HP decided to relaunch their once popular Pavilion laptop series with some modification in order to make it more gamer friendly and to increase their appeal towards the casual gamers by providing a discrete GPU. It comes with a lot of different configurations including a variety of the size of the provided RAM (8, 12 and 16 GB) and the type and the power of the dedicated GPU (AMD Radeon RX 550, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI). Today we are gonna check out the version with the 1050 Ti, HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr.
Check out the latest price for the HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr
Specs:
- CPU – Intel Core i7 Quad-Core (7th Gen), 2.8 GHz
- GPU – 4 GB DDR5, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI
- Memory – 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4
- Screen – 15.6-inch Full HD IPS (1,920 x 1,080)
- Storage – 1 TB SATA HDD + 128 GB SSD
- OS – Windows 10 Home edition
Benefits:
- Performance – It comes with a powerful Intel Core i7 processor which is pretty common for higher mid-range notebooks nowadays, 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM and a duo of 128 GB fast SSD and a relatively slower 1 TB HDD. The laptop is excellent at getting done your everyday chores like media consumption and office jobs as well as for intense gaming. HP doesn’t advertise Pavilion Power series as a gaming laptop series. According to them, it’s a budget laptop that just happens to house a powerful GPU. Anyway, the supplied NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 TI GPU with 4 GB of VRAM is sufficiently powerful for handling some of your serious gaming needs. It can handle almost all the AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto V (>100 fps in 1080p Medium, ~45 fps in 1080p Ultra), Doom (~80 fps in 1080p Medium, ~75 fps in 1080p Ultra), Hitman (>60 fps in 1080p Medium, ~35 fps in 1080p Ultra) and The Witcher 3 (~50 fps in 1080p Medium, <30 fps in 1080p Ultra) in its native 1080p resolution. Although the Ultra preset for some of the more taxing titles like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Ashes of the Singularity may cause a laggy and choppy experience. To experience all your games in the FHD resolution in the Ultra settings the more powerful GTX 1060 would be needed.
- Battery – The battery life can be considered pretty good for a higher mid-range quasi-gaming laptop (Considering the fact that it has to power a powerful GPU like 1050 Ti). It comes with a 4-cell 70 Wh battery pack. The notebook was able to keep running for almost 5 hours while surfing the internet in medium brightness. That might be a tad bit short for a regular laptop but considering that it’s a part gaming laptop as well it seems great. The battery life gets significantly lower while gaming. But that’s not the job of a battery anyway.
Downsides:
- Display – The display is not really the best in its class considering that it’s a post-1000 dollar laptop. Firstly the brightness level, at 240 nits, is not really the brightest among its competitors. It falls behind the category average of 280 nits as well as competing laptops like Lenovo Legion Y520 (245 nits) and Alienware 15 (311 nits). It screams trouble if you plan on using it outdoors as the backlighting is barely able to overcome the environmental light like the sunlight. Secondly, the colour coverage is pretty short as well. The panel nearly showed a sRGB coverage of 65% which falls fairly short of the category average of 80%. Competitors like Inspiron 15 7000 (70%) and Lenovo Yoga 720 (90%) comes with a better panel as a mid-range laptop. But the panel’s not all bad at all. The colour accuracy (delta E value of 0.7) and the contrast ratio (1300:1) are quite good for a budget laptop. In short, while it shows some good results it certainly falls short in some major aspects as well.
- Noise – It seems the fans have only 2 settings when they are on: either high or low. That means the fans either are spinning very slowly (almost inaudible) or totally aggressively (very much audible even from a distance). It seems the fans lack a medium settings that would be very helpful for light gaming or CAD works. As a result, the noise level reaches almost 40 dB while doing some moderately demanding tasks. But the situation worsens even further while doing some strenuous job like gaming as the sound of the roaring fans can be heard even from a reasonable distance away (>46 dB, <45 dB is ideal while gaming). So you might need to use a headphone if you plan on some runnin’ and gunnin’.
Verdict:
It’s a powerful beast. While it can take care of your regular tasks efficiently it houses a moderately powerful GTX 1050 Ti for your gaming needs as well. But the dim display is a pure bummer though. So if that’s not gonna be a biggie for you then this can be a pretty darn good candidate for your everyday notebook.
Check out the latest price for the HP Pavilion Power 15-cb079nr