HP - Pavilion 15.6" Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen 5 - 8GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - 256GB SSD - Shadow Black

This laptop is amazing! Currently as of 11/29/20, the laptop is on sale for $449! Although, after checkout the price is around $490. The laptop has a GeForce GTX 1650 gpu, and an AMD Ryzen 5 4600h w/ Radeon graphics processor. The laptop has a 256gb SSD with 8 gb ram. The laptop boots up extremely fast, and is pretty snappy. From my experience of around a week, I have noticed that originally the touchpad was bent down at the bottom left corner, and it made a loud loose rattling sound when you (even lightly) tap it. But after some usage, the rattling is seemingly disappearing. I read that in many laptops this happens, but after some usage and after the laptop gets a little heated, it should finish. From my experience it did seem to work. The keyboard has a backlight which can only be green, and it does disappear after the keyboard isn't used for a bit. Not sure, but I believe the backlight can be kept on in BIOS settings. I'm a student, and not a gamer, so while in a Zoom meeting, with Chrome tabs open, the highest CPU usage was around 5-7%, and the average temperature was around 40-70 Celsius which is perfectly normal for a laptop. For gamers, the average FPS in modern FPS games is like 40-70 fps. But Valorant and Fortnite can probably run at medium settings 80+ fps. The hinges are amazing and the separation of the screen and keyboard looks pretty modern and slick. If you're interested, the laptop comes with an AMD RYZEN 5 4000 SERIES sticker and Nvidia GEFORCE GTX sticker as well. There is some pre loaded software, which you can delete. I would recommend updating drivers too, since I updated them from GEFORCE EXPERIENCE, but people did report losing frames in their games. This laptop is perfect for everyday usage, and the screen is pretty big. I must say the upgrade an Acer Chromebook C720 was drastic. Feels like a whole another dimension. The keyboard is pretty quiet and feels pretty soft. I got used to the keyboard in 3 days. I use my Logitech G203 for work, but when I'm just watching YouTube, I use the touchpad. Overall, great device, and it's amazing for the price right now. The laptop has a 60hz monitor that can run 4K beautifully. Peace out!

This 'gaming' laptop works great as my secondary laptop for software engineering and music production. I also have last year's HP Omen with i7-9750H, plus a few HP Spectre x360 laptops to compare against. So, just to compare, this fresh 2020 AMD Ryzen™ 5 4600H beats the last year 2019 i7-9750H Omen on CPU benchmarks. We are talking $1800+ Omen vs. $450 Pavillion! And it is about x2 times faster than a 2-year old Spectre with maxed-out mobile i7 from 2018. It also beats Intel Core i5-10600K. Very good. Pros: - excellent CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 4600H; Renoir / Technology: 7 nm. - two GPUs: very good NVidia GTX 1650 graphics card - TU117-300 / Process: 12nm / Transistors: 4.7B / Die Size: 200 mm² / TDP: 75W, with dedicated 4096 MB GDDR5 / 128-bit Bus (Samsung); plus the stock on-board AMD Radeon Graphics itself isn't bad at all. - very easy to upgrade RAM: spare slot. First thing I did is to add an extra +8GB of Samsung 8192 MB (DDR4-3200) - P/N: M471A1K43DB1-CWE. It's as easy as taking 7 screws off and carefully taking the cover off. Compared to HP Spectre x360 - no hassles at all; and can be done easily without damaging any warranty stickers. - easily accessible SSD: stock SSD isn't bad at all performance-wise. But quite small for what I do.. SSD is located right next to where the RAM stick. - EXCELLENT battery life when compared vs. Intel-based HP Omen laptop with RTX. - nice amplified headphone jack. - zombie-colored green keyboard backlight: quite readable at night. - good SSD drive: SAMSUNG MZVLQ256HAJD-000H1 Cons: - so-so LCD: compared to HP Spectre x360 this display is bleak. It has poorer viewing angle, colors are rather washed out and white color has somewhat yellowish tint to it that you can hardly get rid of even after adjusting all possible display calibration settings. - so-so HP TrueVision HD web camera; but even if you get top-of-the line Omen, the camera is gonna be the same. - only 1xHDMI port: no Display Port. This is a bit of an issue if you're planning to use Oculus Rift S. But WMR VR headsets with HDMI work fine. - small SSD... but it's very easy to upgrade - pci.e m.2 NVMe is accessible right next two the memory slot. That's the second thing I did to this machine: replaced the SSD with a better one. - headphones jack right-hand side: I occasionally use mobile mouse, so the headphone jack gets in a way. You can't beat the Black Friday price - for $450 it was a very good deal overall. Even if you invest in a RAM stick and a better SSD drive, you get an excellent machine to use with an external monitor. For VR gaming, however, you do need to get a VR headset that has HDMI connector because this laptop has no Display Port for Rift S. Hope this review helps someone. Peace!

