HP Pavilion 14 Laptop Review: A stylish all-rounder with a bright display

Competitors include other multimedia laptops equipped with a GeForce MX250 GPU. We shall compare the Pavilion 14-ce3040ng with other laptops, including 15-inch ones, like the Lenovo IdeaPad S540-14IWL, Acer Aspire 5 A515-52G-723L and ASUS VivoBook S15 S532F. We have included an overview of the ce3040ng and our comparison devices in the table below.

Since HP has not made many external changes except for minor details like the removal of the fingerprint reader and a redesigned webcam, we shall not cover the case, connectivity or input devices in this review. Please see our review of its Core i7-8550U and GeForce MX150-powered predecessor for our thoughts on these areas.

If you exclude the modest response times of 29.6 ms black-to-white and 60.8 ms grey-to-grey, then the Pavilion 14 has a decent display. In contrast to its predecessor, which had a poorly lit panel, our current review unit can boast of having a pleasantly bright display.

As mentioned, the Pavilion 14-ce3040ng is an all-rounder that, apart from its graphics performance, could be considered a mid-range laptop. The 14-inch device is compact and powerful enough for multiple uses on-the-go. It should cut a fine figure in any environment too thanks to its stylish design.

The clock speed of the Core i7-1065G7 has plenty of scope. While its base value of 1.3 GHz is rather poor, its peak of 3.9 GHz is very respectable. According to Cinebench R15, the CPU can only fully utilise its Turbo Boost in single-core tasks. By contrast, the CPU drops from 3.5 GHz to a mediocre and somewhat disappointing 2.4 GHz after just one run of CB R15 Multi 64Bit. Our review unit then kept its CPU at around 2.4 GHz for the remainder of our looped multi-core benchmark, though.

Despite the limited use of its turbo, the Pavilion 14 overtakes older Core i7-8565U-powered laptops in synthetic benchmarks as our benchmark tables show.

The 14-incher also set itself apart from our comparison devices in system performance benchmarks. There is a thin spread between the devices in PCMark 10, though. Moreover, you will hardly notice any performance differences in practice. Thanks to its SSD, Windows 10 Home 64-bit boots quickly and responds fairly quickly for long periods.

The performance of the built-in SSD meets our expectations for a 1,000-Euro (~$1,109) multimedia laptop. The 1 TB SSD in our review unit is a Toshiba XG6 drive that sprints easily past our comparison devices, although this is mostly because of its higher capacity. While it has strong read speeds, the write speeds of our review unit's SSD are particularly impressive.

In terms of a dedicated graphics card, HP has chosen to equip the Pavilion 14 with a low-end GPU to match its intended use as a mobile device. NVIDIA bases the GeForce MX250 on its Pascal architecture, while also including 384 shader units. Our review unit comes with the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM edition, whereas most GeForce MX250-powered competitors only have the 2 GB version. Even the 4 GB version has limited uses though because of its low raw power.

In order to check the clock speed behaviour of the Pavilion 14's 14 nm chip, we ran The Witcher 3 for approximately 60 minutes at 1920x1080 and maximum details. The GPU averaged 1,683 MHz during this test, which is fairly good for a GeForce MX250. This is especially true considering that the card has a 1,519 MHz base clock.

Nevertheless, the GPU performance of our review unit usually ranks behind its opponents in synthetic benchmarks. The Pavilion 14 finished bottom in our Fire Strike 3DMark 11 and 13 comparison tables, for example. Incidentally, the device supports NVIDIA Optimus, meaning that it can switch between GPUs to reduce power consumption and improve battery life.

Notwithstanding that it occasionally generates significantly higher frame rates than the integrated Iris Plus Graphics G7, modern games often overwhelm the DirectX 12-capable GeForce MX250. Most titles only run smoothly in 1080p at medium graphics, if at all. In many cases, you must turn down the graphics and even the resolution to achieve playable and stable frame rates. Only undemanding or older titles like FIFA 20 and Prey can be played at higher graphics levels in 1080p.

If you like playing current games, then we would recommend considering a laptop with at least a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. Better still, a GeForce GTX 1650 would be more capable, but both will reach their limits much later than a GeForce MX250 would. Laptops with these GPUs are not necessarily more expensive than the Pavilion 14, either.

In our eyes, the biggest weakness of the Pavilion 14 is its fan control. The device often behaves as quiet as a mouse when idling. However, the fan occasionally spins up to 36 dB(A), and seemingly for no reason. The pitch is generally quite unpleasant too. Additionally, innocuous tasks like starting programs and installing programs cause the fan to spin up towards 40 dB(A), which is also annoying.

Even under load, the 14-inch laptop is noticeably louder than our comparison devices. Our review unit peaked at between 47 and 49 dB(A) during our tests, which is loud enough to need to have headphones to hand as we have learned from real high-end laptops. In short, the fan behaviour of our review unit disappointed across the board. HP should urgently tune the fan curve to not scare off buyers.

Internal components do not overheat, either. While the GeForce MX250 settles at around 74 °C during 3D tasks, the Core i7-1065G7 maintains a good 70 °C during The Witcher 3 and 80 °C under full load.

Thanks to the mixture of NVIDIA Optimus technology and energy-efficient hardware, the Pavilion 14 uses little power. Our review unit consumed between 4 and 10 W when idling idle consumption, which is on par with most of our comparison devices. The same applies to power consumption under load, where the Pavilion 14 consumes between 58 and 64 W.

The Pavilion 14 should have relatively good battery life, but it falls short of its potential because of its comparatively small 41 Wh battery. The Lenovo IdeaPad S540-14IWL and Acer Aspire 5 A515-52G surpass 6 hours of internet browsing at medium brightness with runtimes of 6:54 hours and 8:25 hours, respectively. The situation is similar in the Battery Eater tool. Instead of 13 to 21.5 hours, the Pavilion 14 "only" manages 11.5 hours, which is still a decent result. Under sustained load, our review unit checks out after an hour.