Sights and sounds
LAPTOP | £1,000 from HP www.snipca.com/49191
There are several similarities between this and the Acer Swift Go 14, which we reviewed in Issue 677 and is our current favourite laptop (see page 30). They both have brilliant 14in screens OLED screens and powerful processors. However, the Pavilion Plus is cheaper to the tune of £300. And there are reasons for this.
Instead of the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor you’ll find in the Swift Go, this comes with a more modest AMD Ryzen 7 7840U chip. This can’t quite keep up in terms of power, running at around 86 per cent of the speed of the Intel processor in our benchmark tests.
Any comparison of these two laptops only highlights how far Intel has progressed with the Ultra range’s built-in graphics hardware. The Pavilion Plus can only manage around 78 per cent of the Ultra’s performance in graphics tests. None of this is surprising, however, given the price difference.
Where it lags behind more significantly is in the amount of RAM. Here we only get 16GB – half what’s in the Swift Go. While 16GB is probably enough at the moment, over the life of the laptop you may end up wishing you had a bit more. You can replace the SSD at some point in the future – there’s only four screws and a bit of prizing required to access the laptop’s internals. However, the RAM itself is soldered to the motherboard and there’s no way of adding extra.
The Pavilion Plus also struggled in our battery tests, lasting only 5 hours 48 minutes when browsing the web. That’s a long way behind the Swift Go’s 10 hours.
But there are plenty of plus points. The 2880x1800-pixel OLED screen covers all the DCI-P3 standard, providing excellent colour accuracy. It’s also bright, reaching 381cd/m2 in our tests, so will be perfectly visible outside even on a sunny day.
Its built-in webcam comes with all the features you’d want, including a 1440p resolution, infrared sensor and a physical privacy shutter. However, the image it produces doesn’t quite live up to the impressive specs, with soft focus and slightly disappointing detail.
