HP Pavilion series of laptops are globally-renowned for their robustness paired with efficient performance and reliability. After successfully launching a series of all-purpose and business laptops, the company seems to have shifted its focus to the ever-on-demand gaming arena, and have launched the latest mid-range gaming laptop, the HP Pavilion Power 15.
The laptop is launched with huge expectations, as it touted to be one of the best gaming laptops in the budget. The unique selling point about the laptop is its long-lasting battery, which is a rare scene for a gaming laptop.
The laptop sports all the latest and market-trending set of innards (specifications) and is expected to take down the likes of Dell, MSI, and ASUS in the entry-level to mid-range gaming laptop’s segment. After all the hype and expectations the laptop received, we thought of putting the laptop to test and know whether it can really stand up to the expectations or not. Drill down further to know our thoughts on the HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr gaming laptop.
HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr Gaming Laptop
Features
- Processor: 7th Generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700HQ Processor, Quad-Core, 2.8GHz up to 3.8GHz; Powerful performance keeps up with your multitasking demands and enables new ways to interact with your PC
- Video graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI (4 GB GDDR5 dedicated); Turn your laptop into a creative powerhouse for visually demanding apps. NVIDIA Pascal and Game Ready technologies drive the latest games in their full glory
- Display: 15.6-inch diagonal Full HD (1920x1080) IPS anti-glare WLED-backlit; Enjoy vibrant, crystal-clear images with 178-degree wide-viewing angles
- Memory: 16GB DDR4 SDRAM; Designed to run more efficiently and more reliably at faster speeds. Keyboard: Full-size island-style backlit keyboard with numeric keypad
- Hard drive and solid-state drive: 1TB 7200RPM Serial ATA and 128GB PCIe NVMe M.2 solid-state drive; Fast boot up times, snappy responsiveness, and large storage capacity
Design
The HP Pavilion Power 15 comes with standard design, which although isn’t ground-breaking in terms of looks, but does give a solid look and feel.
The overall build quality and the chassis made is evidently a considerable improvement over the previously launched Pavilion series of notebooks by the company and comes with a toughed rigidity. The laptop’s edges and corners are stronger, sharper, and well-defined with better finish. Thanks to the improvised look and feel, the laptop feels far more aesthetic and versatile.
The laptop has been designed and engineered considering the everyday usage. The laptop’s lid lifts the rear base of the laptop for the air flow, which maintains the laptop’s temperature. The display can be tilted to a maximum of 150 degrees, which will suffice most of the regular users. Keyboard, trackpad, ports, and other connectivity slots are neatly recessed and are properly placed on the laptop. Both the edges consistently house the ports and other connectivity options.
Dimension wise, the laptop measures 9.93 x 14.88 x 0.95 inches, which is pretty much the norm in a 15-inch laptop. The laptop however, weighs just 4 pounds which makes it ideal for daily commuters like college students and business people. On an overall, comparative note, the laptop’s dimension and weight are not much different than that of the other notebooks in the segment.
You may like to check out: Our Most Recommended Laptops for College Students in Every Budget
Display
The HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr laptop sports a 15.6-inch diagonal Full HD display. The display comes with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and the panel on the device is an IPS WLED-backlit enabled one.
The 1080p IPS display works fine on most of the occasions. It does provide good vibrant color reproduction along with a 178-degree of wide-viewing angles. However, we felt the display tended to be a bit grainy, which could take out the fun while playing games or watching videos at higher resolutions.
You may like to read: The Laptops with Most Color-Accurate Displays for Photo Editing
Moreover, the contrast levels on the laptop, were also a bit behind the competition. The color temperature on the laptop is not overly cool nor is very warm, which is a good thing. It has the right balance of color, which will suffice most of the gamers, and regular users. Backlit is subtle and can provide enough thrust for daylight viewing.
Hardware
The Pavilion Power packs in some robust and powerful innards for the asking price. Speaking about the hardware and specifications, the device packs in a latest 7th Generation Intel Core i7-7700HQ quad-core processor. The processor of the device comes with a default clock speed of 2.8GHz, which can go up to 3.8GHz in full throttle.
MORE: The Best Laptops with Intel Core i7 Processors
For multitasking and handling applications, the laptop comes with a 16GB of DDR4 SDRAM. The latest and the spacious 16GB of RAM ensures smoother and efficient performance at faster speeds. For the storage, the laptop is bolstered by a 1TB of Serial ATA hard disk drive. The device also comes with a 128GB of PCIe NVMe M.2 solid-state drive. The read and write speeds of SSD are excellent and hard drive used on the laptop is also faster with 7200RPM speed.
As far as graphics are concerned, the laptop comes with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti GPU with 4GB of DDR5 VRAM. So, from specs sheet the laptop looks pretty good but how’s the real-life performance? More on that later.
Keyboard & Touchpad
The HP Pavilion 15-cb079nr series comes with an all new full-size island-style chiclet keyboard. The keyboard is more rigid, and provides better tactile feedback. Although the keys are plastic built, they come with a right concave structure, making typing easy and effective. The keyboard is backlit enabled which comes quite handy.
