HP Pavilion 15 Power (i7-7700HQ, GTX 1050) Laptop Review

[boomer]

From the Performance section:

... the i5-7300HQ will be over 30 percent slower than the quad-core i7-7700HQ in multi-threaded workloads since it is a dual-core chip.

The i5-7300HQ a dual core? Check that again: https://ark.intel.com/products/97456/Intel-Core-i5-7300HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz

[Robert]

There are reviews/consumer feedbacks from various other websites (i.e. system with similar config: i7-7700, GTX1050, HHD and SSD) stating that it gets unbearably hot when gaming.

Does anyone have a similar experience here?

Does anyone actually try to undervolt the system and gain successful outcome?

[John Doe]

I have been using this laptop for over a year since I bought in on August 2017. It will be very hot out of the box but I managed to undervolt it at -140mV at the core and -125 cache, temps for the CPU and GPU never exceeded 80 degrees C. The palm rest will NEVER get unbearably hot even after my 4 hour long gaming sessions with AAA games but it WILL make your palms sweaty.

But the battery life after undervolting is so good, I was able to get 10+ hours out of it reading documents and a little over 7 hours browsing the web. I also removed the HDD, replaced it with a NVME SSD and disabled the "Fan Always on" option in the BIOS. Fans never ramps up at any time on battery unless I'm gaming or rendering, but does ramp up sometimes when I'm plugged in. Essentially making it dead silent most of the time.

Overall, never regretted owning this laptop. (After I replaced the stock touchpad drivers with Windows Precision Drivers)

[SIRmagger]

Maximum load with Prime95 and FurMark will draw 106 W from a power adapter (~14.0 x 6.5 x 2.5 cm) rated for up to 150 W. This is an unusually high power overhead which isn't necessarily bad, but a smaller and more portable 130 W or 140 W adapter would have worked just as well.

This will not work because the laptop demand 7.7 A from the adopter, and the normal voltage of laptop nowadays being 19.5, there is no way to get an adopter with 120W with that current needed for laptop, putting a 120w adopted the laptop will underperform and the clock of the CPU will not go above 0.79 Ghz

[Thomas Holvoet]

Hi,
I am struggling with Photoshop. The app opens and then freeze and I just can't use Photoshop... Is this laptop compatible ? Do I need to change some settings in order to make it work ?
Thank you for helping me.

[Jake.]

Fixed Heat issues by modding the fan. By cutting blue wires on the fans you can force a constant fan speed, and by disabling turbo boost the laptop stays quite cool while gaming.
For the best experience I'd play games 720p, if you can pick this laptop up cheap; its worth it. For those wondering, vr is possible with ASW enabled and a 20% render scale in steam vr and a multisample resolution of 4.0 in the wmr driver settings file.
The laptop has a spare ram slot, definitely worth adding an extra 4gb of ram to the laptop; as windows 10 loves to chew through ram when idling. The laptop also has a m.2 ssd slot as well that supports a maximum configuration of 256gb I believe. £20 or equivalent would get you a cheap ssd which I think is necessary because hard drives are too slow for everyday function and speeds up the computer considerably.
If you are willing to toy around, and you can get this laptop cheap £400~£500 or equivalent; its a great gaming machine.

[zadr]

Audio output quality is terrible. Anything connected to USB ports causes loud audible interference.