Highly Recommended. Screen is not that bright, sound is not that loud and battery is not that big. Everything else is perfect. build is more than expected for the price. If those cons are ok with you then stop being in the fence and get one. This laptop comes with a Samsung 8Gb 3200mhz sodimm. That's 1 module. which is ideal for me so I can just another module to make it 16Gb. I think the description says 4Gb x2 which is inaccurate. see attached photos. You will see how great the cooling, 2nd empty mem slot, and the HDD hardware that i used to add a 2TB HDD. Those that you read in reviews in the web that the battery size is sacrificed for HDD space is wrong that's for the intel version of this laptop. At $449 for a Ryzen 5 4500U, I am a happy camper.

For the money, it's a fantastic laptop. I purchased this alongside a desktop as my main system, to use as a system on the go. It offers the right sort of flexibility and capability I expect from a current system. The Ryzen 5 4600H is a fantastic CPU and the GTX1650 is just budget friendly enough that while it leaves more to be desired as a primary system, is very capable as an on the go gaming companion for occasional use. I upgraded mine with the same 8gb Samsung 3200mhz CL22 ram and 500gb Samsung Evo 860. The supplied 256gb NVME is also Samsung, but seems fairly average. It isn't bad on this system as it runs at 99 percentile. As a platform, it's a great laptop and utilizes attached hardware extremely well. If you aren't put off by the limitations of the GTX1650 in gaming then you shouldn't hesitate to pick one up up at 450 dollars. This isn't a knock on the GTX1650 - it's a well received GPU in it's own right. But it won't appeal to everyone being an entry level gaming GPU. As many have mentioned, the LED panel on this unit (a TN panel) has poor color production. I may not be an AV pro, but I do have a Spyder 4 PRO in hand and I know a hopeless cause when I see it. While the panel on this laptop is indeed a tad washed out, it isn't significantly worse than mid tier gaming system and the panel is actually decent provided you do some tweaking (seems like a poorly calibrated unit rather than technically inferior). Spyder 4 PRO returned 69% sRGB, 51% NTSC, 53% Adobe RGB. Trust me, I've seen worse and after tweaking, it's actually usable. I've uploaded my own settings (without Spyder 4 PRO). Someone here suggested tweaking the settings in Radeon Settings Lite, which is what gave me the idea. With my settings the gamma and color will be off spec from the Spyder 4 Pro's recommended specs and might seem a tad dark, but color reproduction looks very washed out with high brightness if you attempt to jack up the brightness. Speakers are also a weakness. They are bright and in B&O fashion, they are high centric. This gives a sense of spaciousness and clarity, but comes at the cost of bass impact and depth. Not a whole lot you can do about the limitations in bass - I haven't seen a single laptop on the market capable of reproducing bass and lows well anyway. The speakers lack volume, but overall in terms of quality I would place them no worse or better than most. So average since most laptops now contract audio companies to fit speakers on their systems (as is also the case with vehicles). So in all, it's a feature packed laptop. It has pretty much all things you could expect in a laptop you can pick up right now. It is packaged in an attractive and functional design that stands out yet isn't trying too hard. The build quality is better than I expected and the keyboard is decent. CPU is the gem in this system. Overall, a very well balanced and packaged system. If you are hesitating due to the display, I believe that it can be adjusted to meet your needs. I can't say for sure, but to my eyes and whatever calibration Spyder 4 PRO has dished out for me, it works. Seems perfectly acceptable. If the speakers are an issue... headphones? external speakers? no idea, but unless you are in a really noisy place, they work fine as well and the sound quality isn't bad either. 5 stars from me!

