HP Pavilion Gaming 15-EC2004NT

The HP PAVILION GAMING 15-EC2004NT has a gamer-oriented aesthetic. The chassis and outer shell are made of matte black plastic, with an angular design, a geometric speaker grill, and large rear vents. The keyboard has green backlighting, which HP calls “Acid Green” accenting, and the keycap legends have a very gamer-oriented style. There’s also a green-tinted chrome HP logo on the outer shell behind the screen. You can get a laptop with “Ghost White” backlighting and accents.  It has an outstanding hinge. It feels smooth and exudes a “high-quality” feel when opening and closing it, and it keeps the screen steady in its set position. However, the screen wobbles a bit when you type aggressively or on an uneven surface.

Display

The HP Pavilion Gaming 15-EC2004NT has a 15-inch 1080p IPS 144 Hz screen. Its decent pixel density means that text and videos look relatively sharp, so you can view documents or web pages without needing to zoom in. The top and side bezels are very thin and likely won’t distract you when playing games or watching media, although the bottom chin is very thick. It also has a decent contrast ratio that’s typical of most IPS panels. However, blacks look gray when viewing the content in dark surroundings. We expect the 300cd/m² panels to perform similarly. The contrast ratio can vary between individual units.

Performance

The HP Pavilion Gaming 15-EC2004NT is equipped with AMD Ryzen 7 5800H is an impressive octa-core processor of the Cezanne product family designed for larger laptops such as mobile workstations (DTR). The Ryzen features eight SMT-enabled Zen 3 cores running at 3.2 GHz (base clock speed) to 4.4 GHz (Boost). The chip has 16 MB of L3 cache and a Vega 8 GPU. The Ryzen 7 is a marvel of a processor, with its unbelievably high scores no matter the benchmark. Needless to say, 5800H will be able to chew through pretty much any workload imaginable for years to come.

Keyboard

The HP PAVILION GAMING 15 has a very good keyboard. It feels good to type on, with adequately stable keys made of fair-quality plastic. It also doesn’t cause fatigue over extended periods thanks to its long-travel distance and moderate tactile bump. The keys are well-spaced, but you might need to get used to the unusual layout of the arrow keys and some special function keys. There’s a Numpad, which can be helpful if you need to bind extra keys in some games or if you often enter numbers in spreadsheets. Some variants, including ours, have backlighting with adjustable brightness, but you can’t change the color, so it’s limited to Acid Green or Ghost White. You can get it without backlighting if that isn’t important to you.

Touchpad

The HP PAVILION GAMING 15 has a decent touchpad. It’s on the smaller side, but it tracks movements accurately without any stutters. However, it occasionally has issues with multi-touch gestures, meaning that you might occasionally have trouble drag-selecting multiple icons or items in a list. Because there’s a Numpad, the touchpad is shifted towards the left side of the keyboard deck to keep it centered under the main part of the keyboard, which some people might not like.

Battery

The battery capacity of HP PAVILION GAMING 15 is 53Wh and on web browsing, the battery lasts for about 6.4 hours.

Verdict

The HP Pavilion Gaming 15-EC2004NT is decent for playing games. Its AMD Ryzen CPUs and dedicated NVIDIA GPUs run modern AAA games decently well with the powerful 3050Ti GPU if you want smoother gameplay at maximum graphical settings. It barely throttles, meaning you can play at maximum performance for extended periods. The port selection should be enough for all your peripherals, including a dedicated HDMI 2.0 port to output to an external display. You can opt for a 144Hz display if you prefer a smoother experience.