When we reviewed the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 in December 2019, we noted that it was on the wrong side of the $1,000 line for budget gaming laptops at $1,249.99. Its successor in the same chassis, the HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15z-ec200, is on the right side at $789.99, even with a faster AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and screen with 144Hz refresh rate for esports gamers (a 60Hz model is even cheaper at $699.99). Unfortunately, it has a slightly slower GPU and its storage is skimpy, so while the 15z-ec200 earns a look from gamers with thin wallets it doesn’t surpass the slightly less expensive Acer Nitro 5 or slightly more expensive (and Editors’ Choice award-winning) MSI Bravo 15.
Unchanged Styling, Rearranged Ports
Both the 60Hz and 144Hz displays are 15.6-inch, non-touch panels with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution backed by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. The Pavilion features a six-core, 3.3GHz (4.2GHz turbo) Ryzen 5 5600H processor and 8GB of memory; upgrades to 12GB or 16GB are $40 or $80 respectively, while an eight-core Ryzen 7 5800H adds $120. The laptop’s 256GB NVMe solid-state drive is too small to hold many of today’s games. You can bolster it with a 1TB hard drive for $90 or replace it with a 512GB or 1TB SSD for $70 or $140 respectively.
Diagonal cutouts below the display add a bit of visual flair when the laptop’s open; the bezels on either side of the screen are slim though the top and bottom borders are larger. As a Pavilion, the 15z-ec200 wears HP’s circular consumer logo rather than the stylized four slashes of upscale business and Spectre models. The keyboard is backlit, but all in green rather than the multiple zones or million RGB colors of fancier gaming rigs; would-be Windows Hello users will be disappointed to find neither a fingerprint reader nor face recognition webcam.
The black plastic Pavilion measures 0.93 by 14.2 by 10.1 inches, roughly matching the Bravo 15 (0.85 by 14.1 by 10 inches) and Dell G3 15 (0.85 by 14.4 by 10 inches). It weighs 4.4 pounds, a few grams more than the MSI (4.1 pounds) but less than the Dell (5.2 pounds). There’s rather a lot of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.
As an AMD machine, the HP has no Thunderbolt port, but otherwise offers decent connectivity. The only ports on the left edge are a retro USB 2.0 port and the power connector. On the right are USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports, an HDMI video output, an Ethernet port, an audio jack, and an SD card slot. A Realtek card provides Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth wireless.
A Less Than Dynamic Display
It may offer a 144Hz instead of the usual 60Hz refresh rate, but the Pavilion’s screen still comes across as an economy panel—it isn’t very bright and colors are bland, looking muted or washed-out instead of vivid or popping. White backgrounds are a bit dingy and contrast is mediocre, though fine details and the edges of letters are reasonably sharp instead of pixelated and viewing angles are broad.
The keyboard is comfortable and quiet rather than snappy; it offers a numeric keypad with small Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys above it though the cursor arrows are arranged in HP’s eternally awkward row, with hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-sized left and right, instead of the proper inverted T. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly but clicks stiffly.
The speaker grille above the keyboard produces clear but not very loud sound; bass is minimal and you can only faintly make out overlapping tracks. B&O Audio Control software offers music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer with pop, rock, classical, dance, and other modes, most of which sound like you’ve thrown a blanket over the speakers. The 720p webcam captures soft-focus shots with lots of noise or static.
HP backs the Pavilion Gaming Laptop with a one-year warranty and preloads the Windows 10 Home system with Dropbox, LastPass, and McAfee trials and several utilities including HP QuickDrop to transfer files from your smartphone and HP CoolSense to adjust performance and fan settings to keep the system from toasting your lap. Omen Gaming Hub lets you monitor system stats and optimize network traffic.
Performance Testing: A Budget Gaming Throwdown
For our benchmark charts I compared the Pavilion 15z-ec200 to four other under-$1,000 gaming laptops—the abovementioned Dell G3 15, MSI Bravo 15, and Acer Nitro 5 (our 2020 test unit; we haven’t seen the new 2021 Nitro 5 models yet) plus the Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i. 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, spreadsheeting, 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.)
All five notebooks hurdled the 4,000-point line that indicates excellent productivity in PCMark 10, with the HP and MSI leading the way; they may not set frame rate records when gaming but they’re aces at Microsoft Office and Google Docs. PCMark 8’s storage exercise is cake 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 Bravo finished in front but the Pavilion wasn’t far behind, showing processing performance that a couple of years ago belonged mostly to mobile workstations. Outfitting it with the eight-core Ryzen 7 would be overkill.
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 15z-ec200 took the gold medal, finishing the job in a brisk time. Serious image editors will probably want a higher-quality 4K display, but the HP is a fine choice for managing a photo collection.
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 Pavilion’s GeForce GTX 1650 easily outclasses the integrated graphics of generic consumer laptops, but ranks near the bottom of today’s gaming GPUs and well below the Radeon RX 5500M of the MSI Bravo 15. For most AAA games, pairing it with a 144Hz display is an exercise in wishful thinking, but multiplayer esports addicts who often dial down visual quality settings for the sake of faster reactions will appreciate the higher refresh rate.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern AAA titles with built-in benchmark routines. We run these tests at 1080p resolution using both moderate and maximum graphics-quality presets—Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12.
Only the MSI reached the magic 60fps mark at the games’ best visual settings. The HP can play almost any modern title at well above the 30fps that not long ago was the best budget gamers could hope for, but it’s not competitive by today’s standards.
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 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
The Acer showed exceptional stamina, but the Pavilion’s nine-hour runtime was good enough for the silver medal. Of course actual gaming will drain the battery considerably quicker than mere video playback, but wandering away from a wall outlet will be no cause for panic.
In the Top 10, But Not the Top Five
The great GPU shortage of 2021 is affecting laptops as well as desktops, but there are still nifty gaming notebooks to be found for under $1,000. The Pavilion 15z-ec200 is an honorable contender, but it’d take a storage and graphics upgrade to make it a winner. If you’re in the market for a reasonably priced gaming laptop that can deliver a lively 1080p playing experience, the Acer Nitro 5 and the MSI Bravo 15 are more compelling choices.
