HP 15z-ba000 Notebook Review

Most budget 15.6-inch multimedia and office notebooks measure around 15 x 10 x 1 inches - and the HP 15z is no exception. For a comparison of the footprint, please take a look at the graphic below. Weighing in at about 2050 grams (4.5 lbs) - definitely on the lighter side - the notebook is easy to carry as well. The rounded corners help quite a bit during transport, as it's easy to slide the notebook into a bag, so the 15z is less cumbersome to haul around than some of its competitors.

As far as the physical ports are concerned, the notebook offers the bare minimum. The HP 15z-ba000 only has one USB 3.0 port, so copying data lets say from a thumb drive to an external hard drive can take its time. All the ports are unfortunately located on the left and right sides in front of the mid-line, so contention with plugged in peripherals might be an issue - particularly for left handers when an HDMI cable is connected. 

With transfer speeds of 25.1 MB/s during the 1 GB transfer test, the card reader likely only runs at USB 2.0 speeds. Most direct competitors aren't any faster, so we deem this performance to be acceptable. For our tests, we use a Toshiba Exceria Pro SDXC 64 GB UHS-II reference card.

Aside from the notebook, the power adapter, and a quick-start guide, the shipping carton is empty. HP doesn't have any dedicated accessories, but offers various generic accessories - from carrying cases and external hard drives to LoJack theft protection - on their website.

The chassis consists of a bottom shell into which the keyboard tray is inserted. The removal proves to be somewhat difficult: in our case, we removed the screws, but eventually stopped trying to remove the shell because it appeared likely that we would damage the little tabs connecting it and the keyboard tray in the process. Our review unit came equipped with 8 GB of RAM and an SSD, so upgrades likely wouldn't be needed in the near future anyway.

HP covers the 15z for a period of 12 months against manufacturer's defect. Additional coverage - at least when added at the time of ordering - is fairly inexpensive: HP's 3 year Pickup and Return Support w/Accidental Damage Protection only costs $72, which seems well worth it.

Our review notebook comes equipped with a quad-core A6-7310 APU, AMD Radeon R4 graphics card, 8 GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD drive. For $80 more, the user can specify the A8-7410 with R5 GPU; 12 GB of RAM (1x 8 GB, 1 x 4 GB) cost $150 extra - pretty steep in our opinion, particularly since the RAM always runs in single-channel mode. The base configuration at $260 comes with a platter-based 500 GB drive; an upgrade to the 128 GB M.2 SSD is only $40 and a no-brainer in our opinion. 

AMD's A6-7310 is a mobile quad-core SoC primarily designed to operate at a low TDP of 12 to 25 watts and is thus particularly well-suited for entry-level notebooks and subnotebooks. The four cores operate at a maximum of 2.4 GHz; the nominal frequency is 2 GHz. During our CPU benchmark tests, the CPU operated primarily at 2 GHz and only occasionally utilized the Turbo. Looking at the Cinebench scores, the A6-7310 can't even quite compete with the Intel Core i3-5005U, which ends up between 10 % to 60 % faster during the Cinebench R11.5 single/multi tests. One has to step down to Intel's Pentium series of processors - something like the Pentium N3540 - to end up with roughly equivalent performance. 

The subtests of the PCMark 8 benchmark tests tell a similar story as far as the overall performance is concerned, with the A6 trailing notebooks with Intel CPUs - and particularly those equipped with dedicated graphics cards - by a substantial margin. Even the Lenovo G70-80 80FF00H0GE with Pentium 3825U and Broadwell HD graphics gives the A6 with R4 graphics a run for the money and performs 10 to 20 % better. Things are not as bad as they seem, however: thanks to the SSD, the perceived performance of the HP 15z is actually quite snappy. Bootup is quite quick and program launches generally don't take that long, either. We certainly prefer a lower-powered system with SSD to one with a more powerful CPU, but platter-based storage.

The M.2 SSD from Adata (model IM2S3138E-128GM-B) has a capacity of 128GB and is a very decent performer - particularly when one considers that the direct competitors are all equipped with conventional hard drives. Users who need more storage and would like a larger SSD are out of luck however: HP only offers this 128 GB drive in addition to regular 2.5-inch 1 TB and 2 TB drives.

The A6-7310 features an integrated AMD Radeon R4 graphics card. The GPU is DirectX 12 compatible and comes with 128 shader cores across two Compute Units and runs at 800 MHz. Looking at the synthetic benchmark scores, the GPU best compares to the older Haswell-generation Intel HD Graphics 4200-4400 from 2013. 

From the synthetic benchmark scores we can surmise that the gaming performance is not going to be overly exciting. Older games are generally playable at low resolutions up to the native 1366 x 768 and at low settings, but the 15z struggles with pretty much all newer games regardless of the settings. Once again, the Radeon R4 performs very closely to the older Intel HD generations.

HP managed to keep the internal temperatures well in check, and the surface temperatures follow suit. During idle, the temperature tops out at around 25 degrees, so just 5 degrees above ambient. At maximum load levels, the bottom left side gets comparatively warm at up to 43 degrees C. Other budget notebooks perform in a very similar manner. Outstanding in this regard is the Lenovo ThinkPad E560, which only reaches 34 degrees C after a prolonged stress test.

Frequency Comparison (Checkbox selectable!)
Graph 1: Pink Noise 100% Vol.; Graph 2: Audio off

With a TDP ranging from 12 to 25 watts depending, the AMD APU is actually quite frugal. At idle, the power consumption never exceeded 8 watts and even at maximum load levels, we only observed a maximum power draw of about 27 watts - so it doesn't look like HP approaches the maximum allowable limit in this case.