You probably know that HP’s Pavilion brand is for consumer PCs priced and positioned below its upscale Envy and Spectre lines. But Pavilion is only the second-lowest rung on HP’s notebook-PC ladder. Its budget laptops have no brand at all, just a generic family name: “HP Laptop.” Take the HP Laptop 14-dq2020nr ($428 at Amazon and Walmart). The 14-dq2020nr is every inch an economy model, with just 4GB of RAM and a 128GB solid-state drive—half the memory and storage we consider today’s minimum—but it’s a workable introduction to Windows if you don’t want to consider a Chromebook.
Four Cores and S Mode
Though some online listings say the 14-dq2020nr has a dual-core Intel Core i3-1115G4, our test unit actually clicks that up to a quad-core, 2.0GHz (3.7GHz turbo) Core i3-1125G4 processor with Intel integrated UHD Graphics. The 14-inch, non-touch screen offers full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution. The default operating system is Windows 10 Home in S Mode, which restricts software installations to programs from the Windows Store; a few clicks in the Store perform an irreversible switch to regular Windows 10 Home, which we made in order to install our benchmark test software.
Clad in silver plastic, the HP Laptop measures 0.71 by 12.8 by 8.9 inches and weighs 3.24 pounds, making it just a bit heftier than the rival Asus VivoBook S14 (0.63 by 12.8 by 8.4 inches and 3.09 pounds). A chrome HP logo decorates the lid. There’s a fair amount of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
The bezels on either side of the screen are fairly slim (HP quotes a 78% screen-to-body ratio), though the top and bottom borders are thicker. The webcam centered above the display has no privacy shutter or face recognition capability. The keyboard is not backlit, though it contains a fingerprint reader in the palm rest for skipping passwords with Windows Hello.
The laptop’s left side is bare except for an SD card slot. On the right, you’ll find two USB 3.1 Type-A ports and one USB 3.1 Type-C port—all peaking at 5Gbps instead of the 10Gbps or 20Gbps of later variants—along with an HDMI video output, an audio jack, and the power connector. A Realtek controller provides Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Bluetooth, not the newer Wi-Fi 6.
The Bare Necessities
The 720p webcam captures reasonably well-lit and colorful, soft-focus images with a bit of noise or static. Sound from the speaker grille above the keyboard is loud enough to fill a small room but muddy and flat, with zero bass and almost no hint of overlapping tracks. HP Audio Center software offers music, movie, and voice presets, an equalizer, and microphone noise cancellation.
The 1080p screen is definitely an economy panel, with colors that don’t pop—they look flat and bland—and minimal contrast. Viewing angles aren’t as wide as you expect from an IPS display, though fine details and the edges of letters are sharp enough. Brightness is barely adequate and white backgrounds look dull.
We’re always happy to see dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of having to pair the Fn key with the cursor arrows. But otherwise, the keyboard doesn’t impress. The Escape and Delete keys are puny, and the arrow keys are arranged in HP’s usual, unfortunate row. In that arrangement, half-size, hard-to-hit up and down arrows are stacked between full-size left and right arrows, instead of the proper inverted T.
The keyboard has a hollow, almost echoing typing feel that isn’t enjoyable. The smallish, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but clicks stiffly.
HP backs the laptop with a one-year warranty and preloads it with McAfee, LastPass, and Dropbox trials and a few useful utilities such as HP QuickDrop (for exchanging files with your smartphone) and HP Support Assistant (for centralizing software updates, diagnostics, and optimization).
Performance Testing: A Five-Way Budget Battle
For our benchmark comparison charts, I stacked up the HP 14dq-2020nr against four other affordable laptops, ranging in price from $369 for the 15.6-inch Dell Inspiron 15 3000 to $699.99 for the 14-inch Asus VivoBook S14. Two 14-inch convertibles, the Editors’ Choice-award-winning Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 and the Acer Spin 3, fall in between at $599.99 and $649.99 respectively. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run 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 we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The HP fell short of the 4,000 points that indicates excellent productivity in PCMark 10, but it came close enough to satisfy everyday Microsoft Office or Google Docs users. Most of today’s solid-state drives breeze through PCMark 8’s storage measurement, though the HP’s SATA M.2 drive is a tick slower than the PCI Express SSDs found in most modern notebooks.
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.
It’s far from setting any speed records, but the HP’s quad-core, 11th Generation Intel Core i3 is fairly perky for an economy CPU. You wouldn’t want to use any of these laptops for workstation-class CAD or 3D rendering, but occasional content creation or touch-ups will be doable. The Dell’s AMD Athlon Silver was the exception, with truly pitiful performance—likely the reason that, since our review, that Inspiron has received a slight price hike funding a more respectable Ryzen 3 processor. Our usual Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark is absent here because it won’t run on systems with only 4GB of RAM.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution.
The downcast Dell kept the HP from finishing in last place, while the Asus and Lenovo showed the most suitability for casual or browser-based games. But none of these integrated-graphics machines is within shouting distance of gaming laptops with discrete GPUs. Your after-hours entertainment will be limited to streaming media rather than arcade action.
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 did pretty well here, showing enough stamina to get you through a day of work or school plus a few evening hours going online or watching Netflix. Elite ultraportables last longer still, but these results are just fine for budget systems.
The Lowest Common Denominator
The HP Laptop 14-dq2020nr does what it sets out to do, providing sufficient power for going online or doing homework in a reasonably attractive and portable package. Its quad-core Core i3 CPU positively pummels the Celerons and Pentiums still lingering in the low-priced aisle, and it has a decent array of ports.
Still, there’s no denying that spending $200 or $250 more will get you a much more capable notebook, one that both makes you happier with a nicer screen and keyboard, and makes Windows happier with more memory and storage. We’d aim higher if we could.
