Envy is HP’s upper-middle-class laptop brand, filling a niche between bread-and-butter Pavilion PCs and premium Spectre systems. The Envy 14 (starts at $1,069.99; $1,259.99 as tested) is an attractive aluminum wedge that scores high for features, ports, performance, and battery life, but falls short of Editors’ Choice award honors for two reasons. At 3.3 pounds, it’s a few ounces over our definition of an ultraportable, and it’s pricey, giving you an Intel Core i5 processor and a 256GB solid-state drive when the same money will buy a Core i7 and 512GB elsewhere.
A Configuration for Creative Players
According to HP, the Envy 14 targets vloggers and other creative types with its GPU acceleration and high-quality, factory-color-calibrated display. Our test unit will also appeal to those seeking a 14-inch laptop for after-hours gaming. While the $1,069.99 base model relies on its Core i5-1135G7 processor’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, our $1,259.99 Amazon and Best Buy configuration boasts an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q GPU, as well as 16GB versus 8GB of memory plus a touch screen. A $1,699.99 model at HP.com loses the touch panel but steps up to a Core i7-1165G7 and a 1TB SSD.
The screen is noteworthy because it has a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than the more common 16:9, offering an 11% taller view (1,920 by 1,200 pixels) for a bit less scrolling. The Envy clamshell also shares a few frills with the upscale HP Spectre x360 14 convertible, such as a keyboard that incorporates a fingerprint reader, a webcam privacy shutter, a microphone mute button, and a launch button for the HP Command Center settings utility.
The silver, stamped-aluminum Envy is almost as good-looking as the Spectre laptops, though without their edgy finish and diagonal-cut rear corners. There’s almost no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. The machine measures 0.71 by 12.3 by 8.8 inches, which is in line with the Asus ZenBook 14 (0.54 by 12.5 by 8.2 inches) and the MSI Prestige 14 (0.63 by 12.6 by 8.6 inches), though its 3.3 pounds outweigh their respective 2.6 and 2.7 pounds.
You’ll find a USB 3.1 Type-A port, an HDMI video output, a Thunderbolt 4/USB-C port, and an audio jack on the laptop’s left side. The power supply connector, another USB Type-A port, and a microSD card slot are on the right. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth take care of wireless connections.
Scads of Software Utilities
If you regularly use the right Control key, you’ll be disappointed in the brightly backlit keyboard—the fingerprint reader occupies that space. I was disappointed for another reason: the arrangement of the cursor arrow keys in the clumsy row, instead of proper inverted T, that makes me gnash my teeth at all HP laptops. But otherwise the keyboard is a success, with a snappy typing feel and handy dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of shifted arrow keys. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but has a wobbly click.
The nearly borderless display (HP boasts an 88% screen-to-body ratio) is nicely bright, though the edges look a bit washed out at the top brightness setting. Colors don’t exactly pop but are rich and well saturated; white backgrounds are pristine, and contrast is good. Viewing angles are wide, though the touch overlay causes reflections. Fine details and the edges of letters look sharp.
The 720p webcam captures relatively colorful and well-lit images with a small amount of static or noise. Bottom-firing speakers produce loud but somewhat rough or harsh sound; there’s not much bass, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Supplied Bang & Olufsen software lets you choose music, movie, or voice presets or tinker with an equalizer (with pop, rock, jazz, country, and other presets of its own).
Along with Alexa, ExpressVPN, McAfee, and LastPass apps, HP provides a ton of overlapping utilities ranging from a Command Center that lets you optimize network traffic and pick among balanced, quiet, and performance cooling fan modes to a Display Control menu of native, vibrant, or photo-and-video-optimized screen settings. HP Support Assistant handles updates and diagnostics (after it tries to change your search engine and home page to Bing), while HP Enhanced Lighting offers a selfie light ring for video calls.
Performance Testing: Great Productivity, Good Gaming
Both the Editors’ Choice-winning Dell Inspiron 14 7000 and the lower-priced Inspiron 14 5000 have been remodeled since we reviewed them in January 2020, so for our benchmark charts I compared the Envy to four other 14-inch consumer laptops: the Acer Swift 3X, the MSI Prestige 14, the Asus ZenBook 14, and the Lenovo Yoga 9i convertible. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). Its primary test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that rates the speed of the unit’s boot drive. (See more about how we test laptops.)
All five laptops cruised past the 4,000-point mark that indicates excellent productivity in PCMark 10, with the Envy taking the gold medal despite being a Core i5 competing against Core i7s. PCMark 8’s storage measurement is no challenge for today’s speedy SSDs.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The Asus was an underachiever, while the HP’s quad-core processor acquitted itself capably. It’s no workstation, but it’ll handle your biggest spreadsheet with no sweat.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
The Envy took an extra second or three to complete each task, but it’ll get the job done, though serious photo collectors or editors will probably want a sharper 4K display.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We test Windows systems’ relative graphics muscle with two gaming simulations, 3DMark and Superposition. The first has two DirectX 11 subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for mainstream PCs with integrated graphics and higher-end gaming rigs respectively. The second uses the Unigine engine to render and pan through a detailed 3D scene at two resolution and image quality settings with results measured in frames per second (fps); 30fps is usually considered a fair target for smooth animation while avid gamers prefer 60fps or higher.
The 10th Generation Intel integrated graphics of the ZenBook trailed the 11th Gen silicon of the MSI, Acer, and Lenovo, with the rare Iris Xe Max silicon in the Acer Swift 3X leading the integrated-graphics pack here. But the HP’s dedicated Nvidia GPU easily topped them all. It was the only entry to reach 30fps in the 1080p Superposition test.
Though the HP is not a gaming laptop, its GeForce GTX 1650 Ti GPU is capable enough that I tried the Steam game Rise of the Tomb Raider, running the built-in DirectX 12 benchmark at 1080p resolution. The Envy managed 72fps using the Medium quality preset and 49fps at the best (Very High) preset, which should satisfy all but the most hardcore gamers—who, rightly, would be looking at a “true” gaming laptop, in any case. Machines with gamer-first designs based on the GTX 1650 Ti are readily available starting at just under $800, albeit with larger screens and in less elegant chassis.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of SteelTears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
All five laptops showed outstanding battery life, but the Envy was the most impressive of all, lasting for nearly 20 hours of video playback. A hard day’s work or school plus an evening’s streaming entertainment will be no problem.
Verdict: Enticing Envy, But Wait for a Sale
It would be nice if it weighed a few ounces less, but the HP Envy 14 is a stylish, desirable laptop. We’re withholding an Editors’ Choice award mainly because it could be a better bargain—its Core i5 instead of Core i7 processor isn’t a big drawback in terms of real-world performance, but its 256GB instead of 512GB solid-state drive is skimpy at the price level of our tester. Gamers will find its GeForce GPU an almost unique attraction in this segment, but they won’t be able to install many titles.
