Most gamers who are looking for a mid-range gaming laptop look for the best laptop with i5 processor or the best laptops available on the market. Those laptops and the AMD Ryzen ones usually feature the best “bang for the buck” in terms of gaming performance. The HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is a similarly solid mid-range gaming laptop that you can consider buying if you are one of those people.
Why We Like It – HP Pavilion Gaming 15
The HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is a great display of what modern gaming laptops are capable of. Some might find its price tag costly, but it has the hardware to back that price up, unlike many other HP laptops. It provides an excellent gaming experience at a good price range.
- 144Hz high refresh rate display
- Built-in 1TB NVME SSD
- 16GB fast 2933MHz RAM
- Larger than usual bezels
Power & Performance
Basically, all variants of this laptop sport a Core i5-10300H inside. That is a 10th Gen Intel processor, so plenty of power and efficiency there. And it also features a GeForce GTX 1660ti inside. It’s a Max-Q design, so it’s going to be a bit slower than a full-fledged desktop-grade graphics card. But it’s fast enough to drive demanding games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, etc., at above 60FPS on the 1080p display.
Battery
As is the case with pretty much every HP Pavilion gaming laptop, the battery life isn’t that great at all. It’s at least better than the Dell G5 15 Gaming Laptop, meaning you’ll get about a couple of hours of battery life. But you can save battery life too by turning off things like the Wi Fi when not required.
Related: Also check out our HP Pavilion X2 Detachable review.
Ports & Expandability
You get one USB Type C port on this laptop (USB 3.0). And besides that USB C port, you also get two USB 3.0 full-sized Type A ports. And you also get the usual HDMI, ethernet, and the headphone/mic combo jack. But, if you really need a built-in Micro SD card reader, you should rather go for the ASUS VivoBook S14 S433 thin and light ultrabook.
See also: Our HP Pavilion 17 review.
Build Quality
The build quality of the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is pretty decent. Both the keyboard and the trackpad are decent enough and on par with the Acer Aspire 5 A515. The bezels are slightly thicker than some might expect, but it’s not going to be a big deal for most.
Value
This HP Pavilion gaming laptop doesn’t have a variant that comes with an Intel Core i7 processor inside. So the variant we talked about today is pretty much the most top-end one you can get. And with the hardware it offers, it pretty much deserves its sub $1400 price tag.
HP Pavilion Gaming 15 Wrap Up
Overall, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 is a really good gaming laptop if you have the money to spend behind it. Or else, you can also wait for new mobile (laptop) hardware to arrive from Nvidia, Intel, and AMD at this year’s CES event.
