HP Pavilion 15 refreshed with AMD Ryzen 4000 series Renoir CPUs

HP released a new version of its Pavilion Gaming 15 line of laptops earlier this year. Even the Intel-powered variant of the HP Pavilion 15 received a fresh coat of paint. Now, the Ryzen versions of the notebooks have received a much-needed upgrade. The new HP Pavilion 15 variant will be available for purchase this October on HP.com and other online retailers. The base variant will cost US$599.

CPU options on the new HP Pavilion 15 include the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U. The former comes with only 8GB of RAM, while the latter can be configured with 16GB. Adding more RAM is not an option as the DIMMs are soldered to the motherboard. Both versions come with a 512GB NVMe SSD. Whether or not users will be able to add more drives remains to be seen.

The HP Pavilion 15 retains its 15.6-inch touchscreen-enabled IPS LCD panel clocked at 60Hz. An unspecified Radeon GPU powers it, likely the Vega 6/7 found on other Renoir hardware. Its peak brightness is somewhat lackluster at 250 nits, but that's ok for a touchscreen panel. With a screen-to-body ratio of 85%, the Pavilion 15 isn't the slimmest notebook around, but its bezels are relatively invisible. Some of its other features include a 720p webcam, Wi-Fi 6 antenna, and a fingerprint reader for biometric authentication.

Input options on the HP Pavilion 15 are somewhat lacking. It comes with one USB Type-C port, which can double up as a display output, and even charge the laptop if needed. It is accompanied by two USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports, a 3.5mm combo headphone/mic jack, and an HDMI 2.1 port. The HP Pavilion 15's 3-cell 41Wh battery leaves a lot to be desired, though. It can be charged to 50% in just 45 minutes. Under ideal circumstances, light workloads should yield up to 8 hours of battery life.