The deficit in the gaming hardware market continues, and it will not soon, most likely, let go of the industry. The latest consoles, graphics cards and gaming laptops are hard to find freely available. Therefore, pre-scarce models are in demand, and this also applies to gaming laptops in 2023.
Company HP, despite the presence of an expensive line in its catalog OMENcontinues to release more affordable gaming laptops Pavilion Gaming…
Today we will look at a model from the series HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 16… Specifically, for our top-end configuration, the minimum price at the time of this writing was about 95,000 rubles. Prices for other solutions start at 59,990 rubles.
COMPLETE SET, APPEARANCE AND CONNECTORS
The laptop comes in a regular box made of thick cardboard, on which, in fact, there is nothing except the black HP logo.
Inside, the HP Pavilion Gaming 16-a0027ur is protected by two formatted pieces of polyethylene foam. In a pocket on the side, the manufacturer placed a 200 W power supply and a network cable.
You cannot call a compact laptop, but it is far from being a record holder in terms of weight, since it weighs 649 grams with a network cable.
In the box you will also find information about the warranty and as many as three short instructions in Russian, Ukrainian and Kazakh. The manufacturer did not skimp on a protective non-woven cloth between the screen and the keyboard.
Pavilion Gaming Laptop 16 in terms of case design does not differ fundamentally from other models released since 2018. It is still a strict body with sharp lines without unnecessary backlighting.
The semi-glossy gray plastic base is interspersed with small sparkles, and the logo in the middle of the lid has a mirror-like texture that gives off a green tint. The case turned out to be quite easily soiled. But the base is very strong and does not lend itself to deformation, unlike the lid, which still lends itself a little when pressed with a finger from above. At the bottom, the laptop has two rubber feet at the front and one long at the back. In the lower part, there is also traditionally a grill for air intake by the cooling system, under which two coolers adjacent to each other can be seen. The air outlet passes through the holes at the screen hinge.
The dimensions of the laptop are 370 x 262 x 24 mm, and the weight is 2 kg and 289 grams. The HP Pavilion Gaming 16-a0027ur turned out to be quite thick, but its weight is relatively small by the standards of gaming solutions.
As for the connectors, there are many of them and they are mainly concentrated on the right side. There is HDMI 2.0 for connecting external screens, a USB 3.1 gen 2 type A connector, a gigabit RJ-45 port for wired internet with nearby network indication diodes, a USB 3.1 gen 2 type C connector with DisplayPort support, a 3.5 mm combo audio jack for headset, headphones or external microphone and a reader for SD cards. To the left of the Type-C connector, you can also notice a small diode that signals the loading of the internal storage.
On the left side of the laptop, at the very edge, there is a port for the power supply, as well as another USB 3.1 gen 2 type A.
SCREEN, EASY TO USE AND SOUND
Thanks to the weight of the device and the medium-hardness hinge, the lid can be easily lifted with one hand without any problems. It opens about 140 degrees.
Under the lid is a 16.1-inch matte anti-glare screen. It is based on an IPS-matrix from the Chinese manufacturer BOE with a Full HD resolution (1920 × 1080) and a refresh rate of 60 Hz. Screen response is about 30ms. The brightness is 250 cd / m2, and is unlikely to be sufficient when working in direct sunlight.
Contrast – 1200: 1. The NTSC color gamut is 45% and the viewing angles are 178 degrees both vertically and horizontally.
Although the camera recorded flares on the sides in black, in fact, they are not so noticeable during real tests.
The screen has thin bezels only on the sides. Their thickness is 4 mm. On the bottom, the bezel is 19 to 25 mm wide due to the beveled corners of the lid, and on the top it is 9 mm wide because of the built-in webcam and microphones. The camera has a resolution of 0.9 megapixels and is capable of recording video in 720p at 30 frames, as well as taking pictures in the same resolution. The recording quality is expectedly weak, which is standard for built-in cameras in laptops, although this is enough for Skype and ZOOM calls.
On the base, next to the screen, there is a corporate ornament of rhombuses and triangles, under which the device’s stereo speakers are hidden. The manufacturer chose a good location, since they will not overlap during use.
