HP Pavilion 15-eh1000sf review: a balanced laptop

In its midnight blue dress, the Pavilion 15 presents well despite its plastic shell. HP has taken a certain care in the finishes with a flared shell on the rear part, which is not content to be simply monolithic. It even inherited the triangular openings of the speakers in the Specter range. Only downside, the plastic of the screen borders reveals the positioning of this frame on the entry of the Specter range.

The keyboard is equipped with well-spaced keys with correctly marked typing. Two-level white backlighting is welcome. However, despite its qualities, it sinks slightly in its center, the chassis of this Pavilion 15 while plastic lacking a little rigidity.

Note that a fingerprint reader is present on the right palm rest. Its use did not reveal any particular flaw and it even proves to be responsive with Windows Hello.
The touchpad, subtly separated by a silver border, offers a fluid glide with gestures well taken into account by Windows 10. The left and right clicks are however noisy. Drag and drop, however, is not a problem.

The connection includes two USB-A ports, a USB3.2 port compatible with DisplayPort and Power Delivery, an HDMI port and a microSD port. It only lacks an RJ45 port to be completely complete.
Wireless connectivity is provided by a Realtek RTL8852AE chip compatible with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. The webcam is located above the screen, its quality is barely correct and is not compatible with Windows Hello.

The cooling consists of a fan and two heat pipes connected to the radiator. A rather light system and sized for the AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor which dissipates only 15 W.

The cooling system is particularly effective since at the air outlet, placed on the right under the screen, we measured less than 40 ° C, and this after 15 minutes of video encoding. The hottest part of the keyboard is behind the processor, near the ZQSD keys, with less than 35 ° C. The touchpad and the rest of the keyboard are free of hot spots.

Noise pollution is also very low, 35 dB measured at 50 cm from the PC. In a calm environment, the slight hiss is audible, but it will go completely unnoticed in a more lively environment.

Disassembling the Pavilion 15 is easy. Small subtlety: of the six screws that hold the panel, four are hidden in the two non-slip strips. It will therefore be necessary to peel them delicately in order to be able to glue them back properly.

Apart from the processor soldered to the motherboard (as on all laptops), the rest of the components are very accessible. We note the presence of two RAM locations while usually we find only one. The wifi card and the battery are also easily removable. We were telling you about a lack of rigidity in the chassis, HP apparently tried to remedy this by placing two rigid rubber blocks.

As mentioned previously, our HP Pavilion 15-eh1000sf is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 processor with 6 hyperthreaded cores that can reach 4 GHz, all in a 15 W thermal envelope. HP has added 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD.

With a performance rating of 77, the HP Pavilion 15 is adept at all office tasks, with a little penchant for creation. Thanks to its 12 logical cores, the Ryzen 5 5500U can occasionally do photo processing, and even video encoding. It even pays for itself the luxury of being more versatile than the Surface Laptop 4’s Core i7-1185G7.

As usual, we launched Diablo 3 and Overwatch. The first game with full detail at full 1080p runs at 36 fps, while the second with full detail at minimum in the same definition shows almost 80 fps. The Radeon Vega 7 graphics part of the Ryzen therefore allows you to play relatively light games from time to time under correct conditions.

A word about the performance of the onboard SSD: it reaches 1.7 Gb / s read and 1.1 Gb / s write. Honorable performance, but far from those of the most efficient models which approach 4 GB / s in reading.

HP has integrated an IPS panel displaying 1920 x 1080 px, characteristics now commonplace on this kind of PC. Its integration is not particularly careful since we measured the occupancy rate at 79%. We note the grainy plastic around the screen and the unflattering HP logo.

Regarding the pure characteristics of the panel, we measured a contrast of 1218: 1, a very correct value for an IPS panel. The color temperature is on the other hand a little high with 7038 K, when the video standard recommends 6500 K. HP announced a maximum brightness of 250 cd / m², for our part we measured 292 cd / m², a fair value, but fortunately the slab reflects only 17% of the light. You will be able to enjoy the display without trying to avoid windows. Finally, the only weak point of this panel is the colorimetry: we measured a delta E of 6.6, a little more than double the recommended value (3) under which the displayed color differences are imperceptible.

The two speakers are located under the PC on either side of the chassis. Main disadvantage of this position: the rendering depends on the support on which the PC is placed and the hands resting on the keyboard alter the quality of the sound.

Despite the B&O branding on the shell, the two speakers do not work miracles and apparently do not receive the same treatment as the Specter range. Listening, the sound volume is important but suffers from a sound box effect due to the lack of rigidity of the chassis.

The Pavilion 15’s headphone output has no particular flaw. The output power is very slightly above average, as is the crosstalk. The dynamic range is on the other hand slightly behind. As for the distortion, it is very low, a good point for sound reproduction.