HP 14s-dq1431ng: Where affordable meets cheap
HP’s 14-dq1431ng is a laptop aimed at price-conscious customers that don’t want to spend more than $600 on a notebook. It comes with a flicker-free 14-inch IPS display with decent brightness high enough for everyday use.
Its hardware looks promising: Intel Core i5-1035G1 (Ice Lake), 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD, and 16 GB of Intel Optane memory. This should make for adequately smooth system performance not just for office applications but even for modest photo editing.
It’s the details that count
On paper, the HP 14s-dq1431ng looks not just affordable but very promising indeed. Unfortunately, we immediately noticed the rattling trackpad that made a horrible and annoying rattling sound with every touch of the finger. Fully inserted SD cards protrude by around 2 mm from the case, which in itself is not particularly worrying. The fact that you will most likely require tools because of their super-tight fit, on the other hand, is.
The icing on the cake is a fan that already ramps up already when launching a web browser but on the other hand is incapable of maintaining proper cooling to ensure consistent CPU performance. Since fan behavior can be retroactively adjusted and fine-tuned, we would have been satisfied with a properly mounted non-rattling touchpad. However, as is customers receive a notebook whose flaws cannot be address and fixed through an update.
Source(s)
HP 14s-dq1431ng Notebookcheck review
