gaming laptop features a full-sized textured island-style keyboard with numeric keypad. The keyboard is backlit in nature, meaning that you will face no problem when playing games with no ambient light. In our testing period, we found that the typing experience on this device is quite smooth and comfortable in nature. The keyboard delivers a travel distance of 1.15mm is quite decent in our opinion. Coming to the gaming experience, you will enjoy it, though it takes some time to get used to it.
One thing we didn’t like was the size of Up and Down buttons. Most of the time we pressed the wrong key, which was quite frustrating at sometimes. Coming to the touchpad, it comes with Windows 10 Multi-point gesture support. The performance of the trackpad was quite satisfactory in our testing and it was smooth to navigate.
Performance
Coming to the performance, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is powered by 8th generation Intel Core i7-8750H (2.3GHz base frequency) and it offers up to 4 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost Technology along 9 MB cache. It features an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4GB DDR5 graphics card. The laptop is backed by an 8GB DDR4-2666 SDRAM along with 128GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD + 1TB storage with 7200 RPM.
In day to day usage, you will not feel any lag or something. We opened almost 20 tabs on Chrome and watched some episodes on Amazon Prime Videos and Netflix, the laptop performance was swift. However, when it comes to rendering some 3D graphics, we noticed some minute lag. Multitasking was fluid and smooth during our review period. However, sometimes we noticed some lags. For example, after a long session of power usage, we tried to refresh it with a Right. At that moment the home screen tends to freeze, though the rest of the working was fine. This was pretty weird, to be honest.
Coming to the gaming performance, the device was able to run all the new games and we didn’t notice lag. Games like Fornite and PUBG ran smoothly and we easily got 60fps mark with this laptop. The thermal performance was decent as well, though we noticed a rise in temperature when we played an extended gaming session. The fan sound was particularly loud as well.
Battery
Coming to the battery department, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is equipped with a 52.5 Whr 3 Cell cylindrical Lithium Ion polymer battery with Fast charging support. In our testing, we found out that the laptop lasted almost 2 to 3 hours under heavy usage, while under normal usage, it was able to deliver more than 4 hours of battery backup. The laptop also supports fast charging and in our testing, it charged from 0-90 per cent. In around 90 to 120 minutes.