The HP Pavilion 15T is an elegant and sleek gaming laptop that delivers a pretty solid gaming and overall performance. Its battery life is also quite impressive for a gaming laptop. It is an expressive laptop, coming in several different colors like most gaming laptops do. All in all, it is a pretty decent gaming laptop with a modest price range.
Overview
Before we dive deeper into the review, here is a quick overview of the HP Pavilion 15T’s hardware specs:
Processor: Intel Core i5-7300HQ Processor
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU
Screen: 15.6 inches 1920×1080 Multi-touch supporting 10 finger touch
Memory: 1TB HDD, 12GB of RAM, 4GB of VRAM
Battery: Up to 6.5 hours of battery life
Design
The HP Pavilion 15T is a sleek laptop, with a black brushed aluminum chassis with green accents. The lid elegantly curves over the hinges at the bottom giving the laptop a unique look.
When you open the laptop, it has a similar black brushed aluminum deck, with soft green accents on the speaker, touchpad and the keyboard. The power button also glows green when you switch on the laptop.
Its dimensions are 14.9×9.9×1 inches, and it weighs a comfortable 5.4 pounds. Although this design means you will be wiping your fingerprints off your machine almost daily, it is a small price to pay for a laptop that looks this good.
Display
The 15.6-inch display is a bit dull, which takes away from the gaming experience if you are using it for gaming. However, it has crystal clear clarity at 1920×1080 HD resolution. The touchscreen is a very responsive multi-touch screen supporting 10 finger touch.
Hardware
The HP Pavilion comes with a standard range of hardware:
1. Ports and Slots
The HP Pavilion 15T comes with several ports and slots. On the right side, it has a USB 3.0 port, a USB Type C port, a 3-in-1 card reader, an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, and a power port. On the left side, it has two USB 3.0 ports, an earphone and headphone jack, and a secure lock slot.
2. Webcam
It comes with a 720 HD front-facing webcam. However, if you can, you should definitely invest in a good quality webcam, The photos you will get from the HP Pavilion 15T, like from most laptops, are grainy and blurry. The images will have noise and the colors will not be accurate. You can, however, use it for such tasks as Skype calls, where communication is more important than how you look.
3. Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard comes with preinstalled green underlighting that gives the laptop a nice sparkling emerald look when lit. However, these lights cannot be customized, so if you wanted some RGB lighting, this is not for you.
The keyboard is also very comfortable to use, largely due to its placement. It rests snugly at the center in an island style that you will definitely appreciate.
The touchpad is extra long, at 4.5 inches and 2.3 inches wide. It has the same elegant green lining, and it will give your fingers a lot of room to move around, swipe and scroll. Every gesture will be accurate with a touchpad this size.
Software
It comes with a few preinstalled software. For example, you get Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software to customize and enhance your gaming experience. It also has a host of other HP software, such as Recovery Manager, HP Support, HP SmartFriend, and Orbit. Orbit is a nice little software that lets you transfer data between multiple devices.
HP, however, bloats its machines with a huge amount of third-party apps and software. Although these do not actually harm your machine, they can quickly get annoying. The Pavilion 15T comes loaded with McAfee, Netflix, Dropbox, Cyberlink Media Suite, Wild Tangent Games, Amazon, Microsoft Games, The Weather Channel, Evernote, TripAdvisor, and Priceline. You will probably never use most of these and you should definitely uninstall them as soon as you can. Start with McAfee. There are way better antivirus programs out there.
Performance
1. Overall Performance
It has a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5-7300 HQ processor with 12GB of RAM. This makes it able to perform multiple tasks and to multitask efficiently. You can watch a movie, stream videos and browse using multiple tabs all at the same time and it will not lag.
The HP Pavilion 15T also does not easily heat up. It can comfortably handle running demanding software and remain cool to the touch.
2. Graphics
It has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU with 4GB of VRAM. This delivers a solid gaming experience, especially if you use modest settings.
Some units reviewed online had stability issues, where the laptop would show lines across the screen several times as it was used. Others experienced bluescreens or inconsistent performance issues. HP released a firmware update for this model to fix the issues it was facing. After the update, fewer problems were reported, but a few cases still persisted.
Audio
The audio quality leaves much to be desired. You would want to use a pair of headphones for a better gaming experience if you are using the HP Pavilion 15T because the standard speakers are disappointingly weak. Perhaps this is partly because the main speakers have been placed on the bottom front part of the laptop, a position that has been proven to make the audio perform better on hard surfaces than on soft ones such as laps.
It comes with Bang & Olufsen audio software to help you customize your audio performance. The software has three presets: Voice, Movie, and Music. If you want the best audio quality and volume, use the Movie setting. However, despite the boost this setting gives, the overall audio performance is still a little lacking.
Battery Life
The HP Pavilion 15T is a breath of fresh air when it comes to battery life. Most gaming laptops are usually very disappointing in this area, with famously short battery lives. Despite being able to handle heavy tasks, the HP Pavilion 15T can run for 6 hours and 30 minutes of non-stop use.
Summary
To summarize, here is a list of pros and cons you can expect with the HP Pavilion 15T:
Pros
1. It has a classy and attractive design2. The graphics are solid with a good overall performance3. It has a good battery life
4. The keyboard is well designed and comfortable