For the speaker setup in the HP Pavilion Gaming 16-a0027ur, as in all HPs, experts from the Danish premium manufacturer Bang & Olufsen were responsible. Their volume level is quite standard. The highs and mids sound clear when listening to music. For games, these speakers are more than enough.
The laptop is equipped with the Bang & Olufsen Audio Control application, where you can control incoming and outgoing sound sources, microphone noise cancellation and an equalizer with ready-made presets.
A thin power button is located on the left between the speakers and the keyboard. When the device is turned on, the button glows green, and somehow we could not turn off its glow.
Most of the base is occupied by the keyboard unit, which is located on the recessed part. There is a numeric block on the keyboard. To accommodate it, the manufacturer shifted the arrow keys under the right Shift and cut the height of the up and down arrows by half.
The keyboard is made of soft-touch plastic, the stroke is short and quiet when used. All buttons, with the exception of very large ones, like Space, are evenly squeezed when pressed in any corner. On the sides, the keys, as well as the symbols, are colored green. This was done, most likely, to enhance the effect of the backlight, which also shines in green and has two levels of brightness, which can be adjusted and turned off by alternately pressing the FN and F5 buttons combination. Additional functions, such as volume and flight mode settings, have other buttons, starting with F1 and ending with F12.
The touchpad is located in front of the keyboard and is quite large. Its dimensions are 113 x 72 mm. The surface is made of soft-touch plastic and supports multi-finger gesture control. The bottom corners are pressed through and simulate the main mouse buttons.
FILLING, BATTERY, OPERATION AND TESTS
The HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 16 that came to us for testing is based on a 14-nanometer Intel Core i7-10750H processor, clocked at 2.6 GHz. The processor is 6-core and operates in 12 threads and 12 MB of Intel Smart Cache, and the maximum frequency is 5000 MHz. There are two video adapters in the laptop: an Intel UHD accelerator built into the CPU with 1 GB of video memory and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 MAX Q card with 6GB of GDDR6 memory.
The laptop has 16 GB memory (two 8 GB sticks, operating at 1600 MHz in dual-channel mode) manufactured by Samsung with a maximum frequency of 3200 MHz. If desired, the memory can be replaced and expanded up to 32 GB. The role of the internal drive in the test sample was played by a 256 gigabyte NVMe SSD from Western Digital (WDC PC SN730 SDBPNTY-256G-1006). The second drive is a 1 terabyte HDD (WDC WD10SPSX-60A6WT0) from the same manufacturer.
In addition to the ability to connect the network over a wire through the built-in gigabit adapter from Realtek, the laptop has a dual-band WiFi 5 module Realtek RTL8822CE with Bluetooth 5.0.
The HP Pavilion Gaming 16-a0027ur comes with a 3-cell, 53Wh Li-ion battery. A full charge will last for 4-6 hours of normal use (at 50-80% screen brightness and Wi-Fi on) – for surfing the Internet, working with documents, watching videos and listening to music.
In active gaming mode, the laptop runs for about 1.5 hours. Maximum performance is achieved only when the power supply is connected. Battery modes can be controlled exclusively through standard operating system tools, and the OMEN Gaming Hub app allows you to monitor temperature and performance data.
In optimal performance mode, NWiNFO64 shows the following temperatures on average:
- CPU – 62 ° C
- Intel UHD – 57 ° C
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 MAX-Q – 52 ° C
- WDC PC SN730 SDBPNTY-256G-1006 – 46 ° C
- WDC WD10SPSX-60A6WT0 – 23 ° C
With a long maximum load in CPU tests, the laptop heated up to 99 degrees, and on average, under load, the temperature remained at 80 degrees. At such temperatures, of course, CPU throttling was recorded. In the multi-threaded test Cinebench R20, the processor was able to score 2497 points, and the frequency remained between 2.6 and 3.5 GHz. In a single-threaded CPU, I was able to earn 464 points at an operating frequency of 4.2 to 4.6 GHz.
In graphics tests and games, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 performs well. All tests were run in system performance mode with power on. Resolution was fixed at 1080p at high-maximum gaming settings:
- In the Superposition benchmark test on the Unigine 2 engine in 1080p mode at extreme settings, the system showed from 19 to 28 frames, while at high settings the GPU was able to show from 45 to 75 frames.
