Hp Windows 10 Cloudbook 14-bw012nr 14 Laptop Review
You probably know that HP'due south Pavilion brand is for consumer PCs priced and positioned beneath its upscale Envy and Spectre lines. Only Pavilion is just the 2nd-lowest rung on HP's notebook-PC ladder. Its upkeep laptops have no brand at all, only a generic family name: "HP Laptop." Accept the HP Laptop 14-dq2020nr ($428 at Amazon and Walmart). The 14-dq2020nr is every inch an economic system model, with only 4GB of RAM and a 128GB solid-state drive—one-half the retentiveness and storage nosotros consider today'southward minimum—just it'southward a workable introduction to Windows if y'all don't want to consider a Chromebook.
4 Cores and S Mode
Though some online listings say the 14-dq2020nr has a dual-core Intel Core i3-1115G4, our test unit of measurement actually clicks that up to a quad-core, 2.0GHz (3.7GHz turbo) Core i3-1125G4 processor with Intel integrated UHD Graphics. The xiv-inch, non-touch screen offers total HD (ane,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution. The default operating system is Windows x Home in S Manner, which restricts software installations to programs from the Windows Shop; a few clicks in the Store perform an irreversible switch to regular Windows 10 Home, which nosotros made in social club to install our benchmark exam software.
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(Photo: Molly Flores)
Clad in silverish plastic, the HP Laptop measures 0.71 by 12.8 by 8.nine inches and weighs 3.24 pounds, making it simply 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'south a fair amount of flex if y'all 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 height and bottom borders are thicker. The webcam centered above the display has no privacy shutter or face up recognition adequacy. The keyboard is non backlit, though it contains a fingerprint reader in the palm rest for skipping passwords with Windows Hi.
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(Photo: Molly Flores)
The laptop's left side is bare except for an SD card slot. On the right, you lot'll detect ii USB three.one Type-A ports and one USB 3.1 Type-C port—all peaking at 5Gbps instead of the 10Gbps or 20Gbps of afterward variants—forth with an HDMI video output, an sound jack, and the ability connector. A Realtek controller provides Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Bluetooth, not the newer Wi-Fi vi.
(Photograph: Molly Flores)
The Blank Necessities
The 720p webcam captures reasonably well-lit and colorful, soft-focus images with a bit of racket or static. Sound from the speaker grille above the keyboard is loud enough to fill a small room simply muddy and flat, with naught bass and about no hint of overlapping tracks. HP Audio Center software offers music, picture, and phonation presets, an equalizer, and microphone racket cancellation.
(Photo: Molly Flores)
The 1080p screen is definitely an economic system panel, with colors that don't popular—they await flat and bland—and minimal contrast. Viewing angles aren't every bit broad 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 boring.
We're ever happy to meet defended Habitation, Finish, 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 bundled in HP'south usual, unfortunate row. In that organisation, half-size, hard-to-hit up and down arrows are stacked between full-size left and right arrows, instead of the proper inverted T.
(Photograph: Molly Flores)
The keyboard has a hollow, almost echoing typing feel that isn't enjoyable. The smallish, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly just clicks stiffly.
HP backs the laptop with a 1-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 5-Manner 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 xv 3000 to $699.99 for the xiv-inch Asus VivoBook S14. Two fourteen-inch convertibles, the Editors' Option-award-winning Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 xiv and the Acer Spin 3, fall in between at $599.99 and $649.99 respectively. You lot can encounter their basic specs in the tabular array 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 ten examination nosotros run simulates different real-world productivity and content-cosmos workflows. We use information technology to assess overall system performance for office-axial tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet piece of work, spider 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 improve. (Run into more about how we test laptops.)
The HP fell curt of the 4,000 points that indicates excellent productivity in PCMark 10, merely information technology came close enough to satisfy everyday Microsoft Office or Google Docs users. Almost of today's solid-state drives breeze through PCMark eight's storage measurement, though the HP's SATA One thousand.2 bulldoze is a tick slower than the PCI Express SSDs found in most mod notebooks.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make employ of all bachelor processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to return a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is frequently a adept predictor of our Handbrake video editing criterion, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a cursory movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, likewise, is a tough examination for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are amend.
Information technology's far from setting any speed records, but the HP's quad-core, 11th Generation Intel Core i3 is adequately perky for an economy CPU. You wouldn't desire 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 Silverish was the exception, with truly pitiful operation—likely the reason that, since our review, that Inspiron has received a slight price hike funding a more than respectable Ryzen 3 processor. Our usual Adobe Photoshop prototype editing criterion is absent here considering it won't run on systems with but 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 2 different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX xi benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets loftier-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.
Side by side upward is some other 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 auto'due south graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Depression 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 coincidental or browser-based games. But none of these integrated-graphics machines is within shouting distance of gaming laptops with detached GPUs. Your after-hours entertainment volition be limited to streaming media rather than arcade action.
Battery Rundown Exam
After fully recharging the laptop, nosotros set up the machine in ability-save manner (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where bachelor and make a few other bombardment-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also plough 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 Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
All 5 laptops did pretty well here, showing enough stamina to get you through a twenty-four hours of work or school plus a few evening hours going online or watching Netflix. Elite ultraportables terminal longer yet, but these results are merely fine for budget systems.
The Lowest Common Denominator
The HP Laptop xiv-dq2020nr does what it sets out to do, providing sufficient power for going online or doing homework in a reasonably attractive and portable bundle. Its quad-cadre Core i3 CPU positively pummels the Celerons and Pentiums still lingering in the depression-priced aisle, and it has a decent array of ports.
(Photo: Molly Flores)
Still, there'southward no denying that spending $200 or $250 more than will become you a much more capable notebook, 1 that both makes you happier with a nicer screen and keyboard, and makes Windows happier with more than memory and storage. Nosotros'd aim higher if we could.
HP Laptop 14-dq2020nr
Pros
The Bottom Line
If you take less than $500 to spend on a new Windows notebook, you could practice worse than the HP Laptop 14-dq2020nr, but be prepared to live with its limitations.
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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hp-laptop-14-dq2020nr