MORE: Our Top Recommended Laptops for Writers with Best Keyboards
There are no separate fancy colors for WASD keys though, but that’s what makes this HP pavilion laptop stand out. Being a professional looking device, this laptop is beast inside and hence, the best all-purpose laptop in $1000 price range with perfect mixture of work and play.
The touchpad on the device is also very spacious and comes with a proper surface area to suffice all the gestures and inputs. Moreover, it has chrome-trimmed trackpad, giving it a rich feel while using.
Webcam
The HP Pavilion Power 15 comes with an integrated 720p HD web camera. The device’s camera can aid in video callings but cannot suffice someone who will use this as a means of capturing images. Although the device can capture images, the results might be a tad disappointing. There is evident visual noise in the images and they appear to be a bit blurry. However, the image gets adjusted quite well to the frame, and the camera’s reception rates are acceptable.
Ports & Slots
The laptop comes with all the set of ports and input slots, one would expect from a laptop. It comes with a pair of USB 3.1 Gen 1 Ports, an audio jack and kensington lock on left hand side and on right hand side there is one USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 port, one USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, RJ-45 port, an HDMI port, and a media card reader.
The ports selection on the laptop is very good and you would never run out of ports with this laptop but we think that the ports are aligned slightly close to each other and that might be problematic while connecting thumb drives to adjacent USB ports.
Software
HP Pavilion 15-cb079nr laptop runs Windows 10 out of the box which is pretty much a norm, when it comes to gaming-stationed laptops. It has a large application market, and an even larger user base, making it an ideal choice for every gaming laptop.
As far as bloatware is concerned, the HP Pavilion Power 15 does come with some softwares pre-installed but some of them are useful. However, they can be uninstalled pretty easily and you can enjoy pure Windows experience with this laptop.
Performance
Thanks to the stellar set of specifications, the laptop offers, the performance on this device is not a compromise by any means. That said, the device delivers, powerful performance and can keeps up with all the multitasking demands of the users.
We tested the laptop in its full throttle by throwing multiple heavy applications at it. Thankfully, the laptop handled multiple apps exceptionally well. We were watching 4K content on the laptop, with multiple applications including benchmarks, chrome with almost 15 tabs open, and more, to which the laptop responded really well.
MORE: The Best Laptops for Video Editing with Powerful Hardware and 4K Screens
We did not had any issue in using the laptop as the primary work machine. The spacious keyboard and the trackpad helped us stay productive with the works. All the connectivity options provided with the laptop worked like a charm with no hassles.
We ran a couple of benchmarking tests to determine the power and performance of the device. The laptop gave very adequate benchmarking scores, easily topping the lists of most of the other gaming laptops under $1000.
We also did a couple of other performance tests including the data transfer rate tests, to which the laptop gave amazing results. Thanks to its combination of HDD+SSD, the device was able to achieve very good data transfer rates.
Gaming Performance
As far as the gaming on this HP Pavilion is concerned, the integrated 4GB of GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI graphics coprocessor is a show-stealer here.
Being a primarily gaming-stationed laptop, the HP Pavilion 15-cb079nr laptop can handle almost all the modern games with ease even with the graphics set to mid-high level settings. To test its 3D rendering strength, we ran 3D Mark on the device, and the laptop scored a decent 8800 points.
However, do not expect the buttery smooth gaming experience from demanding games at highest graphics settings. So on a conclusive note, users will be satisfied with the gaming performance of the device, if they keep their expectations in check. We played a couple of modern games including the GTA V on highest graphic mode and the laptop did well.
You may like to read: MSI GL62M-7REX Gaming Laptop Review – The Best Gaming Laptop Under $1000?
Audio & Video
The HP Pavilion Power 15’s speakers aren’t very powerful. But, they are subtle enough to give a good audio and listening experience. The device comes with dual Speakers, which are internally tuned by B&O PLAY for better audio output. Moreover, the laptop comes with the company’s proprietary HP Audio Boost technology for better audio at various presets.
As far as video experience is concerned, the laptop’s full HD display can handle almost all the content you throw at it. Be it 4K, UHD, Full HD, or HD, we had good time watching video content on the laptop. But, as we mentioned earlier the display is bit grainy and it isn’t the brightest to use easily in the daylight conditions.
Battery Life
The company claimed that the laptop can provide a battery backup of up to 11 hours on a single charge, which is very huge for any gaming laptop. However, when we put the laptop to test, it provided us an endurance period of about 7-8 hours on a single charge, which is still pretty commendable for a gaming laptop. The device is powered by a lithium-ion polymer battery, which takes just 1 hour for a full charge from 0 to 100 which is again an added advantage of this laptop. So, battery life is where this laptop shines and stands out in the segment and we would like to applaud HP for that.
Conclusion
HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr is unarguably one of the best value-for-money gaming laptop in sub-$1000 segment. The laptop has got able hardware paired with decent specs. Although the laptop lags slightly behind the competition in terms of display quality and audio output, its performance, built, and battery life makes it a very worthy buy.
HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr Gaming Laptop
$999.00
Pros
- Aesthetic design
- Sturdy performance
- Long lasting battery life
- Comfortable backlit keyboard and spacious touchpad
Cons
- Grainy display
- Feeble audio
