HP Pavilion Plus 14 Review

HP's Pavilions—the company's bread-and-butter laptops—have lately been earning looks from sophisticated shoppers who might once have gazed up to the more premium Envy and Spectre series. Last summer's Pavilion Aero was fast, well-equipped, and a featherweight 2.2 pounds, and the new Pavilion Plus 14 (starts at $729.99; $1,279.99 as tested) is a sleek aluminum ultraportable laptop available with a snazzy OLED display. The Plus earns an Editors' Choice nod as a midrange ultraportable, replacing the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon, which also offers OLED and is lighter, but has a higher price and fewer ports.

Plenty of Configurations to Choose From 

American buyers are limited to Natural Silver instead of the several colors offered to overseas shoppers, but otherwise the Pavilion Plus 14 is a dream for people who like to pore over configuration details. It can be ordered with either Intel integrated or Nvidia discrete graphics, and 12th Generation processors from Intel's 15-watt U, 28-watt P, or 45-watt H series. That's extraordinary flexibility; which one you choose will depend on your lust for performance versus battery life.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The cheapest model right now is a $729.99 HP.com configuration with a Core i5-1235U processor, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and a 14-inch display with 16:10 aspect ratio and 2,240-by-1,400-pixel resolution backed by a GeForce MX550 GPU. Prices can dip lower, though, so it may be worth waiting for a sale like a $549.99 deal at Staples we spotted, which expired just before this review posted.

The $999.99 model steps up to a Core i7-12700H (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads) with Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics and a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED panel. Our $1,279.99 review unit matches it, except for a 1TB SSD and Windows 11 Pro instead of Home. Would-be gamers can combine a Core i7-1255U with seldom-seen GeForce RTX 2050 graphics. Different models have Wi-Fi 5, our system's Wi-Fi 6, or Wi-Fi 6E as well as Bluetooth for wireless connectivity.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Pavilion Plus 14 measures 0.72 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches (HWD), just a bit bulkier than the Slim 7 Carbon (0.59 by 12.3 by 8.5 inches). The Acer Swift 3, a 14-inch ultraportable with a conventional 16:9 screen aspect ratio, is 0.63 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches. Though it's no burden in a briefcase, the HP is the heaviest of the three at 3.09 pounds to the Lenovo's 2.42 pounds and the Acer's 2.71 pounds.

HP boasts that the Plus features a recycled aluminum lid, keyboard deck, and bottom, as well as recycled plastic keycaps. There's some flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard, but the laptop feels fairly sturdy overall. The screen bezels are thin (the company says the screen-to-body ratio is 87%) and there's a fingerprint reader in the palm rest for password-free logins.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

We like to see Thunderbolt 4 ports on $1,000-and-up laptops; the Pavilion Plus has none, but since it starts under $1,000 we can't complain too loudly. There are two 10Gbps USB 3.2 Type-C ports on the right side (either accommodating the AC adapter for charging the laptop's battery), along with a 5Gbps USB Type-A port and an HDMI video output. Another USB-A port, a microSD card slot, and an audio jack are on the left.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A Few Luxury Features 

Since you can sign into Windows Hello with a fingerprint, we don't mind that the webcam lacks face recognition tech, though we're disappointed it has no privacy shutter. On the plus side, it blows away the usual 720p junk with sharp 5-megapixel resolution (capturing 2,592-by-1,944-pixel 4:3 images or 2,560-by-1,440 16:9 shots or videos) and delivers well-lit and colorful pics with no noise or static.

The backlit keyboard wins points for having real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you pair the Fn key and cursor arrows for those functions. It loses points for HP's trademark arrangement of said cursor keys in an inept row instead of the proper inverted T, with half-sized, hard-to-hit up and down arrows stacked between full-sized left and right. (And, I'm tempted to say, it loses more points for the inclusion of an emoji key alongside the brightness and volume controls on the top row.)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Escape and Delete keys are puny, but the keyboard's typing feel is pretty good. It's a bit shallow and plasticky, but still snappy and responsive. The large, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but has a vague, loose-feeling click.

Most of the kudos the Pavilion Plus 14 earns come from offering a vivid OLED display at an affordable price. It's not a touch screen, but what HP calls a 2.8K display is exceptionally sharp and colorful, with gorgeous hues and sky-high contrast. White backgrounds are pristine and blacks look like India ink. The panel also offers a choice of the usual 60Hz refresh rate, or a 90Hz one for slightly smoother scrolling and videos. (This is not a fast-twitch gaming rig, as you'll see in the performance benchmarks below.)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Bottom-mounted speakers produce relatively loud and crisp sound. There's no bass to speak of, but audio isn't tinny or hollow even at top volume, and you can make out overlapping tracks. B&O Audio Control software provides an equalizer with music, movie, and voice presets plus noise cancellation for conferences. Other software includes HP Enhanced Lighting to simulate a ring light on screen, HP QuickDrop to transfer files to or from your smartphone, and McAfee, LastPass, and ExpressVPN trials.

Testing the Pavilion Plus 14: An Ultralight Ultra-Faceoff

For our benchmark tests, we challenged the HP Pavilion Plus 14 with four other 14-inch consumer slimlines led by the OLED-screened, AMD-powered Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon and its Intel sibling the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7i Pro. The other two are the Acer Swift 3 and XPG Xenia 14, which come in just at and just over $1,000, respectively.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Pavilion Plus landed solidly in the upper middle of the pack, leading the way in our CPU tests and clearing the 4,000 points in PCMark that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps like Microsoft Office or Google Workspace.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

For the ten thousandth time, we see Intel's Iris Xe integrated graphics falling far short of the discrete GPUs of gaming laptops. The HP and its peers are fine for casual gaming and streaming entertainment, not the latest simulations and shoot-'em-ups. 

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Nine and a half hours of unplugged life is perfectly fine—three years ago, we would have thought it miraculous—but it's shy of the 12 or more hours we regularly see from ultraportables these days. Still, the Plus should get you through a full day of work or school with a bit of YouTube, if not a whole Netflix movie, left over. More important, the HP's dazzling display is rivaled only by the OLED Slim 7 Carbon, with spectacular brightness and gorgeous color coverage.

The $1,000 Model Looks Even Better

Some of our favorite laptops have IPS displays, but once you've seen an OLED panel it's hard to settle for less. The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is a capable ultraportable in its IPS guise, but its OLED version is a major value even with the surcharge of our review unit's 1TB SSD. Losing a few ounces and gaining a few hours of battery life would make it awesome, but it still deserves Editors' Choice honors and a spot on your shopping list.