So far excellent performance and specs for the price. PROS: NVidia discreet graphic card is pretty good with all games including APEX Screen size is good and color and DPI is decent Plastic body is well built with very minor flexing Keyboard is lighted, easy for typing but printed fonts on the keys are a little hard to read CONS: You have to remove the back 7 screws and pry open the edges of backing plate with a guitar pick or similar to install extra RAM and HD. Easy to do but would have been nice if this was readily available with dedicate openings. Hard plastic body that is does not feel as solid as other high end laptops but what a great valve. If you handle the laptop with reasonable care it should last. Was able to easily remove 7 screw from back of laptop and install and extra 1TB HDD hard drive and extra RAM. There is an extra 2.5" 7mm thick SATA hard drive location in the laptop. KEY is to get a 7mm thick HDD. I got a 9mm thick HDD and it fit but I could NOT screw the HDD down but instead used small strips of tap. I plan on replacing the 9mm thick HDD with a 7mm in a few weeks. 2 pictures attached show the back of the laptop remove and the internal location (upper right corner) for 2.5" HD and location for extra RAM (lower left corner). Also there is a HD bracket already in the laptop to anchor down your HD with 4 side screws and 3 screws to the body of the laptop (bracket is not in the picture however) Also the extra RAM slot is under a LARGE black sheet of tape that you have to remove gently or else that same tape is covering the default SDD drive and pry it loose. After you install the RAM just press the sheet of tap back onto the RAM and SDD and you are good to go. I see now issue with this laptop at this time. First time I have purchased HP brand and we are happy. I purchased 4 of these during the 2020 Black Friday deal for under $500 with taxes. And Best Buy did a good job for my family.