- In the Chinese Boundary 1080p ray-traced benchmark, the laptop was able to average 80fps with DLSS in Ultra Performance mode. In quality mode with the same settings, the average FPS was 31.
- In the Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition benchmark, the laptop was able to score 5878 points at high graphics settings at 1080p and was rated “fairly high”.
The system was also tested in the in-game tests of Forza Horizon 4, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Gears 5 at 1080p:
- In the Playground race at maximum graphics settings, the laptop was able to produce an average FPS of 68 frames per second.
- Gears 5 on ultra settings and with the ultra texture pack installed showed an average frame rate of 54 FPS.
- The in-game RDR2 benchmark was run on ultra settings with Vulcan API and TAA anti-aliasing, showing an average of 41 FPS in Full HD.
Next, we tested the GPU directly during gameplay. For starters, we launched last year’s DOOM Eternal. The shooter was tested on Ultra settings at 1080p. On average, the frame rate was kept at around 95-105 frames, depending on the location and the intensity of what is happening on the screen.
The second project that we tested in gameplay was Control by Remedy, which supports DLSS 2.0 ray tracing and anti-aliasing technologies that we are interested in. We ran the project in 1080p resolution at maximum graphics settings with RTX and DLSS with a rendering resolution of 540p. At these settings, the picture on the laptop screen generally looked good, although it lacked a little clarity. The average frame rate in the game at these settings was in the range from 45 to 65 frames.
The final graphics test was Cyberpunk 2077. We tested the game at high settings at 1080p, with RTX at medium and DLSS in Ultra mode, and got an average of 60-70 frames when traveling through the wastelands, as well as 30-35 frames in the city. In closed locations, the frame rate is kept on average in the range of 40-50 FPS. However, the picture in this DLSS mode is very lacking in clarity, and the best option is the balanced mode, which makes the visual range noticeably sharper, although you have to pay for a decrease in performance by about 10-25 frames.
We were able to fix the maximum temperature of the GPU at around 77 degrees, and on average under load in games it kept at around 65-70 degrees. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 should be enough for games at high-ultra settings at 1080 without ray tracing and at medium with RTX.
The average temperature of a WD SSD installed under the system remains at 61 ° C under load. The disk speed in Crystal Disk Mark was 2808 MB / s for reading and 2187 MB / s for writing. As usual, the AS SDD test shows more modest results – 2161 MB / s for reading and 2072 MB / s for writing. Additional 1 terabyte file storage installed had an average temperature under load of 40 ° C. The Crystal Disk Mark and AS SDD tests showed quite close results to each other:
- Crystal Disk Mark (WDC WD10SPSX-60A6WT0): read – 116 mb / s, write – 117 mb / s
- AS SSD (WDC WD10SPSX-60A6WT0): read – 117 mb / s, write – 110 mb / s
As for the noise figure, it is not audible when the laptop is idle (at room values of 25-30 dB), since it does not turn its fans. At light load, the noise level rises to 38-40 dB. Under heavy loads, powerful cooling starts to work and the device becomes noisy – up to 48-50 dB, which, however, is within the normal range for gaming laptops.
TOTAL
The HP Pavilion Gaming 16-a0027ur is a decent gaming laptop for those on a budget. It offers adequate gaming performance, a good set of interfaces and a comfortable full-size keyboard, which, by the way, does not get warm during games in the left half, where the main buttons used when playing the keyboard are located. The only upsetting thing is the small size of the SSD, which the manufacturer decided to compensate for with a large hard drive, as well as the slow laptop screen. But the first problem can be solved by choosing a configuration only with a 512 gigabyte SSD or by self-replacement, since the memory in the laptop is completely replaceable. The manufacturer may have corrected the second flaw with the release this year of an updated model with a screen with a refresh rate of 144 Hz, and even Wi-Fi 6.
The minimum cost, by the way, for the improved model at the time of this writing was at the level of the tested sample.
Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)
Read also: ASUS ROG Strix Scope RX keyboard review…