I snagged this laptop on Black Friday sale, and the only store that had it in stock was an hour away. Definitely worth the drive though! I had been looking at getting this laptop for awhile to upgrade from my old laptop that was from 2012 and no longer had numeric & symbol keys working. The laptop itself isn't my favorite aesthetic since I'm not really a gamer and not a huge fan of the color green, but it looks sleek and interesting and how it looked was the least of my worries because of what was inside. My partner on the other hand IS a gamer and was very jealous of the specs - AMD ryzen processor instead of Intel, good NVIDIA graphics card, etc. On paper, it was better than any of the other cute rose gold laptops I liked the look of, and I knew it would last a long time and outperform most of them. I've had the laptop for about a month now, and really enjoyed it! The screen is a good size and looks absolutely gorgeous. The only con is that it is hard to see at an angle, so showing something onscreen to someone else requires them to look at it pretty dead-on; but this can be a benefit too, especially when you don't want people around you seeing everything clearly on your screen. I was able to download steam and play games for the first time (my old laptop couldnt handle it) and every game has handled well, from an old Myst game I enjoyed as a kid to Sims 4 and Left for Dead. You can sometimes really hear it working, especially when I've been running a graphics intensive game for a few hours, but it hasnt had any problems and runs smoothly. I've also enjoyed being able to work on photo editing and digital drawing. This laptop beautifully handles applications like Inkscape (similar to Adobe Illustrator), darktable (similar to Lightroom), and GIMP (similar to Photoshop). Details show up beautifully on the screen, and the hard drive is large enough to store a decent amount of photos even in RAW format so far, although I'll probably get a hard drive to supplement at some point. I also got a wacom art pad and it has integrated seamlessly for drawing and detailed editing. I've used it for zoom calls during this pandemic and it was great! The camera isn't *super* high quality or anything, but wasn't incredibly pixelated and I could see my family and friends as well as myself without any issues. There are 2 integrated USB ports which I've been using mostly for a wired mouse and my wacom tablet, but have also uploaded photos from a jump drive pretty quickly. The HDMI port worked fine to connect to a TV for streaming video too, and youtube/netflix/hulu/disney+ all run great on the laptop itself. The sound gets quite loud, and only a little tinny for being laptop speakers. Their location just above the keyboard helps a bit, although if you want to listen to a lot of music or films, you may want to connect speakers or use a headset for prolonged use. The laptop layout is pretty decent and didn't take much of an adjustment period, and the extra numeric keypad on the side is convenient- although I do find myself hitting NumLock frequently when trying to backspace. But the bigger keys are nice for typing and gaming reasons. I miss having touchscreen, but it's all good. A bit confused why you can still put this laptop in "tablet mode" since it doesn't seem very useful since you can't touch the screen or bend it into a tablet etc, but I'm guessing it's an across-the-board kinda thing. The OS itself was really customizable and walked me through everything during setup, from color schemes for menus and pop ups to backgrounds and preferences. Overall, I would definitely recommend this laptop! Especially if you anticipate doing any graphics-intensive stuff like gaming or art & editing. The battery life is pretty good, obviously better when not doing intensive apps and such, but still lasts a good few hours on battery while running Sims, so I'd say not bad. If you're not into the "gaming look" it might not be your cup of tea, but I prefer the ease of knowing it can handle whatever I need to throw at it over a shiny finish. Definitely recommend!!

I'm happy with the laptop, I took off 1 star because the display is not very good and the wireless card is wifi 5 instead of wifi 6 it's just $10 difference in price. But even with wifi 5 can still connect with wpa 3 to my wifi 6 router. The laptop is easy to upgrade the RAM and SSD, it has 1 chip 8gb Samsung 3200 ddr4, which runs single channel at 1600mhz and 256gb Samsung Nvme SSD not the EVO series though, the speed is 1800mb read/700mb write, it's right next to the ram chips under the tape. So you can add another 2.5 inch sata SSD or hard drive. I installed another 16gb ram chip at 2666mhz, so now both chips run dual channel 2666 total 24gb. So it can be configured with 12gb,16gb,24gb or 32gb depending on the budget. I also added another 500 gb SSD and a 256gb micro SD card which can expand the storage without even opening the laptop. The laptop perform great, the sound quality is very good too. For $450 is a good deal, for $699 I wouldn't buy it.

We haven’t had this long. I don’t want to mislead, but so far it is great. The graphics are awesome, and the speed a tremendous upgrade. My boys have started really appreciating computer gaming. They have been using our Mac desktop and another HP Laptop not specific for gaming. This was part of their Christmas gifts this year and they are thrilled with everything it has to offer. I did weeks of research and comparisons and lots of brain damage, and I couldn’t meet these specs for the price anywhere. They are now able to see the slower players moving awkwardly in the games and laugh, saying it must have been them. Our Mac does a pretty decent job, especially given its age, and they will still hop on there to play together, but this is fantastic and hard to beat. I don’t see a need for upgrading graphics, only possibly memory at some point and adding an external disc drive, for their PC games that don’t come as DLC. Overall, very happy, and will update if this changes. I’m not a computer or gaming person myself, so I can’t get into all the specs and their benefits outside of the side by side comparisons I did exhaustively. Other great reviewers have done that. If you need a solid and nice laptop upgrade, I still think this is the way to go. I truly didn’t find a comparable for the sale price. More than capable of everything we will use it for at this time.